Stalin

Figuring out a way to both engage and contain Stalin would not have been simple, but it was the strategic choice among two odious options, if only because Hitler’s rabid revisionism would be vastly empowered should the Nazi leader reach his own understanding with a spurned Stalin. Here, too, Chamberlain and much of the British establishment had been smug.²⁰⁰ The defector Krivitsky, a top intelligence operative for the Soviets in Europe, had in 1938 warned MI5 of Stalin’s strenuous efforts at a Soviet-German rapprochement. Additionally, General Karl Bodenschatz, for a time the military adjutant to Göring and his liaison to Hitler, relayed the fact of secret Nazi-Soviet talks to London. Foreign Secretary Halifax—no friend of Communism—had warned Chamberlain and the cabinet as early as May 3, 1939, that Stalin and Hitler could cut a deal. But at a cabinet meeting on July 19, according to the minutes, “the Prime Minister said that he could not bring himself to believe that a real alliance between Russia and Germany was possible.”²⁰¹ Even at this point, there was time for the British government. Hitler did not begin his definitive move to Stalin until late July/early August, when the war to annihilate Poland—the traditional hinge of German-Russian relations—was just weeks away.²⁰²

MORE SURPRISES

Hitler’s decision making appears linear only in retrospect. He was a gambler, but also a vacillator. He seems to have assumed that the Pact with Stalin would force the British and the French to back down over Poland, an assertion that Ribbentrop parroted, as did almost all the ingratiating German reports out of London and Paris. When Dirksen, the German ambassador to London, changed his tune, his communications stopped reaching Hitler.²⁰³ It is not clear whether anyone brought the Führer information that contradicted what he wanted to hear.²⁰⁴ “The people in the streets,” William Shirer, in Berlin, recorded in his diary on August 24, 1939, “are still confident Hitler will pull it off again without war.”²⁰⁵ But after the Pact was made public, the British and French governments publicly reaffirmed their commitments to Poland, hoping, for their part, that these renewed pledges would force Hitler to back down, averting war.²⁰⁶ In fact, Hitler did now hesitate.

Hitler—still hopeful of averting a pan-European war by scaring or enticing Britain into backing down from defense of Poland—had heeded the advice of Ribbentrop and once more had British ambassador Henderson summoned to the Chancellery. During a meeting on August 25, that commenced at 1:00 p.m. and lasted about an hour, Hitler denounced Chamberlain’s recent restatement in Parliament of the guarantee for Poland, but he also divulged that he was still prepared to make “a large comprehensive offer” to guarantee the continued existence of the British empire with German troops after he had “solved” the urgent Polish problem. Hitler called this “his last offer.” He suggested that Henderson fly immediately to London, putting a plane at his disposal. The Führer had always trained something of a jealous eye on Britain’s empire and power, and remained open to some sort of bargain, but only on the basis of full British acquiescence to his domination of the continent.²⁰⁷ Henderson insisted that any bilateral deal would require that German differences with Poland be settled through negotiations, a concession Hitler refused. “The chancellor,” Henderson would report, “spoke with calm and apparent sincerity.”²⁰⁸

Henderson would fly off to London on the Hitler-supplied plane, carrying his “last offer,” but only on the next day (August 26).²⁰⁹ Already at 3:02 p.m. on August 25, mere minutes after the ambassador’s exit from the Chancellery, Hitler issued the final order to proceed with military action against Poland before dawn the next morning.²¹⁰ But then, only four and a half hours later, Hitler called the invasion off. Frantic desist orders went out to chief of staff Halder, who was already in his command bunker south of Berlin.²¹¹ German soldiers on the front lines, when told to stand down, remarked that “Hitler got cold feet.”²¹²

It was the duce—the sole leader who had once stood up to Hitler.

Mussolini, essentially consulting no one in his own government, had signed the Pact of Steel with Germany, so Italy was on the hook for war. Now he pledged support for a war over Poland but wrote that Italy did not command the resources for a war against France and Britain. He also noted that he had been kept in the dark about the deal with Stalin. Hitler had been sure of a favorable reply from Rome. When the Italian ambassador arrived at the Reich Chancellery bearing Mussolini’s letter, only an hour or so had elapsed since the Führer had given the order for war.²¹³ Italy’s demurral was inconsequential for the German plan of battle, but it did remove a cudgel to induce France and Britain to back down and, no less consequentially, could damage Hitler’s prestige. “The Führer ponders and contemplates,” Goebbels recorded in his diary. “That’s a serious blow for him.”²¹⁴ Mussolini’s was not the only unpleasant news. The French ambassador, Coulondre, had also been summoned to the Chancellery, and he had stated to Hitler that German reports of Polish atrocities against ethnic Germans were exaggerated and that France would honor its commitments to Poland. Additionally, Ribbentrop had reported word out of London of a new mutual assistance treaty, just signed between Britain and Poland.²¹⁵

