The Hitler-Stalin Pact as the Beginning of the European Prelude to World War II
Chapter 3 Section 8
FUNDRAISING for this project: pdf of high quality pictures of etruscan sculpture of "the parthenon collection"--for free or give a small donation
Click here to navigate the table of contents.
This below is Chapter 3 Section 8:
8. The Hitler-Stalin Pact as the Beginning of the European Prelude to World War II
Of course, the news did not come as a complete surprise. In 1938 and early 1939, the French and English press had repeatedly reported news and comments announcing a rapprochement between Germany and the Soviet Union or portraying it as possible. But these might be expedient reports, and Hitler’s hostile statements, such as those in the speech of January 30, 1939, had quickly rendered such expectations or fears, it seemed, irrelevant. France’s foreign minister, meanwhile, knew at the beginning of October 1938 that a senior Soviet diplomat had reacted to the Munich agreement by exclaiming: “I see no other possibility for us than a fourth partition of Poland!” And everyone could make up his own mind when Stalin delivered his so called “Chestnut Speech” on March 10, 1939, at the XVIII. Party Congress, which distributed the blame equally between the two sides, but insinuated that the Western powers wanted to incite Germany against the Soviet Union, in order to then appear on the scene with fresh forces and dictate their terms to the weakened belligerents. In any case, he expressed the refusal of the Soviet Union to “pull the chestnuts out of the fire” for the war provocateurs. Three weeks later, Hitler also used the chestnut metaphor in a speech in Wilhelmshaven. On May 3, however, the world was surprised by the news that Soviet Foreign Minister Litvinov had been relieved and replaced by the Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, Vyacheslav I. Molotov. Why was the most important champion of the Soviet orientation toward the West deposed just at the moment when unity with the Western powers seemed inevitable? Was it not Stalin’s way of showing that he was in any case not compelled to close deals with any particular partner, and that he, who had been completely isolated just a few months earlier, had now become the key figure in the fate of Europe and the world?
But even in Germany the “Rapallo line” had never been completely dead, and Hermann Göring had done much to ensure that the tenuous threads between the two powers were not broken, which the Soviet trade representative in Berlin, David Kandelaki, sought to preserve and to strengthen. Underneath the propaganda drumbeat in Germany, there were for some time considerations that thought to recognize a weakening of the ideological opposition and stated a “nationalization of Bolshevism,” quite in line with the ideas that had been advocated in the Russian emigration 15 years earlier. Thus Hitler himself had already rejected a feeler from Kandelakis at the beginning of 1937, but said to Neurath: “It would be something different if things in Russia were to develop further in the direction of absolute despotism, supported by the military. In that case, however, we should not miss the moment to intervene again in Russia.” And the basic approach of National Socialism included the possibility of emphasizing the contrast to the Jews in the West. If the Polish and Romanian “no” to the Soviet march through were allowed to be taken into account as an established fact, then in the spring and summer of 1939 German-Soviet contacts carried greater weight from the outset.
The initiative came more from the Soviet Union than from Germany, and the risk was indeed far greater on the German side. The fact that Stalin tried to improve his negotiating position vis-à-vis the Western powers by establishing contact with Germany would probably have been regarded by the Western powers as a customary and forgivable ruse in the event of an indiscretion; on the other hand, it could have been disastrous for Hitler’s prestige and for his relations with Japan and Italy if Stalin had announced the feelers and made deals with the Western powers. It was therefore not surprising that the world-historical event was initially prepared primarily at the level of third-rate beamers.
Immediately after Litvinov’s dismissal, the Soviet chargé d'affaires Astakhov contacted Schnurre, the legation counselor of the economic policy department of the Foreign Office, and tried to find out whether the event would lead Germany to change its attitude towards the Soviet Union. Fourteen days later, Molotov spoke personally to the German ambassador in Moscow, von der Schulenburg, about the need to create a “political basis” for the planned economic negotiations, but he did not allow his wishes to be specified. On June 3, the Russians made use of the Estonian envoy, who said in a conversation with State Secretary von Weizsacker that in Moscow mistrust of democratic states was greater than totalitarian ones, and that one seemed to be waiting only for a public gesture of accommodation to give expression to the mood mentioned. Astakhov was even more explicit in a conversation with the Bulgarian envoy on June 15, which was of course immediately brought to the attention of the Foreign Office: The Soviet Union had three possible courses of action before it, among which it “emotionally” preferred a rapprochement with Germany. If Germany eliminated the Russian fear of an attack via the Baltic States or Romania by concluding a non-aggression pact, the Soviet Union would probably refrain from concluding a treaty with England. Since at the same time German negotiations with Japan about a military pact were faltering, Ribbentrop and Hitler seem to have taken the idea of a non-aggression pact seriously into their considerations for the first time. The next important step, however, was again taken at the lower level, namely at a dinner to which Schnurre invited the chargé d'affaires Astakhov and the head of the trade mission Barbarin to the Ewest restaurant on July 27th. Here Schnurre put forward extremely peculiar views on the relationship between Bolshevism and National Socialism, which in earlier times would certainly have prompted Soviet officials to protest sharply or to flee in horror: despite all the differences, he said, there was common ground in the ideology of Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union, namely, the opposition to capitalist democracies. There could no longer be any question of a sharp antagonism between Germany and the Soviet Union, for the Comintern was no longer dominant, Bolshevism was increasingly merging with the national history of Russia, and the world revolution had been postponed by Stalin ad calendas graecas. Therefore he could imagine that the two states would come together in three stages. In his reply, Astakhov emphasized how valuable this conversation had been for him, and no doubt he immediately prepared a report for Molotov.
