Some Thoughts on the Stalin-Hitler Pact

Plainly, no event in the 20th century equates to the outbreak of the First World War, rightly compared to the fall of the Roman Empire,  as a moment which utterly altered all that happened after it. 

 

But one moment, in those generally rather dreadful and violent ten decades is almost equally striking – yet far less well-known.

 

It is the Nazi-Soviet (or Molotov-Ribbentrop, or ‘Stalin-Hitler) Pact of August 1939. Yet there are very few books in English about this great event, especially compared with the miles of volumes about the two world wars, about the evils of Hitler and (now that the collapse of the USSR has made this previously neglected topic oddly fashionable in the academy and in publishing) the evils of Stalin.

 

In fact there was so little about it in print that I used to treasure the idea of writing a book on the Pact myself, but never tried because I lacked the time and the languages.

 

Yet what a subject it is. Here were the century’s two regimes of utter evil, both close to the high tide of their violence and murder,  supposedly each other’s most irreconcilable enemies – yet actually forming an alliance. When they did so, they appeared, in all visible respects, to be on friendly and civil terms with each other. They even held joint victory parades, their armies mingled, in Brest-Litovsk, Pinsk and Grodno. Polish sources, until Warsaw sold its soul to Berlin and Brussels, used to be the best place to find entertaining photographs or even films of these immensely sinister events, ghostly in grey and white. The Polish embassy in Berlin did for a while have a fine window-display on the joint parades, back in the late1990s.  I always thought it amazing that any records survived at all, given the USSR’s strong interest in keeping the whole thing quiet later. As everywhere in that whole blasted part of the world, one is always amazed to find that anything has survived at all. 

 

(There is even a bitter little Trotskyist song about it called ‘Oh My Darling Party Line’  (to the tune of ‘Clementine’) , one of whose verses ran:

‘Leon Trotsky was a Nazi – yes we knew it for a fact, ‘Pravda’ said it, we all read it . till the Stalin Hitler Pact.

 

‘Once a Nazi would be shot, see? That was then the party line.

Now a Nazi’s hotsy-totsy - Trotsky’s laying British mines’

 

The refrain ran ‘ Oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my darling Party Line.

Oh I never will forsake thee, for I love this life of mine’. )

 

Paradox reigned supreme. I believe that  leading French Communists approached the German occupation authorities in June 1940, to seek the lifting of the ban on France’s Communist daily newspaper ‘L’Humanite’ which had been imposed by the Daladier government in August 1939.  The Germans did, I think, authorize Communist newspapers in occupied Belgium, Norway and Denmark, but were afraid of the much greater power of the French Communists and couldn’t be sure they would accept Nazi censorship. The ban wasn’t lifted.

 

Still, it’s amazing that these discussions should ever have taken place  - or at least it would be if the orthodoxy were true – that the political Left (and above all its revolutionary wing)  was, is and always will be the most reliable and militant foe of Hitlerism.

 

In fact, that orthodoxy was never true. Communism and National Socialism were both based on power worship (itself founded on Utopian ideals which allowed each faction to believe its absolute triumph was absolutely necessary for the good of ‘mankind’), and so had no inescapable moral certainties. Both could therefore make deals with each other without reservation. Both were also scientistic creeds which believed in the ultimate malleability of man, rather than in his being created in the image of God (and therefore fundamentally unalterable). Communism's modern heirs suffer from the same problem, which is why they hate God so, simultaneously jeering at the idea that he exists at all, much as the Bolsheviks did. 

 

Thus, for both creeds, no action was ruled out on moral grounds. If a pact with the other was needed for ultimate triumph, then a pact there would be. And in fact that pact was a good deal less uneasy than the more reluctant alliances formed by the liberal democracies with Stalin. Because when they met each other, National Socialists and Communists got on rather well together.

 

What a subject for a TV documentary , or even a Michael Frayn or Tom Stoppard drama, this bizarre pact would be, a couple of minor characters, just offstage – a Red Army officer (preferably a Jewish one, as actually happened in real life) and his Wehrmacht counterpart arranging whose tanks went first through the shocked and silent streets of Brest, or a French Communist explaining to a German officer in 1940 Paris how their interests now coincided.

 

But if there have been any such works, I’ve missed them.

 

As it happens, there was a book, whose existence I’d never heard of (I must have been abroad a lot, I suppose, or perhaps the reviewers ignored it ). It was called ‘The Deadly Embrace – Hitler, Stalin and the Nazi-Soviet Pact 1939-41’, and written by Anthony Read and David Fisher, published by Michael Joseph in 1988. Neither of the authors is an academic. In those days it wasn’t a good idea for academics to be too critical of the USSR.

 

I heard of this thanks to the reviews of a new work on the subject ‘The Devil’s Alliance- Hitler’s Pact With Stalin 1939-41’, by Roger Moorhouse. Some of them mentioned the previous book.