When Göring, in the Chancellery that day, asked whether the war had been canceled or just postponed, Hitler vowed to continue to break off the Western powers from Poland, in order to fight only a local war.²¹⁶ General Walther von Brauchitsch, Wehrmacht commander in chief, judged that Hitler genuinely did not know what to do.²¹⁷ Could the Führer really back down in front of his military inner circle, the German people, and the world? Would he risk a world war over Polish territories that he likely could obtain via negotiations? Chamberlain continued to relay offers of Polish territory to Germany that the Poles had explicitly rejected. Ribbentrop rightly surmised that the British PM was looking for a way out of his commitment.²¹⁸ Even if Hitler insisted on fighting a war, would it not have made the most strategic sense to accept British offers regarding Danzig and the Polish Corridor, which would have elicited the Polish government’s rejection and thereby given Britain and presumably France a firm pretext to renounce their “guarantees” for Poland’s independence and stand aside?

Germany, not Poland, had ended up nearly isolated. On August 26, 1939, Mussolini conveyed another message to Berlin: he would intervene “immediately”—if Germany supplied Italy with 7 million tons of gasoline, 6 million tons of coal, and 2 million tons of steel, among other greedy, impossible desiderata.²¹⁹ Hitler could expect nothing from his other formal Anti-Comintern ally, Japan, which remained mired in the war with China and now had allowed itself to become enmeshed in a losing border clash with the USSR, too. With neither Italy nor Japan willing or able to lend support and solidarity, suddenly only Stalin and the “Judeo-Bolsheviks” were on the Führer’s side. Grand strategy, stranger than fiction.

At the Pact’s signing, Stalin had mischievously proposed a toast to “the new Anti-Cominternist—Stalin” (then apparently winked at Molotov). But upon parting, in utmost earnestness, the despot had told Ribbentrop, “The Soviet Government takes the new Pact very seriously. It can give its word of honor that the Soviet Union will never betray its partner.”²²⁰ Here was the real “pact of steel.”

Hitler reinstated his battle orders. His thought processes remain opaque. “In my life,” Hitler told Göring on August 29, “I’ve always gone for broke.”²²¹ That same day, a resolute Poland wanted to move its troops into their forward positions and declare a general mobilization. Belgium and the Netherlands, which lay in the Nazi path toward France, had already announced general mobilizations on August 23 and 28, respectively, and no one had requested they reconsider, but the British and the French urged Warsaw to withhold an announcement in order to allow for a possible last-ditch Nazi climbdown, with “negotiations” to follow if conducted without menace. But Goebbels recorded in his diary that “the Führer views England as still taking an uncompromising stance. We must not blink.”²²² On August 31, Hitler ordered a doubling of production of a new long-range “wonder bomber” (the Ju 88) for use against Britain and its empire.

That same evening, a preplanned Nazi provocation created a casus belli against Poland: SS troops dressed in Polish uniforms attacked a German border post and a German radio station, killing seven people (six prisoners brought from Sachsenhausen concentration camp and one pro-Polish German supplied by the Gestapo) and broadcasting briefly in Polish.²²³ On September 1, after an air bombardment before dawn, 62 Wehrmacht divisions—nearly 1.5 million men—ripped into Poland, in Hitler’s biggest yet roll of what Bismarck had called the “iron dice.”

THE DISTRUST

The Führer arrived at the Kroll Opera House at 10:00 a.m. on September 1 to address the Reichstag (which had only been summoned at 3:00 a.m.). He was treated to standing ovations. British and French diplomatic notes delivered that day in Berlin threatened war—if the German government failed to “agree” to withdraw its forces from Poland and “express readiness” to negotiate. When queried whether their notes of September 1 constituted an ultimatum, the British and the French explicitly stated no.²²⁴ Mussolini, partly to save face, had intervened yet again to float the idea of an international conference, which Chamberlain had already suggested to Hitler (London was communicating with Rome).²²⁵ While the French were seeking time to evacuate Paris and the frontier zones and to puzzle out their prospective moves, the two Western powers were also trying to coordinate their military mobilizations, and a certain chaos ensued in Britain’s Parliament. Finally, on September 3, after Hitler had continued to obfuscate on the peace feelers while pressing his military invasion, and the House of Commons exploded in revolt at Chamberlain and Halifax, first Britain and then France (Daladier) declared war on Germany. Hitler was said to be “stunned.”²²⁶ In fact, he was aware that the British and the French would have to declare war. But he could not back down at this point.²²⁷ For Germany and its racial destiny, in any case, he had concluded that a war to vanquish the West was inevitable at some point.²²⁸