From the beginning, the initiative passed to the German side and assumed an increasingly urgent character, while negotiations were taking place in Moscow with the Anglo-French military mission arrived by sea. On August 3 Ribbentrop conveyed to Molotov the German desire to place German-Russian relations on a “new and definitive basis” and on August 14 he indicated his readiness to come to Moscow to conclude the non-aggression pact, because was undeniable that “the capitalist Western democracies are irreconcilable enemies” of both Germany and the Soviet Union. Molotov received the message “with the greatest interest,” but he nevertheless emphasizes the need to carefully prepare the Reich Foreign Minister’s trip and speaks for the first time of a “special protocol” that must form an integral part of the planned pact. On the same day, Ribbentrop declared himself ready to negotiate such a protocol and urged rapid action. Such urging, of course, gives the negotiator an extraordinarily strong position, and on August 20 Molotov again reminded the ambassador of the need for “preparation.” But half an hour after the end of the conversation the ambassador was called back to the Kremlin: he was handed the draft of a non-aggression pact and the Soviet government declared its agreement to Ribbentrop arriving in Moscow on August 26 or 27. Obviously, Stalin personally gave the order. And on the same day Hitler intervened personally. In a telegram to “Herr Stalin, Moscow,” Adolf Hitler urgently requested that his foreign minister be received in Moscow as early as August 22, but no later than August 23. On the evening of August 21, Stalin telegraphed “to the Reich Chancellor of Germany, Herr A. Hitler” that “the Soviet government” was in agreement with Ribbentrop’s arrival on August 23.
Thus, in days, even hours, the decision was made which fundamentally changed the world situation and forced the Franco-British military mission to an inglorious departure. The policy of great resistance collapsed after all attempts to keep the policy of small resistance alive which, at least virtually, became obsolete with the signing of the German-Italian “Steel Pact” on May 22. But neither a small nor a large agreement was reached between the Western powers and Germany, although Ministerial Director Wohlthat had been conducted negotiations with Sir Horace Wilson in July that seemed promising, by means of which Chamberlain wanted to pursue in secret, according to Dirksen, “the only important and worthwhile goal of the union with Germany”. But England was not in a position to offer to Hitler what he was now striving for with all his might, the defeat of Poland, and she was equally unable to concede to the Soviet Union what Hitler was now able to offer her. Despite the “general authority” with which he was endowed, Ribbentrop had to ask Hitler from Moscow on August 23 whether he could yield to Stalin’s and Molotov’s surprising demand that the Latvian ports of Libau and Windau be recognized as within their “spheres of interest,” but Hitler’s immediate reply was, “Yes, agreed.” This finally cleared the way for the signing of the Non-Aggression Pact and the Secret Additional Protocol.
The Non-Aggression Pact was based on the Soviet draft, but this was modified in a symptomatic way, apparently at Ribbentrop’s request. In the draft, the Soviet Union and Germany were guided “by the desire to consolidate the cause of peace between nations” while the final text only spoke of consolidating peace between Germany and the USSR. In the draft, the crucial Article II read: “Should one of the contracting parties become the object of an act of violence or aggression by a third power, the other contracting party shall not in any way support such acts of that power.” The final version, on the other hand, spoke only of “acts of war on the part of a third power” which one of the contracting parties would become the object of, and it thus expressly sanctioned aggressive war, just as the “Steel Pact” had done.
