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

^PROLOGUE A MEETING ON THE BOUNDARY OF PEACE

IT WAS PROBABLY NOT THE RATTLE OF TANKS THAT SURPRISED THE citizens of Brest that chill September morning in 1939. German forces had already occupied their city in eastern Poland for the best part of a week, so they were accustomed to the din of barked orders and military traffic. Rather, it was the accompanying voices that shocked them, speaking not in the harsh, guttural intonations of German but in the slurred singsong of a language much closer to their own and instantly recognizable: Russian.

For some in Brest, the arrival of the Red Army was a liberation. Many among the city’s Byelorussian and Jewish communities viewed the Soviet Union as their protector against what they saw as the intolerant nationalism of the Polish state. In some eastern suburbs, therefore, there was a celebratory atmosphere, with the traditional Slavic greeting of bread and salt being extended to the arriving soldiers, while a band played the “Internationale.”

Others were warier. The city’s Polish population had endured a torrid few weeks, fretting over the military situation, fearing the arrival of German troops or the use of poison gas, and worrying that their Byelorussian neighbors might turn against them. Those with long memories recalled the bitter 1920–1921 Polish-Soviet War and the long decades of Russian occupation that had preceded 1914, only a generation or so earlier. For them, the arrival of Soviet troops was an echo of dark times and an ominous portent of bad days to come.

The Soviet troops themselves did little to ease tensions. Generally shabby and unkempt, they were evidently under orders not to interact with the locals, although it seems that some had little choice but to ask the peasantry for food or to change their exhausted horses. Nonetheless, they were sometimes approached by the brave or curious. One of the latter was fifteen-year-old Svetozar Sinkevich, a Byelorussian, who was initially excited by the arrival of what he called “his” people. He was quickly disillusioned: “‘Their faces were grey, unshaven,’ he recalled, ‘greatcoats and short quilted jackets looked baggy, the tops of their boots were made of a canvas-like material. I went up to one of the trucks and tried to talk to the soldiers, yet all of them kept silent, averting their gaze from me. Finally one of them in a uniform cap with a star on his sleeve said that the Party had sent the Red Army to liberate us from the Polish landlords and capitalists. I was perplexed.’”

Many in Brest would have shared his confusion. Historically, at least, the city was used to the violent intrusion of the outside world. In the nine hundred years since its foundation, Poles, Mongols, Russians, Swedes, and Teutonic Knights had fought over it repeatedly. Within living memory, too, it had seen considerable upheaval. In 1915, the Russians had abandoned the city to a German occupation that lasted until the end of World War I. Then, with the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917, the city had made headlines worldwide for the first time. As Brest-Litovsk, it had played host to the German-Soviet negotiations and the signing of the peace treaty between the two that would bear its name.

In 1939, however, events had moved with a rapidity unimaginable a generation before. Far from the plodding, stalemated immobility of World War I, Germany’s Polish campaign of 1939 had witnessed something of the revolution in military tactics. Although it was developing organically and had yet to earn the status of an official doctrine, the blitzkrieg, with fast-moving armored spearheads penetrating far into the enemy’s rear to disrupt defenses, heralded a new era in tactical thinking. So, although located deep in eastern Poland, Brest had quickly found itself a focus of the German advance, primarily because of the formidable nineteenth-century fortress on its western fringe that might feasibly serve as a defensive strong point for hard-pressed Polish forces. Such had been the speed of the German advance that when German armies first appeared before Brest, on September 13, less than two weeks after the opening of the invasion, some within the city believed that the soldiers had to be paratroopers dropped behind Polish lines.

Confusion was still the order of the day when the Red Army arrived in the city five days later. Aside from those citizens who hurried to greet the Soviets as liberators, others fervently hoped that the Red Army was coming to their aid against the invading Germans, a fiction evidently propagated by elements of the Polish military. Yet official declarations by the Soviet authorities issued in Polish translation by the local Wehrmacht command—a cozy example of collaboration between the two—would dash all such hopes by stating categorically that the Red Army’s invasion was merely the result of Poland’s supposed military and political collapse and was intended solely to protect the Ukrainian and Byelorussian peoples living there. Far from rushing to engage the invading Wehrmacht, then, those Soviet soldiers—riding on the open backs of trucks or clinging to the sides of their tanks—were heading west through the city to greet their German counterparts.