Incredibly, the Polish regime had failed to prepare a full-fledged war plan in the event of a German attack, even after the Nazi seizure of Czechoslovakia had made the path to Warsaw that much easier. Poland’s contingency planning was focused on a war against the Soviet Union. Most of Poland’s military supply bases remained in its western regions, considered the rear.²²⁹ Now, rather than establish a line of defense in depth on the Vistula that could be held, Poland massed its forces forward, in the Poznań salient, troops that were encircled and annihilated. Already on September 3, Wehrmacht units in the north had crossed the entire Corridor and linked up with German East Prussia. On the same day, Ribbentrop cabled Schulenburg in Moscow to gently urge the Soviet Union to occupy its sphere of Poland “at the proper time,” as agreed in the Pact, adding that “this would be a relief to us.”²³⁰ Of course, his goal was not to gain assistance for the Wehrmacht in its war effort, but to fatally poison relations between the USSR and the Western powers. (Heydrich enthused to his subordinates, “Then Britain would be obliged to declare war on Russia, too.”) Molotov was noncommittal. Poland had an army of around 39 divisions and 16 cavalry brigades, plus reserves, while Hitler had mobilized 54 divisions (out of about 80 total at the time). Stalin was waiting to see how well the German offensive went. In the event, the Luftwaffe would end up losing almost as many planes as the small Polish air force; the Luftwaffe would also expend its entire stock of bombs, while fully one quarter of Germany’s tank park would be knocked out of commission or outright destroyed.²³¹

Stalin, no less than the Polish government, was also waiting to see what concrete military actions Britain and France would undertake. As it happened, those actions proved to be minimal (indicating, perhaps, what the USSR, too, would have received from the Western powers in an alliance against Germany). The British instituted a blockade of Germany but shrank from bombing even Germany’s airfields, despite an explicit commitment to Poland to do so. The air attack plans had been quietly abandoned for fear of provoking Luftwaffe retaliation on Britain—but the Poles had not been informed. Similarly, the French government had agreed, in the protocol signed with Poland back on May 19, 1939, to commence military action against Germany within fifteen days of the start of a war, but then, in consultation with Britain, France subsequently decided it would not do so—also without informing Poland. France’s 110 divisions did not storm into Germany, which was protected by fewer than 30 divisions, perhaps 12 of them combat ready. The entire sum of French action consisted of a small attack on the Saarland, even though, privately, Wehrmacht chief of staff Halder admitted that he could not have prevented the French from occupying the Ruhr, Germany’s industrial heartland, had they moved expeditiously.²³² As France instead hunkered down against an anticipated German attack, the Poles were left to fight alone.²³³ The Polish government, in a demoralizing move, abandoned Warsaw beginning on September 5, in a chaotic evacuation southeast, by steps, toward the frontier with Romania—planning, if necessary, to try to travel on to the West and return on the backs of Western military might.

Stalin did not know for sure that the French and the British had effectively written Poland off militarily even before the war had been launched. He was also hypercautious not to walk into a Nazi trap. On September 3, the same day Ribbentrop had tasked Schulenburg, in Moscow, with ascertaining Soviet plans for Poland, Stalin’s latest ambassador to Berlin, Alexei Shkvartsev, the former head of the textile institute, was ceremoniously received at the Chancellery. When the envoy presented his credentials to Hitler, in the presence of Göring and Ribbentrop, the Führer remarked, “The German nation is fortunate to have signed the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact. This Pact will serve the cause of the commonwealth of these two nations in both the political and economic arenas.” Hitler vowed to uphold all the obligations he had undertaken, but he declined to provide any information on the course of his campaign in Poland.²³⁴ Would the Wehrmacht actually halt at the line agreed upon in the just-signed Pact? Would they even stop at the Polish border?²³⁵

The fact remained that both the Japanese and the German armies—two of the world’s biggest, and both bordering on the Soviet Union—were on the move at the same time.

Ribbentrop’s requests for the USSR to invade Poland became “urgent,” but Stalin needed to be sure of the battlefield and of German intentions, not to mention the need to publicly justify Soviet participation in a new partition.²³⁶ On September 5, the USSR rejected a request from Poland for military supplies and transit of war matériel, citing a desire not to be dragged into war. Two days later, directives for the initial Red Army mobilization in the Belorussian and Ukrainian military districts, bordering Poland, were issued.²³⁷ On the afternoon of September 9, Stalin had Molotov vaguely inform Schulenburg that the Red Army would be moving into Poland in a matter of days. The next day, a vast Soviet mobilization began. It produced a panicked run on shops, which was not altogether unintended: it let the Germans know the Soviets were moving to a war footing. Also on September 10, Molotov told Schulenburg that the rapidity of the German advance had surprised the Soviets, but that the Red Army had more than 3 million soldiers ready. Molotov’s initial draft of a Soviet declaration of a Red Army move into Poland, which he shared with Schulenburg, referred to the supposed disintegration of the Polish state and the resulting urgent need to aid Ukrainian and Belorussian brothers “threatened” by the German advance. Perhaps it was an unintentional slip. Schulenburg reported this calmly (the final joint communiqué would remove the offending implication), but he informed Berlin that the Soviets were in a quandary over the imminent German victory.²³⁸