The radical difference from the League of Nations ideology and even from the Steel Pact, however, became quite clear only through the “Secret Additional Protocol,” which was exclusively the result of a Soviet initiative, although Ribbentrop had certainly envisaged something similar in substance several weeks earlier with the assurance that Russian interests would be protected. The starting point, internal prerequisite and undisguised goal of the agreement was the “case of a territorial-political transformation” in the areas of the Baltic states and Poland. From this point of view, the spheres of interest of both states were delimited by the northern border of Lithuania and by the Narew, Vistula and San lines. Any possible uncertainty as to what was meant was cleared up by the sentence: “The question of whether the mutual interests make the preservation of an independent Polish state appear desirable and how this state should be defined can only be finally clarified in the course of further political developments.”
Thus there cannot be the slightest doubt what this pact meant: the Soviet Union cleared the way for Germany to go to war against Poland: it was a war pact. At the same time, this war was supposed to lead to the division of Eastern Europe into spheres of interest: the pact constituted a division pact. At least with regard to Poland, the division was not limited to the definition of zones of influence, but it suggested the disappearance of the country’s statehood: the pact was an annihilation pact. As a war pact, a division pact and an annihilation pact, it has no parallel in European history of the 19th and 20th centuries. The two states that concluded it had to be states of a very special kind.
Of a very special kind was also the conversation that took place in the Kremlin on the night of August 23-24 between Ribbentrop and Stalin and Molotov. Stalin blamed the “stupidity of other countries” for England’s domination of the world, and Ribbentrop claimed that the anti-Comintern Pact was not really directed against the Soviet Union but against Western democracies. Molotov raised his glass to Stalin, pointing out that it was Stalin who, with his March 10 speech, initiated the turnaround in political relations, and Stalin himself offered a toast “spontaneously” (as the German clerk put it) to Adolf Hitler: “I know how much the German people love their Führer: I would therefore like to drink to his health.” For his part, Ribbentrop had pointed out that in Germany “especially the ordinary people” welcomed the understanding with the Soviet Union. At the farewell, Stalin assured the Reich Foreign Minister that the Soviet government took the new pact very seriously; he could assure on his word of honor that the Soviet Union would not betray its partner.
What was the immediately recognizable significance of this event, which gave the greatest surprise throughout the world and in many places caused sheer horror or left speechless? One result was clear from the first moment: it was no ordinary non-aggression pact. The very wording of Article II indicated this, and the departure of the Allied military mission from Moscow underlined this fact. In any case, a serious shift in the world political balance had taken place, and the first German commentaries pointed out with much satisfaction that the two peoples who had stood together in the wars of liberation against Napoleon and who had signed the Rapallo Treaty only 15 years earlier had found each other again. Here and there one could get the impression that the pact was seen as a return to Bismarck and reason after Hitler’s previous and unnatural friendship with Poland. In fact, the Russian-German bloc was unassailable and invincible, and some of Stalin’s statements later went in that direction with regretful undertones. But what seemed to have been destroyed, however, was the credibility of both states as ideological powerhouses. Certainly Lenin had concluded the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and certainly in 1923 Radek had advocated cooperation with the German nationalists. But in the first case it had been a matter of bare survival, and in the second it had been clear who would have had the stronger leverage. Even if one accepts that the revolution was so feeble that it could only be kept in existence by the existence of the Soviet Union, could this city of revolution simply do anything and shake hands with the worst of its enemies? It was obviously not a question of survival: it is out of the question that Hitler would attack Poland if there was a hostile major power on its eastern border. In fact, for many communists in the West, after the Moscow Trials, this pact was the second deep shaking of their loyalty, which had been so strong until then, and quite a few now finally turned their backs on the man and the great power who betrayed the anti-fascist front for the sake of mere advantage of power. Either the Comintern now had to resort to the truly confusing interpretation that Schnurre and Ribbentrop had offered with reference to the internal kinship between the two regimes, or they had to choose the most obvious and plausible explanation, at least in hints: Stalin had lured his mortal enemy in an exhausting war with those who were objectively his friends, and would deal him the deathblow as soon as he was the last to step onto the battlefield with his forces undiminished. This, however, was the concept of a world revolutionary war, as it had been outlined by Marx himself occasionally and in passing, but which now had to turn even the last of the bourgeois pacifists into enemies of such a warlike state.