Late on the morning of September 18, the first contacts were made. Across the city, German and Soviet troops began fraternizing: olive green met “field gray”; the vanguard of Joseph Stalin’s communist revolution came face to face with Adolf Hitler’s Wehrmacht. Cautiously at first, mindful of their previously strained relations, the two sides shared rations and communicated as best they could, using sign language and good will. An easy entrée was the sharing of cigarettes: papirosi, crude, hand-rolled examples from the Soviet side, would be exchanged for German manufactured articles, much prized by the Red Army men. Tanks and armored cars were clambered upon and inspected, with the ever-present rejoinder from both sides that “ours are better.” For all their ideological differences, the smiles that day seem to have been genuine. One eyewitness recalled seeing Wehrmacht soldiers on one side of the street greeting their Soviet counterparts on the other with the words, “Communists! Good!”

Contact was also made at more senior levels. At around 10:30 a.m., a young Soviet officer arrived in an armored car at the German headquarters in the city. According to contemporary German records, the discussions that followed were “friendly” and mostly concerned delineating a demarcation line between the Soviet and German forces. The local German commander, General Heinz Guderian, was less enthusiastic. He had endured a difficult few days, losing his adjutant, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Braubach, to a Polish sniper—a “painful loss”—and then being obliged to assist the bishop of Danzig, Edward O’Rourke, who had found himself in the war zone and been eager not to fall into Soviet hands. Consequently, Guderian was frustrated that the deadline agreed for a German withdrawal from Brest, only two days later, gave his men too little time to evacuate their own wounded or recover their damaged vehicles. Nonetheless, the Soviet officer was given lunch, and an agreement was made that a formal cession of the city to Soviet control would follow on the afternoon of September 22.

On the morning of the handover, preparations went smoothly. According to the agreement, Soviet forces took sole control of the city and its fortress from 8 a.m. Two hours later, a joint commission met to clarify any remaining points of confusion or friction. Soon after that Guderian met with his opposite number, Brigadier General Semyon Krivoshein, commander of the Soviet 29th Light Tank Brigade. An impassioned Communist and a Jew, Krivoshein was short and wiry and incongruously sported a Hitler-esque toothbrush moustache. Like Guderian, he was a pioneer in the use of tanks; indeed, the two may have known each other from their time at the Kama tank school at Kazan in the 1920s, during an earlier blossoming of German-Soviet collaboration. Speaking together in French, he and Guderian discussed staging a joint military parade to mark the formal handover of the city. Although less than keen, stating that his men were weary after their long march west, Krivoshein nonetheless agreed to release a couple of units to take part in a march-past of Wehrmacht and Red Army forces for that afternoon.

At 4 p.m., the two generals reconvened on a small, hastily constructed wooden platform in front of the main entrance to the former German command, the regional administration building on Union of Lublin Street. Standing before a flagpole bearing the swastika’d German Kriegsflagge, Guderian grinned broadly, looking resplendent in his red-lined greatcoat and black leather jackboots. At his side, Krivoshein was similarly attired, in a belted leather coat and leather boots to keep out the autumn chill.

Surrounding the two, beyond a knot of senior German military personnel, a mixed crowd of Wehrmacht and Red Army soldiers thronged the route of the parade, pockets of German field gray mingling with the black leather coats of Soviet officers, the olive drab of the infantry, and the dark overalls of the tank crews. Beyond them, civilians lined the street. Among them was twenty-year-old Raisa Shirnyuk, who remembered how word of the parade had spread: “There was no official announcement,” she recalled, “but the rumour mill had worked well; already that morning everyone in the town knew that the troops would be marching there.” According to one German account, the crowd was lively, consisting primarily of Brest’s non-Polish communities—Byelorussians and Jews—who welcomed the Red Army with flowers and cheering.

To the blare of a military band, the parade began. German infantry led the way, their smart uniforms and precision goosestep drawing admiring comments from the assembled crowds. Raisa Shirnyuk was impressed by their military bearing, noting that their commanding officer kept the men in line, shouting, “Langsam, langsam, aber deutlich!” (Slowly, slowly, but clearly!). Motorized units followed: motorcycles with sidecars, trucks and half-tracks laden with soldiers and towing artillery pieces. Tanks also clattered along the cobbled street. As each group filed past the reviewing stand, it drew a crisp salute from both Guderian and Krivoshein, who spent the moments between in amiable conversation.