On September 11, Voroshilov and Shaposhnikov wrote an order for an invasion to commence on the 14th. But this directive did not go into effect.²³⁹

That Stalin somehow trusted Hitler was laughable, as Hitler himself noted.²⁴⁰ Stalin trusted no one (other than perhaps Abram Isayevich Legner, his Jewish tailor and one of the very few people he deferentially addressed by first name and patronymic).²⁴¹ The despot had tasked one of his aides, Boris Dvinsky, with assembling a reading packet. Stalin did not travel among adoring masses in an open-top car, as Hitler did, or issue impulsive decisions. When not receiving personnel for sessions in the Little Corner, he sat there alone and read. Like Hitler, he commented or doodled on whatever he was reading. One of his most frequent marginal scribblings was “teacher.”²⁴² With Hitler, however, he had been reduced to pupil, and he had better get the lesson right. Perusing the Dvinsky-assembled dossier on Nazism that summer of 1939, Stalin examined the Russian translation of a book by the Englishwoman Dorothy Woodman, Hitler Rearms: An Exposure of Germany’s War Plans (London, 1934), which contained a blistering chapter on the sweeping scale of Nazism’s “ideological preparation for war.” She wrote of Hitler’s bathing an entire country in national hysteria and psychological exultation: molding the general will, transcending the individual. The power of those techniques had to be familiar.

Stalin also consulted an internal Russian translation of Mein Kampf.²⁴³ The Soviet population could not read Hitler’s book, which by now had sold more than 10 million copies internationally. (The Japanese public could read it, but the translator had censored many passages so that Japanese readers would not know that in Hitler’s racial hierarchy, the East Asians were subhumans, too.)²⁴⁴ Stalin directed his inner circle to read Hitler’s text as well.²⁴⁵ Whether they made it through remains unknown, but some at least grasped the existential threat Nazism posed beyond traditional German imperialism. “I forget how many pages I read, but I was unable, morally, to get through the whole thing,” Khrushchev would later recall. “I could not read it because it literally wrenched my gut; I could not look calmly at such delirium; it disgusted me, I did not have the patience, and I put it down without having finished it.”²⁴⁶ Members of the general staff and the foreign affairs commissariat evidently could not manage to finish the text, either, and some did not take Hitler’s ravings at face value.²⁴⁷

Stalin took one of his thick colored pencils and underlined frothy passages in Hitler’s tract about the Nazi Drang nach Osten (“drive toward the east”). For example: “And when we speak of new lands in Europe, we can think only of Russia and her borderlands. . . . The future goal of our foreign policy must be . . . acquiring the territory we need for our German nation.” Stalin further underlined passages in the Russian translation (1935) of Konrad Heiden’s exposé A History of National Socialism (Zurich, 1934). To wit: “Hitler, unable to control himself, simply does not know what he promises; his promises cannot be considered the promises of a solid partner. He breaks his promises as soon as it is in his interest to do so, and all the while continues to view himself as an honest person.”²⁴⁸ Heiden’s singular point was that Hitler’s opponents, as well as his (temporary) allies, dangerously underestimated him. Dvinsky also delivered to Stalin Soviet military intelligence estimates of Nazi German strength: a land army of 3.7 million men, almost half mechanized, 400,000 air force personnel, 60,000 naval personnel, more than 3,000 tanks, 26,000 guns and mortars, 4,000 planes, and 107 warships.²⁴⁹

The Wehrmacht, taking advantage of the Polish army’s lack of mobility and weak communications and control, reached Warsaw’s outskirts in just the second week of fighting. “The operation was carried out like a theatrical performance,” recalled Khrushchev. “The Germans had set up movie cameras ahead of time. The battles were filmed from both land and sea, and they sought to distribute this film as widely as possible in all countries of the world.” Hitler “proposed that Stalin take this film and have it shown through our network of motion picture theaters, to show our audiences how the Germans dealt with Danzig, with Poland, with all of Europe.” Stalin agreed to do so, provided Hitler promised to show an equivalent Soviet film to a mass audience in Germany; Hitler refused. “Nevertheless,” Khrushchev concluded, “this film was sent to us by the Germans, and we took a look at it together with Stalin. It really did have a depressing effect.”²⁵⁰ Although Pravda (September 11, 1939) contrasted Germany’s organizational and technological prowess with the “laughable mouse-like fuss” of Britain and France, scenes of Germany’s military romp in Poland were kept out of Soviet newsreels. Stalin got his own firsthand taste. On September 15, an unidentified airplane crossed into Soviet territory above Olevsk, in Ukraine. It was fired upon by Soviet forces and forced to land; it turned out, Izvestiya reported, to be a German bomber.²⁵¹

WHO WANTS WAR?