But Hitler had definitely lost his credibility as the champion of the anti-communist cause. Never again would it be possible to make a statement like that which Lord Halifax had made to an emissary of Hitler only a year before: the aim of his work was to see the Führer enter Buckingham Palace together with the English king, to the cheers of the crowd. Even Germany’s best friends among English and French statesmen had to now perceive Hitler as he presented himself in his two speeches to the generals on August 22: as the ruthless power politician who had “maneuvered” Poland into a situation in which he could proceed to “destroy the enemy” and who believed he had Stalin in his hands because he allegedly had to fear victory for his soldiers just as much as defeat. But even among old and convinced National Socialists, the pact caused a shock that was difficult to overcome. “I have the feeling that this Moscow Pact will eventually take revenge on National Socialism,” wrote Alfred Rosenberg in his diary on August 25. This, he said, was a plea from one revolution to the head of another, when it had been the ideal of a twenty-year struggle to defeat it. “How can we still talk about saving and shaping Europe if we have to ask the destroyer of Europe for help?” All the same, Rosenberg wanted to see Ribbentrop as the main person responsible, whom he even declared to be a “criminal” since he had no political views apart from hatred of England. And mustn’t Hitler, if he wanted to stand up to himself, have made the decision for a different kind of world revolutionary war when he left Finland and the Baltic states, the eastern half of Poland and Bessarabia to Stalin?
At least, this is indicated by that “most remarkable statement” which he made on August 11, according to the report of Carl J. Burckhardt, the League of Nations Commissioner for Danzig, during a conversation on the Obersalzberg: “Everything I undertake is directed against Russia; if the West is too stupid and too blind to understand this, I will be forced to come to terms with the Russians, defeat the West, and then, after it has been defeated, turn my combined forces against the Soviet Union. I need Ukraine, so that we can’t be starved like in the last war.” But even this statement pointed more to the “lebensraum” politician than to the revolutionary anti-communist who appeals to the freedom of oppressed peoples and wants to liberate the world from the nightmare of an unprecedented reign of terror. But how much of the old worries and fears remained alive in Hitler, underneath all the power politics and all the confident will to win, was shown by another and even stranger statement that he had already made to the Romanian Foreign Minister on April 19, 1939: “And why this unimaginable killing? In the end, we will all lie under the same rubble, victors and vanquished, and only that one from Moscow will benefit.”
For a crucial 10 days, meanwhile, he once again offered the world the face of the mere revisionist, the fighter against the injustices of Versailles. And now Stalin was running a tremendous risk. The immediate purpose of the pact, for Hitler, was to keep the Western powers from intervening in favor of Poland. If he could do that, Stalin would have made the pact for nothing, then he would be alone in facing Hitler’s tremendous power. Poland’s situation was hopeless. There was much to be said for the correctness of Hitler’s prophecy that the British Empire would in no case survive a war. Thus he continued to demand only Danzig and the corridor, indeed, in his most recent and publicly announced proposals, he even offered a referendum in the corridor, which would hardly have turned out favorably for Germany. He assured Henderson, with all subjective sincerity, that he wanted British friendship more than anything else in the world and that he was ready to guarantee England’s empire. On August 26 he withdrew the order to attack that had already been given, although this meant a considerable loss of prestige among the military, so that his most resolute opponent among the senior officers, Colonel Hans Oster of the Abwehr, predicted Hitler’s imminent demise. Everything he did outwardly these days appeared reasonable and measured. On the side of his opponents there were obvious misjudgments: Josef Lipski expected uprisings in Germany and the march of Polish troops against Berlin; Chamberlain evidently did not take seriously the idea of the fall of the Empire. But all of Hitler’s statements and actions were invalidated by the precedents of “Munich” and “Prague,” and Beck as well as Chamberlain followed the public opinion of their countries, which would not have tolerated any yielding at the last hour. The notion of honor had come into its own, and became the boulder that set off the avalanche. Molotov, in turn, postponed the ratification of the pact by one day to August 31.
On the morning of September 1, German troops crossed the Polish borders from the west, north, and south, and Hitler delivered a speech before the Reichstag that resembled more the outburst of a hounded man than the calm confidence of someone convinced of his rights: “Since 5:45 a.m. we have been firing back. And from now on bomb will be repaid with bomb…One word I never got to know, it is called: surrender…But I would like to assure the environment: November 1918 will never be repeated in German history!” Hitler did not find a touching and memorable word as Wilhelm II had found in 1914: “I know no more parties, I know only Germans.” No elated crowds surged in the streets as they had in 1914; a depressing and gloomy atmosphere hung over Germany. For two long days the scales did not seem to have finally tilted in favor of the great war, and Mussolini made one last attempt at mediation. But since Hitler did not want to and probably could not accept the Allied demand that his troops, who had already been victorious everywhere, be withdrawn to the borders of the Reich, the British and French ambassadors handed over the declarations of war on September 3. Hitler had succumbed to a miscalculation, and Stalin had correctly foreseen that the Western powers would not back down again and that Hitler would not be able to resist the lure of the Narev-Vistula-San line. Stalin had thus achieved greater things than Lenin: he had not only played the capitalist powers off against one another, he had involved them in a war among themselves which, after the expected mutual exhaustion, would make him the victor over both sides.