 

The covers of both books, inevitably, are decorated with Swastikas and Hammers and Sickles. The earlier one is cleverer, showing both symbols as scorpions , one black and one red, stinging each other at one end, and merging at the other.

 

I read them in tandem, turning from one to the other, and must say I much preferred the Read and Fisher version, which I was able to get second hand for a ludicrously small price(my copy had been dumped on the market by a public library, alas).  It appeals to the scribbler in me, being full of the sort of detail I want to read about great events, and confirming the story I’d always heard but had never sourced, that when Ribbentrop’s aircraft arrived in Moscow, the Soviet authorities were so short of German flags that they had to get them from the Mosfilm studios, where they had been employed until then in the making of anti-Nazi propaganda films. And Ribbentrop stayed in the old Austrian Embassy (closed after the Anschluss and refurbished for the purpose) in the well-named ‘Death Lane’ . The building is still there and is once more the Austrian Embassy. I do not think there is a plaque.  And I think it’s here that I recently learned that Hitler had wanted to settle the Germans of the South Tirol (which he had ceded to Mussolini as an act of special favour) in the Crimea, long a territory much envied by German expansionists

 

But both are crammed with the sorts of facts that compel the reader to think and re-evaluate. The story is in fact even more outrageous than we thought . If you didn’t know about the friendly exchanges of prisoners between the Gestapo and the GPU, here they are. An entire German warship, almost complete, was handed to the USSR. The German navy was allowed to use Soviet bases. Germany shared designs of its advanced aircraft with the Soviets (who thought they were being palmed off with inferior goods) . Germany did not in fact rely on Soviet oil( a mistake I’ve often made) . Hitler ordered photographs of the signing ceremony to be airbrushed to remove the cigarettes Stalin was smoking, as he thought they made the occasion look frivolous. He also ordered his photographer to ensure that he got good shots of Stalin’s earlobes, as he wanted to know if Stalin was Jewish,  and believed that Jewishness could be detected through an examination of the lobes. He decided Stalin was not Jewish. Luckily for the negotiations, he never discovered that Molotov’s wife *was*Jewish. A German diplomat managed to take an ‘accidental’  sip from Stalin’s vodka glass during an interminable series of devastating toasts – and found it was full of water. The enjoyable story that Molotov, sheltering from British bombs in a  Berlin shelter, was told by the Germans that Britain was defeated and asked ‘then why are we sitting in this shelter, and whose bombs are these which we hear falling?’ was almost certainly invented by Churchill, who attributed it to Stalin. Thus is history made.  

 

Several German soldiers (presumably Communists) courageously swam rivers or otherwise deserted, to warn the Red Army that the July 1941 attack which ended the pact was coming. Stalin ordered that one of them should be shot, but the order, fortunately, arrived after the attack had begun, by which time the man had become a hero.

 

Neither book explains the mystery of Stalin’s disastrous refusal to believe that Hitler’s attack was coming. Both slide delicately over the (to me, entirely plausible) suggestion made later by Khrushchev that Stalin suffered a sort of breakdown in the days immediately after the attack. How could it be checked? Who would have dared say so, at the time,  and lived? I find it plausible because ( and my time on this blog has strengthened this view) I think wilful self-deception makes the world go round. And I think that Stalin needed in his heart to believe that Hitler was trustworthy, for otherwise his pact with him would have been an act of great unwisdom. There has seldom been a better example of ‘none so blind as he that will not see’. And, as it was on record that he had played a prominent personal part in the Pact, which was brought about by a personal correspondence between him and Hitler, he could not really shift the blame on to anyone else.

 

The story, in both versions, is limitlessly fascinating, as are the details they reveal of the Finnish winter war and of the foredoomed Anglo-French mission to Moscow which stalled just as Ribbentrop arrived. My own view is that the Anglo-French mission failed because ( as I think Stalin later said) Russia was not afraid of Britain, and Britain had nothing to trade for an alliance’. Whereas Stalin was definitely afraid of Germany, and Germany had much to trade, in territory and wealth, in return for Soviet help in overcoming the danger of another naval blockade (a hugely important motive for any German leader) , sparing Hitler a second front and expunging Poland from the map. The French tried harder and negotiated more boldly, but shared the same problem. I don’t think it would have made any difference if the Anglo-French mission had got there earlier, or even if it had contained more senior figures. Stalin didn’t much want or need a British alliance – though I don’t doubt he wanted an American one, which he eventually got merely by staying in the same place.