Also on September 15, after intense internal bickering and foot-dragging in Tokyo, the Japanese acceded to a cease-fire in the border war. Signed by the ambassador with Molotov, it took effect at 2:00 a.m. on September 16 and was to be followed by a boundary demarcation commission.²⁵² Japan’s military defeat at Nomonhan village had compounded its severe loss of face over its German ally’s nonaggression pact with the USSR.²⁵³ On September 17 at 2:00 a.m., exactly twenty-four hours after the truce had taken effect, Stalin gave German embassy personnel four hours’ notice of a Red Army advance into Poland. “In order to avoid incidents, Stalin urgently requested that we see to it that German planes as of today do not fly east of the Białystok-Brest-Litovsk-Lemberg [Lvov] Line,” Schulenburg reported to Berlin. “Soviet planes would begin today to bomb the district east of Lemberg. I promised to do my best with regard to informing the German Air Force but asked in view of the little time left that Soviet planes not approach the abovementioned line too closely today.” Stalin declined, but he did allow Schulenburg to edit the text of the Soviet statement on Poland for German sensitivities.²⁵⁴

There was no Soviet declaration of war. Potyomkin summoned Polish ambassador Grzybowski at 3:15 a.m. and read aloud a note, in the name of Molotov, unilaterally abrogating the Soviet-Polish nonaggression pact; the envoy refused to take the document.²⁵⁵ Poland’s high command had predicted back in June that the Red Army would attack Poland “only in the final period of a war, when disadvantageous developments had turned against us and the Russian government would have concluded that the Poles had lost the campaign.”²⁵⁶ On the radio, Molotov announced a Soviet military action supposedly necessitated by the disappearance of the Polish state and the possible ensuing chaos. “The Soviet government regards as its sacred duty to proffer help to its Ukrainian and Belorussian brothers in Poland,” he stated.²⁵⁷ In fact, the Polish government continued to function, having relocated to Kuty, in the southeast, on the Polish side of the border with Romania. Although Poland’s high command had effectively lost contact with its armies, the latter retained about 50 percent of their troop strength, and were still fighting the Wehrmacht in central and southeastern Poland.²⁵⁸

Such was the extreme narrowness of the Soviet regime that Nikolai Kuznetsov, the naval commissar, had not been informed beforehand of the Soviet invasion of Poland. He went to Molotov to complain, averring that if he was not trusted, he should not occupy such a high post. “In response, [Molotov] recommended that I read the TASS summaries of foreign news, which he ordered be sent to me from that day,” Kuznetsov recalled. “But is that really the way—the naval commissar should learn about major military and (especially important) political events which affect him, from foreign sources?!”²⁵⁹

German generals, meanwhile, had crossed the secretly agreed-upon German-Soviet demarcation line (which ran along the Pissa, Narew, Vistula, and San rivers). Schulenburg had warned Molotov, back on September 4, that the Wehrmacht, in hot pursuit of Polish forces, might have to cross over temporarily into the Soviet section of Poland. The next day, Molotov had replied in a conciliatory manner, “We understand that as the operations proceed, one of the parties or both parties might be forced temporarily to cross the line of demarcation between the spheres of interest of the two parties; but such cases must not prevent the strict execution of the plan adopted.”²⁶⁰ Whether German generals knew about the Pact’s secret protocol on the precise territorial division remained uncertain, however. Stalin had no guarantee the trespass would be temporary, or that the entire Pact had not been a ruse. When had these Nazis kept their word—over the Munich Pact? General Köstring, in the Little Corner with Schulenburg in the wee hours of September 17, had requested a delay in the Red Army offensive so that the Germans would have time to get out of the way. Stalin had declined. As some 600,000 Red Army troops poured into eastern Poland, they encountered few Polish troops, but some German units came under Soviet fire. Hitler himself was in Poland. He had set out on September 3 in his armored train, Amerika, trailed by weaponized railcars, and traveled through the front in Pomerania and Upper Silesia, on his way to Danzig, which he would reach on September 19.²⁶¹ He billeted, along with Himmler, Ribbentrop, and a huge entourage, at the Kasino Hotel in Sopot (Zoppot, in German), a Baltic Sea resort adjacent to Danzig.

On September 18, Schulenburg reported that Stalin had told him “that on the Soviet side there were certain doubts as to whether the German high command at the appropriate time would stand by the Moscow agreement and would withdraw to the line that had been agreed upon.” In response to assurances, he said that Stalin “replied that he had no doubt at all of the good faith of the German government. His concern was based on the well-known fact that all military men are loath to give up occupied territories.”²⁶² Earlier that day in Berlin, with General Wilhelm Keitel and his chief of operations, Major General Alfred Jodl, away on the eastern campaign, Walter Warlimont, senior operations staff officer, had shown the deputy Soviet military attaché a map indicating that the Lwów/Lviv/Lvov region and its valuable Drohobycz oil fields, as well as a direct train line south from Polish Kołomyja down to Romania, fell within the German sphere. But on the map that Ribbentrop had signed with Molotov in Stalin’s presence, these territories were on the Soviet side. Warlimont either had no knowledge of the secret protocol, was deliberately pretending not to know, or was just indicating the location of German forces at that moment. Molotov, on the evening of September 19, summoned Schulenburg and stated that “the Soviet government as well as Stalin personally are surprised at this obvious violation of the Moscow agreement.” Schulenburg called it a misunderstanding.²⁶³