Hitler had lost far more than just a cleverly devised stratagem. Like Mussolini, his domestic recipe for victory consisted in crushing the revolutionary enemy with the help of conservative allies and then largely disempowering these allies. He had to follow the same rule in foreign policy if he wanted to prevail. But the revolutionary enemy no longer seemed as threatening to the potential allies after the Great Purge as it had appeared to Papen and Hugenberg in 1933 in view of the 100 Communist Reichstag mandates, and internal agreement was weaker because for Chamberlain and Halifax anti-communism was not synonymous with anti-semitism. So for the sake of a relatively small advantage, Hitler made an alliance with his enemy and attacked his friends. Without an unforeseen way out, he had already lost the war by the time he fired the first shot.
On September 3, Adolf Hitler issued an appeal to the NSDAP, in which he held “our judeo-democratic world enemy” responsible for the war and also characterized this enemy as “the capitalist warmongers of England and its satellites.” Not only had he allied himself with his enemy, but he had also adopted the language of that enemy. How should he ever again be able to credibly talk about the “Bolshevik world enemy” or even about “Jewish Bolshevism”?
Admittedly, Hitler did not yet waging a world war. A European war began with the attack on Poland, and it was to prove to be a kind of half-war at first. It would only become a prelude to a world war if Hitler either allied himself with Stalin for better or worse if he tried to overthrow him, even though the elementary precondition for an understanding with the conservative or established powers no longer existed. That the United States, for the moment still bound by its legislation of neutrality, should stand aside in one case or another was highly improbable.
Two events of a very special kind, however, indicated that this war was already far more than the normal war that was being waged between some of the great European powers, as was the case in 1870/71.
On September 1, Hitler had a decree dated, which instructed the Reich leaders Bouhler and Dr. Brandt: “…to expand the powers of doctors to be commissioned by name in such a way that, according to human judgment, incurably sick can be granted a mercy death if their condition is critically assessed.” It could appear as if Hitler wanted to show deliberately and explicitly that with the outbreak of war a new epoch had dawned in which National Socialism would be free of all the shackles which the state of peace had imposed on it in order to advance the recovery of the people that was demanded by his ideology. Only with the outbreak of the war, then, did National Socialism arrive at its specific and at least biological level of destruction, while Bolshevism had shown its will to social destruction from the very beginning of its rule and precisely as a struggle for peace.
On September 5, The Times published the text of an open letter that Dr. Chaim Weizmann, head of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, addressed to the British Prime Minister. In it, Weizmann reiterated the declaration made before September 1 that the Jews would stand on the side of Britain and fight alongside the democracies. Certainly the Jewish Agency for Palestine was not the government of a state, but it was by no means a mere private organization either. And if anyone in the world was allowed to speak for all Jews and not just for the Jews of Palestine, it was Chaim Weizmann, who had been Lord Balfour’s negotiating partner in 1917 and who for many years headed the World Zionist Organization. It is therefore by no means out of place to speak of a “Jewish declaration of war on Hitler. “And Weizmann merely expressed what almost every Jew in the whole world must have felt. Hitler had declared war on Jewry much earlier, and not only as a party politician but also as a statesman, at the latest on January 30, 1939. This declaration of war was therefore a response, and a fully justified response. But it was not a negligible quantity, and it is not appropriate to conceal it, as is done in almost all accounts. Hitler had made his mortal enemy a group of people who, while not nearly as powerful as he repeatedly claimed, undoubtedly wielded great influence in England and America. It remains an open question whether Weizmann’s statement was unwise or, on the contrary, it was not all too wise, because it might have possibly wanted the interment of German Jews and thus their protection, analogously to the difficult but assured fate of German citizens in France and England. However, the possibility that Weizmann even remotely suspected a connection with that biological decree of September 1, of which he was unaware, can be completely ruled out. Weizmann could have known that the war of 1939 was fundamentally different from the First World War, not only because of the Hitler-Stalin Pact but also because of Weizmann’s declaration; but how much it would finally differ in the end was still unimaginable for him in September 1939, no different than what everyone suspected for Himmler and Heydrich, who were already preparing to wage a “ethnic struggle” of utmost severity in Poland.
I don't know how many people are reading but I want to say thank you for the translation and I hope it continues until the book is finished.