 

‘The Deadly Embrace’ is also enjoyably rude about Colonel Beck, the Polish foreign minister who dragged Britain into war with Germany at the worst possible moment. He appears as a garrulous braggart,  drunk and lecher, chucked out of France for exceeding his diplomatic duties by stealing documents from a French general’s drawer, and taking bribes from the Germans for obtaining French military secrets for them. Beck also developed severe delusions of grandeur. There’s a fine account of Hitler’s efforts to woo Beck at Berchtesgaden in January 1939(with amongst other things, promises of a share in a German-owned Ukraine) which make nonsense of any idea that a German invasion of Poland was inevitable at that stage. It was the Anglo-French guarantee of Polish independence in April that would bring that about, by encouraging Beck’s delusions still more.

 

Even so, Read and Fisher provide a tantalizing account, not known to me until now,  of the last evening of peace in Berlin at the end of August 1939, in which it is clear that the Polish foreign service, directed by Beck, played its own part in helping Hitler slam the door on any last possibility of negotiation.

 

The British ambassador, Nevile Henderson, was still trying to save his failed mission, right to the very end. When Ribbentrop told him a last-minute deal might still be done with a Polish plenipotentiary. Henderson took him seriously (or pretended to do so) and pressed the idea on the Polish ambassador to Germany, Josef Lipski.

 

 

 

By 2.00 a.m. on the fateful day of 31st August,  Henderson had managed (thanks partly to the intervention of Goering and his Swedish friend Dahlerus) to get a text of Ribbentrop’s proposals, read to him too fast for him to write down at their final meeting earlier, after which Ribbentrop had refused to provide a copy.  Henderson (perhaps hoping to sabotage Ribbentrop’s plan by taking him at his word)  outlined them to Lipski and said they were ‘not unreasonable’ ( which, compared with what was about to happen to Poland, , could perhaps be argued). Lipski said nothing. Henderson pressed on, urging Lipski to call Beck immediately and suggest a meeting with Ribbentrop. Lipski said ‘Not tonight. It is too late’.

 

Was it? Probably, but what if it had not been?

Henderson still pressed. He said Poland’s military chief, Marshal Smigly-Ridz, could meet Goering ‘They would get on well together. Something could be arranged’ .

Lipski said he would put the suggestion to Warsaw ‘but not tonight’

By breakfast time on 31st August (8.30) Henderson called Lipski to warn him that war was inevitable within there hours unless Poland acted. Henderson’s ultimate source was von Weizsaecker , in the German foreign ministry who (like Henderson) was trying to sabotage Ribbentrop’s rush to war). But Lipski was ‘unavailable’. Henderson called Coulondre, the French Ambassador, who went round in person to see Lipski and tell him to call Beck for authority to approach Ribbentrop.  (Please recall, as you read this story, that Britain and France had recently guaranteed Poland’s independence and were now its principal allies. Yet this was how Poland’s ambassador treated his most valuable friends).

 

Eventually Henderson reached Lipski who was ‘too busy’ to come and collect a copy of the Ribbentrop proposals, which Dahlerus had by this time brought from Goering to the British Embassy. Henderson then asked Sir George Ogilvie-Forbes, first secretary at the embassy, to drive Dahlerus round to see Lipski, with the document.

 

The Polish embassy was (unsurprisingly) in a state of chaos, being packed up. Lipski claimed he couldn’t read the handwritten document, and said ‘even a Poland abandoned by her allies is ready to fight and die alone’.

 

He then told Ogilvie-Forbes : ‘I have no interest whatsoever in notes or any other kind of proposals from the Germans. I have a very clear understanding of the situation in Germany after five years as ambassador. I know Goering intimately and all the other leading Nazis and I am sure of one thing: in the event of war there will be uprisings and rebellion in Germany and the Polish army will march in triumph into Berlin’.

 

He cannot really have believed this, though it is interesting that he had already concluded (rightly as it turned out) that Poland had been ‘abandoned by her allies’.  The efforts of Henderson and Coulondre to get him to talk to Ribbentrop were, obviously, a sign that they did not want to be forced to abide by their treaty obligations.

 

As it happens, long after it was far too late, Beck did instruct Lipski to seek a meeting , but forbad him to make or accept any proposals, so rendering any meeting pointless. German signal intelligence intercepted it (they may have been meant to) . Hitler was said to have been ‘delighted’ that Warsaw had not taken up his proposals But by then it was certainly too late. As Beck sent his message, at 12.40 pm Berlin time, Hitler ordered that the attack on Poland should begin at 4.45 the next morning. The order went out to troops at 4.00 pm, when it became irrevocable in effect.

 

A futile meeting between Lipski and Ribbentrop did in fact take place at 6.30 (Ribbentrop, who presumably knew what had been in Beck’s telegram To Lipski, and that Lipski could not negotiate, had kept him waiting five hours). Could a quicker response by Lipski, with genuine intent to negotiate, have halted war at that stage? I doubt it very much, though Lipski’s attitude and general non co-operation makes one wonder. But I don’t think there is much doubt that Beck would have behaved very differently during summer 1939,without the Halifax guarantee. Had he done so, it is by no means certain that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact would have been signed that year, or ever. Then what?