But on September 19–20, 1939, approaching Lwów/Lemberg/Lvov—not far from where the Germans had imposed the diktat of Brest-Litovsk on Soviet Russia in 1918—advancing Red Army troops were greeted by German artillery. Both the Red Army and the Wehrmacht took casualties.²⁶⁴ Had the Germans mistaken the approaching Soviets for Poles, as some would claim? Or were the attacks deliberate? We shall never know. But the speed and depth of the Soviet military advance into eastern Poland had surprised the condescending German brass.²⁶⁵

Hitler, in “liberated” Danzig on September 19, had been soaking in the jubilation. “It was a state built on force and governed by truncheons of the police and the military,” the Führer said of Poland, with no hint of irony.²⁶⁶ The streets of the predominantly ethnic German city—like those of Vienna the year before—were festooned with swastikas, flowers, and admirers. Precisely when, and under what circumstances, the Führer learned of the armed clashes taking place near Lvov is unclear.²⁶⁷ Ribbentrop instructed Köstring over the phone to attempt to have the accepted demarcation line modified so that Germany could keep this area, Borisław-Drohobycz, and its oil fields. Köstring phoned the Soviet defense commissariat several times on September 20. “East of Lvov Soviet tanks clashed with German troops,” he stated over the phone. “There is a disagreement about who should take Lvov. Our troops cannot withdraw until we have destroyed Polish forces.” Köstring proposed, on orders from Berlin, that the Germans and the Soviets storm Lvov together, after which the Germans could hand the city over.²⁶⁸ The Soviets refused. Schulenburg also conveyed Ribbentrop’s request to retain the seized oil fields to Molotov, who rejected it—as well as Schulenburg’s fallback position of a temporary German military occupation, pending a final political adjudication.²⁶⁹

Somebody would have to back down. On September 20, Köstring got an order directly from Hitler to help negotiate an immediate German withdrawal from Lvov, which was to be abandoned to the Soviets. Voroshilov received Köstring and asked what had caused the military clashes. The German attaché answered that it had been just a small local incident. He joked that Warlimont, who had shown the Soviets the map in Berlin, was an oilman and perhaps had been seduced by the oil fields. Köstring took out his own map, which showed, in black, the line of German advance and, in blue, the agreed-to territorial division, and he again vowed that the German army would withdraw.²⁷⁰ But even while abandoning the advanced positions in eastern Poland, the Wehrmacht continued to fire on the Red Army.

On September 22, Hitler flew from Sopot to the outskirts of Warsaw to take in the devastation he had wrought.²⁷¹ As of that day, after its defenders capitulated, Lvov was in Soviet hands, and by the next day the Red Army had established full operational control over Polish territory up to the Narew, Vistula, and San rivers, a five-day romp facilitated partly by the fact that the Polish command had issued orders not to engage Soviet forces unnecessarily and instead to prepare for evacuation to Hungary or Romania.²⁷² On the afternoon of September 23, a ceremonial joint military parade was held in Brest-Litovsk to mark the German handover of the town that morning to the Soviets. Presiding over the event, on an improvised low platform, were the respective tank commanders Heinz Guderian, who had been born just 300 miles away in Chełmno (Kulm), and Semyon Krivoshein. The two shook hands. But the Luftwaffe flew aggressively low passes, and the two sides tussled over the city’s war booty.²⁷³ Guderian privately observed that relinquishing Brest was “disadvantageous.”²⁷⁴ Germany’s commanders had suffered many casualties to seize these Galician territories—needing that oil—and they remained deeply unhappy about the pullback. (Stalin also managed to hold on to the Volhynian grain fields.) Halder, the man who had planned the Polish campaign, confided in his diary, “A day of disgrace for the German political leadership!”²⁷⁵

Hitler, perhaps for the first time, had kept his word in an international agreement. But Stalin gained the impression—fatefully, it would turn out—that German “militarists” wanted war against the Soviets, and that Hitler was the restraining influence.

