The Devils' Alliance: Hitler's Pact with Stalin, 1939-1941

INTRODUCTION

ON AUGUST 23, 1939, STALIN DRANK TO HITLER’S HEALTH. Although the two dictators would never meet, the agreement that they forged that day would change the world. Known as the “Nazi-Soviet Pact,” the “Hitler-Stalin Pact,” or the “Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact,” it was in force for less than two years—ending with Hitler’s attack on Stalin’s Soviet Union on June 22, 1941—but it was nonetheless one of the salient events of World War II.

When I started researching this book, friends and acquaintances outside history circles occasionally asked what I was working on, and I would reply, “The Nazi-Soviet Pact.” The blank looks and furrowed brows that I saw in response spoke volumes. Except in Poland and the Baltic states, the pact is simply not part of our collective narrative of World War II. It is my firm conviction that it really should be.

Our ignorance of the subject is surprising. Whereas every other curiosity, campaign, and catastrophe from World War II has been interpreted and reinterpreted, assessed and reassessed, the pact remains largely unknown—passed over often in a single paragraph, dismissed as a dubious anomaly, a footnote to the wider history. It is instructive, for example, that almost all of the recent popular histories of World War II published in Britain give it scant attention. It is never considered to warrant a chapter and usually attracts little more than a paragraph or two and a handful of index references.

When one considers the pact’s obvious significance and magnitude, this is quite astonishing. Under its auspices, Hitler and Stalin—the two most infamous dictators of twentieth-century Europe—found common cause. Their two regimes, whose later confrontation would be the defining clash of World War II in Europe, stood side by side for twenty-two months, almost a third of the conflict’s entire timespan.

We forget the link, perhaps, but the pact led directly to the outbreak of war; it isolated Poland between its two malevolent neighbors and fatally undermined the somewhat desultory efforts of the Western powers to thwart Hitler. The war that followed therefore carried the pact’s odious stamp. While the Western powers endured the so-called Phony War and America watched events from afar, Poland was invaded and divided between Moscow and Berlin. With Hitler’s connivance, the independent Baltic states were occupied and then annexed by Stalin, as was the Romanian province of Bessarabia. Finland, too, was invaded and conquered by the Red Army. When Hitler turned west, successfully invading and occupying first Scandinavia, then the Low Countries and France, Stalin sent his congratulations. Behind the scenes, meanwhile, the Nazis and the Soviets traded secrets, blueprints, technology, and raw materials, each oiling the wheels of the other’s war machine. For a time it seemed that the two dictatorships—or “Teutoslavia” as one British politician called them—were ranged together against the democratic world. The British and French even considered a preemptive attack on the Soviet Union in 1940.

This aspect of Soviet belligerence is more than just a curiosity. Postwar writing on the Nazi-Soviet Pact—such that there is—long tended to parrot the Kremlin’s postwar exculpatory line that Stalin was merely buying time by signing the pact, fending Hitler off while he could prepare Soviet defenses to meet an expected attack. This interpretation, still hawked by communist apologists to this day, does not tally with the evidence, however. As this book shows, Stalin was much more proactive and anti-Western in signing the pact than has conventionally been appreciated. His motivations were complex, of course, but on one level at least, he was seeking to exploit Nazi aggression to his own ends, to speed the fall of the West and capitalism’s long-awaited collapse. An unwilling or passive “neutral,” he was not.

Viewed in this way, as it was by many contemporaries, it is clear that the Nazi-Soviet Pact turned the political world upside down, making—as one commentator memorably put it—“all our -isms into -wasms.” It was a close-run thing, but the Soviets and world communism were most profoundly damaged by the connection. Whereas Nazism had precious little moral capital left by 1939 and would soon disgrace itself entirely by launching the Holocaust, communism still liked to pride itself on its moral aspect. The acrobatics that loyal party members were obliged to perform, therefore, to accommodate Hitler and the Nazis as their fraternal allies were all the more humiliating; as a result party memberships fell, and the little political integrity that communists were perceived as having beyond their own milieu vanished in a puff of contorted dialectic. The pact with Hitler, like the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 and the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968, left an indelible stain on world communism. Only Stalin’s hard-fought victory against Nazism after 1941 would temporarily rescue its blackened reputation.

The Nazi-Soviet Pact was hugely influential, therefore. But away from the high politics and ideology, its baleful consequences were most keenly felt in central and eastern Europe, where—at a rough estimate—75 million people were affected. By facilitating Hitler’s war, the pact ushered in the brutal German occupation of western Poland, with all its attendant cruelties and injustices. Although the Holocaust itself was yet to get properly underway in this period—beginning in earnest in the summer and autumn of 1941—Poles and Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland were subjected to a horrific regime of exploitation and persecution, with hundreds of thousands expropriated, deported, and killed.

The pact also affected those Poles, Jews, Latvians, Estonians, Lithuanians, Byelorussians, Ukrainians, and Romanians who became Soviet citizens under its aegis, their homelands annexed by the USSR. A few of them certainly welcomed the change. The vast majority did not. Huge numbers suffered persecution, torture, and death at Soviet hands, the most notable examples being the 22,000 Polish army officers and officials murdered in the Katyn massacres, in Soviet Russia, in 1940.

Many more suffered deportation and exile to the Soviet interior. From eastern Poland alone, as many as 1.5 million people were deported in 1940 and 1941. Tens of thousands more were deported from the Baltic states and Bessarabia. All were destined for the wild depths of the USSR—Kazakhstan, Siberia, the Polar North—and a life of hard labor and misery in the myriad camps of the Gulag, which only the strongest would survive. Some of the descendants of those survivors are still there to this day.

It is frankly scandalous that this grim chapter does not find a place in the Western narrative of World War II. For, just as Hitler “ethnically cleansed” the lands under his control, Stalin politically cleansed those under his. Indeed, the two dictators had much in common, and, far from being anomalous, their pact might be seen as emblematic of their shared misanthropy. Yet, although Hitler’s crimes are well known and well documented—endlessly discussed in the media and the subject of school and university syllabuses the world over—Stalin’s crimes scarcely penetrate the public consciousness. Six decades after the Soviet dictator’s death and more than twenty years since the demise of the Soviet Union, it is high time that this changed.

Although it ended in 1941, the pact would have a curious afterlife. Torn up by the Nazis and justified by the Soviets as a strategic necessity, its effects persisted long after its death. The map of eastern and central Europe that we see today is largely its product: the boundaries hastily drawn by the German and Soviet foreign ministers, Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov, have proved astonishingly durable. More immediately, two generations of Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians would endure life within the hated USSR, and bitter memories of the Soviet annexation and occupation of 1940 and 1941 would fuel postwar resistance movements. Poetically, the protests in the Baltic states on the fiftieth anniversary of the pact’s signing in 1989 would begin the process of the USSR’s dissolution.

For all its brevity then—it lasted only twenty-two months and its seven short paragraphs contain barely 280 words—the Nazi-Soviet Pact was profoundly important. Far from a sideshow or a curiosity, it is of vital importance to our understanding not only of the war but also of the broader story of twentieth-century European history. It fully deserves to be rescued from the footnotes and restored to its rightful place in our collective narrative of World War II in Europe. I can only hope that this book makes some small contribution to that process.