Inevitably, some of those watching drew comparisons between the two forces on display. The somewhat primitive Soviet T-26 tanks, for instance, contrasted rather obviously with more modern Wehrmacht vehicles, especially when one of the former slithered off the road not far from the reviewing platform. Stanislav Miretski noticed other differences: the Soviets’ belts were canvas rather than leather, like the Germans’, and whereas the Germans employed trucks to haul their artillery, the Red Army used “stunted and unsightly” horses with inferior harnesses. Raisa Shirnyuk concurred, recalling that the Red Army men, with their “dirty boots, dusty greatcoats and stubble on their faces,” compared unfavorably with their German fellows. Another eyewitness drew a chilling conclusion from the poor appearance of the Soviet infantry. Boris Akimov was accustomed to seeing elegantly dressed Polish officers, so the “poverty and slovenliness” of the Red Army troops struck him. But their smell and dirtiness prompted a much more profound question: “What sort of a life will they bring to us?” he wondered. An answer of sorts was provided when an elderly lady with tears in her eyes pushed her way through the crowd to approach the Soviet soldiers, muttering, “My kin, my boys.” To the astonishment of those watching, a soldier roughly pushed her away, shouting, “Get back, woman!”

As the military hardware trundled past and the future was pondered, the attention of the crowd turned skyward as two dozen or so Luftwaffe fighters made a low pass over the dais. Guderian, struggling to make himself heard over the roar of their engines, shouted, “German aces! Fabulous!” “We have better!” Krivoshein replied, determined not to be impressed by the display of German airpower. Soon after, with the parade drawing to a close, Guderian, Krivoshein, and the senior officers around them all turned to face the flagpole. As the military band struck up the German national anthem, “Deutschland, Deutschland, über Alles,” and the assembled officers solemnly saluted, the blood-red war ensign, or Kriegsflagge, was lowered, to be replaced by the deeper red of the Soviet hammer and sickle. With that, the band played the “Internationale”—out of tune, as one eyewitness recalled—before Guderian and Krivoshein shook hands for the last time. Then, the German general joined his men as they departed westward, across the river Bug, the new German-Soviet frontier. “At last,” Krivoshein recalled sourly, “the parade was over.”

In his postwar memoir, doubtless mindful of the compromising nature of events that day at Brest, Krivoshein made much of his reticence in his dealings with Guderian and the Germans, giving the impression that he had been “holding his nose” throughout. He claimed to have set his men to various maintenance tasks, thereby leaving only one battalion to take part in the parade, and mischievously suggested that Guderian’s men and machines were looping around the block to make them appear more numerous than they really were. Despite such protestations of reluctance, however, the account of a couple of German war reporters who caught up with him the following day at his nearby field headquarters perhaps indicates Krivoshein’s true sentiments that day. They noted that the Soviet brigadier general was in high spirits, treating the two to a lavish lunch and raising a toast to both Hitler and Stalin as “men of the people.” As the reporters left, he even gave them his Moscow address and invited them to visit “after the victory over capitalist Albion.” Politics, one might conclude, can do strange things to people’s memories.

Although the Soviet media appears not to have mentioned the parade at Brest, the German propaganda machine made much of it, describing it as a “meeting on the boundary of peace.” Grainy footage of the tanks and vehicles rumbling past the reviewing stand was duly included in the weekly newsreels shown in cinemas across Hitler’s Reich that autumn. The propaganda value of the images was immense, providing as they did a startling visual confirmation of the Nazi-Soviet agreement forged the previous month. As if to hammer the point home, the newsreel commentary taunted Germany’s enemies by stating that the meeting with the Soviets at Brest had “scuppered the pious plans of the Western Democracies.”

One German news reporter went further. Writing in the Nazi Party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, Kurt Frowein described the scene in lyrical terms—the “keen autumn day,” the “rising crescendo of tank tracks,” the homage to a city “captured with German armsnow being returned to its rightful owners.” For him, the handshake between Guderian and Krivoshein was “a symbol of the friendly coming together of two nations” and an announcement “that Germany and Russia [were] uniting in order to jointly decide on the fate of Eastern Europe.” Frowein was right to employ hyperbole. The events of that day signified such a seismic political shift that his words would have been unthinkable barely a month before.

For those who had taken to heart all the fulminations and insults that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany had hurled at one another over the previous six years, these were strange days indeed. The parade at Brest vividly demonstrated the reality and currency of the pact signed a month earlier in Moscow, tanks and soldiers now replacing the images of smiling men in smoky Kremlin offices. As events at Brest demonstrated, Europe’s two mightiest dictatorships—whose bitter enmity had largely defined the 1930s—now stood side by side as allies, collaborating in a joint conquest of their mutual neighbor. Contemporary observers were bewildered. Communists around the world balked at the ideological gymnastics that they were suddenly obliged to perform, while many Nazis harbored deep misgivings about their country’s new collaborator and bedfellow. In the West, meanwhile, there was profound disquiet, as though the world had shifted slightly on its axis and the old political certainties had proved merely transient. Many would have wondered just how this peculiar turn of events could have come to pass.