STALIN’S SUDETENLAND

Stalin had managed to undo the Soviet defeat in the 1920 Polish-Soviet War, reclaiming imperial Russian lands at the cost of just 700-odd lives. (Not that he cared about Soviet casualties.) The Germans in Poland, by contrast, had lost between 11,000 and 13,000 killed. At least 70,000 Poles were killed and nearly 700,000 taken prisoner by the aggressors on both sides.²⁷⁶ Hitler, in improvisational fashion, toyed with leaving a rump independent Poland of some sort, but Poland’s state effectively vanished again, partitioned between Germany and the Soviet Union, as well as Lithuania and Slovakia. Members of Poland’s government fled into Romania, hoping to proceed to France and set up a government in exile to continue the fight, but they were placed under house arrest.²⁷⁷ The Polish supreme commander’s efforts to have surviving troops evacuated via Romania or Hungary to form a new Polish army in France were interdicted by the NKVD, which sealed the border along the Zbruch River. Many of the Polish army’s now 190,000 troops, taken prisoner by the Soviets, were interned in Gulag camps, with the intention of exploiting them as slave laborers. Thousands of Polish officers were separated into special camps.²⁷⁸

Poland’s immense Jewish population of nearly 3.5 million had experienced trying times under the Polish government. Between 1935 and 1937, 79 Polish Jews had been killed, and significant incidents of anti-Jewish violence had been recorded in 97 towns; quotas introduced in 1937 had halved the number of Jewish university students. Indeed, Jews could be discriminated against within the framework of Polish law, including by exclusion from chartered professional associations. In 1937 alone, 7,000 trials took place of Jews accused of “insulting the Polish nation.” When the government suspended the validity of the passports of its citizens who had been living abroad for five years or more consecutively, in an attempt to preempt a mass flow of Jewish immigration from Nazi-annexed Austria (which had ceased to be a refuge), the act precipitated the expulsion of 17,000 Polish Jews from Nazi Germany in October 1938. The Polish regime refused to allow them back into Poland; many were trapped in a no-man’s-land, without shelter or food. Several thousand who managed to cross the border at Zbąszyń ended up in a hastily formed restricted camp—with some begging to be let back into Nazi Germany. The head of the Catholic Church in Poland, Cardinal Augustyn Hlond, had accused the Jews of “spreading atheism and revolutionary Bolshevism . . . [and] contributing to the decline of Polish morals.”²⁷⁹ On December 21, 1938, the leader of the politically powerful National Unity Camp had reiterated the oft-stated view that Jews hindered the development of the Polish nation, and urged the government to take energetic action to reduce the number of Jews. Some Polish military leaders called a departure of Jews a matter of national security.²⁸⁰ But all that turned out to be prelude: with the Nazi occupation, SS Einsatzgruppen (special action groups), as well as militarized regular police—both of which were under Heinrich Himmler—began scouring the land to murder Polish Jews and torch or dynamite synagogues.²⁸¹

The SS also targeted non-Jewish Poles. Nazi terror against the “racial enemy” in these conquered lands far eclipsed what had descended on Germany itself since 1933, and further empowered the SS institutionally. The atrocities would continue long after the main combat was over.²⁸² More than a million Poles would be forced to work as slaves in Germany. Nazi propaganda portrayed the war as having been imposed on Germany, a necessity for the very survival of the German race—a mutilation of the truth that a majority of Germans appear to have accepted, leavened, as it was, with lurid fables of Polish atrocities and German victimhood.²⁸³

Soviet terror methods were different, spurring self-destruction of existing social bonds by soliciting anonymous denunciations by aggrieved individuals against their neighbors, a story to be more fully examined below. In the meantime, the occupiers found a cornucopia. “Long trains with Soviet functionaries and their families, mostly from Kiev and Kharkov, began pulling into the station,” remarked one observer in what had been Poland’s territory. “Streets filled with crowds of shabbily dressed and dirty people frantically eyeing already modest-looking store windows. They bought almost everything available to them, especially watches—the most sought-after commodity.” Some Soviet functionaries returned to Kiev with foreign-made cars, provoking volunteerism for service in former Poland. But the Red Army arrived in these regions in torn uniforms and scrounged for food out of obvious hunger, rolling cigarettes with paper picked off the street. When the Poles ridiculed the soldiers for chasing after consumer items even though, according to Soviet propaganda, the USSR enjoyed abundance, the Red Army conscripts shot back that while the Poles had silk stockings and perfumes, the Soviets had tanks, guns, and fighter airplanes. “Frankly,” admitted one Pole, “it was a shrewd point, which often cut the discussion off.”²⁸⁴

Boris Yefimov, the Soviet cartoonist, drew a map of Europe with red arrows showing the Soviet territorial advance westward, with an irate, frightened Neville Chamberlain raising his striped trouser leg to stamp his foot impotently. But the Soviet regime had long trumpeted its policy of “peace,” an ideological pillar, and on September 18, 1939, the day after troops had burst into Poland, Izvestiya had reiterated that the Soviet Union would maintain “a policy of neutrality” in the European war. Two days later, the British and the French, rather than declare war on the USSR for invading Poland, as they had on Germany, requested an “explanation” of Soviet actions. The Soviets remonstrated in public, as they had in private, that the Polish state had “ceased to exist” and that the “vacuum” threatened the USSR, justifying the dispatch of the Red Army. At the same time, the Soviets portrayed their military action as a class and national rescue operation. The Polish state had, in fact, mistreated not just its Jews but also its large Ukrainian and Belorussian minorities. Molotov privately admitted to the Germans that the Soviet regime had heretofore not bothered much about the Ukrainians and Belorussians living in Poland.²⁸⁵ But now Soviet propaganda efficaciously cast the invasion and landgrab as Ukrainian-Belorussian “liberation.”

Censorship precluded public mention of the fact that perhaps 40 percent of the population in the territories seized by the USSR was ethnic Polish, or that hundreds of thousands of ethnic Poles were being displaced, deported, or pressed into forced labor; that at least 30,000 ethnic Ukrainians sought refuge in the German-occupied zone; that some invading Red Army soldiers had deserted by heading to the German zone; and that even some Jews, who mostly tended to flee toward the Soviet zone, preferred a return to their homes under Nazi occupation to a life under Soviet rule.²⁸⁶ What the Soviet populace might have made of such information will never be known. What we can say is that many ordinary Soviet inhabitants perceived justice in the fight against Polish “class and national oppression,” as well as in a rearranged border that reunited “blood brother” Ukrainians and Belorussians, in repudiation of Piłsudski’s “imperialist” Treaty of Riga (1920).²⁸⁷ The Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic doubled in size for the second time (the first had been 1924–26, when it was awarded territories carved from the Russian republic). Ukrainian irredentist dreams were fulfilled. “Everyone approves the seizure of (western) Ukraine and Belorussia,” wrote the regime critic and geochemist Vernadsky in his diary that fall of 1939. “The Stalin-Molotov policy is realistic and, it seems to me, correct, a Russian policy of state.”²⁸⁸

Trotsky deemed Stalin’s invasion progressive, despite the Soviet leader’s own supposed counterrevolutionary inclinations. “In the regions which must become a component of the USSR, the Moscow government will take measures to expropriate the big property owners and to nationalize the means of production,” he explained. “Such action is more likely not because the bureaucracy is true to the socialist program, but because it does not wish to and is unable to share power and the privileges connected with it with the old ruling classes of the occupied regions.” Trotsky evoked Napoleon: “The first Bonaparte brought the revolution to a halt with the aid of a military dictatorship. But when French forces invaded Poland, Napoleon signed a decree: ‘Serfdom is abolished.’ This action was dictated not by Napoleon’s sympathies for the peasants, nor by democratic principles, but by the fact that the Bonapartist dictatorship rested not on feudal but on bourgeois property. Since Stalin’s Bonapartist dictatorship rests not on private but on state property, the Red Army’s invasion of Poland must essentially bring with it the liquidation of private capitalist property, in order thereby to bring the regime of the occupied territories into line with the regime in the USSR.”²⁸⁹

Soviet dishonesty and spite were epic. Scenes for the film The First Cavalry Army, adapted from the play by Vishnevsky about the Polish-Soviet War of 1920, were being shot on location just as the Red Army had smashed across the border into Poland on September 17. It depicted the Poles, not the Ukrainians, as the perpetrators of the civil-war-era pogroms against Jews. On September 21, the film Burning Years, directed by Vladimir Korsh-Sablin, which also portrayed the 1920 Polish-Soviet War, premiered to wide acclaim (“not in terms of its artistic merits, but in terms of its political significance,” one critic sniffed).²⁹⁰ The Soviet-Belorussian film July 11, by Yuri Tarich, which would premiere October 20, similarly took up the 1919–20 events of that war, showing drunken Polish soldiers forcing Belorussian girls to dance and entertain them, in the ashes of their occupied village, until Soviet partisans fight back and unite with the Red Army to recapture Minsk on July 11, 1920.²⁹¹ Polish POWs in Soviet camps were shown July 11, rubbing salt in their wounds.²⁹²

Eastern Poland in a way constituted Stalin’s Sudetenland, an analogy that resonated in some quarters of London and Paris, too: the new frontiers, after all, corresponded to the line once proposed by Britain’s Lord Curzon. From the despot’s point of view, Poland had refused years’ worth of probes for bilateral security cooperation. And once the Wehrmacht was on the move, if he had not annexed these eastern Polish regions, Hitler would have seized all of Poland. That would have made possible the creation of a puppet Ukrainian state in eastern Poland, which, in turn, could have been used as a pressure point against Moscow to yield Soviet Ukraine in a “unification.” Of course, this was the argument that Poland had used when participating in Hitler’s dismemberment of Czechoslovakia (preventing Germany from dominating the entire territory).²⁹³ Now, instead of German troops waltzing right up to the vicinity of Minsk, significantly closer to Moscow, Stalin, as he observed privately, had managed “to extend the socialist system onto new territories and populations.”²⁹⁴ The annexation also delivered a windfall of captured Polish intelligence archives—pleasure reading for the despot, who could sift through what the Poles had made of him and his regime.²⁹⁵ In the confiscated Polish archives, the NKVD claimed to have discovered 186 secret agents—real ones—who had carried out or were carrying out missions against the USSR, and began to neutralize them.²⁹⁶

POLITICAL ECONOMY