Europe: A History (205 page)

A Nazi-Soviet
rapprochement
was in the offing from the first week of May,
when one of Stalin’s closest henchmen, Molotov, emerged as Commissar for Foreign Affairs. Molotov’s Jewish predecessor, Litvinov, who had an English wife, Ivy, was closely connected with the West and with the ailing policy of collective security. His last throw, for an Anglo-Soviet defensive alliance, had fallen on stony ground. Molotov was appointed with a view to reactivating the line to Berlin. Direct negotiations began in Moscow in June under the cover of ‘trade talks’.

Once Stalin and Hitler had cast their suspicions aside, and their representatives had began to talk, they must rapidly have realized the scale of the opportunity. Given the indecisions of the West, Poland was the only serious obstacle to the prospect of dividing up Eastern Europe between them. With such a glittering prize in view, neither Hitler nor Stalin can have worried too much about the later prospect of Russia and Germany fighting over the spoils. Nor can they have cared to guess the long-term reactions of the West. Given Stalin’s blessing, Hitler reckoned that he could deal with Britain and France single-handed and greatly strengthen Germany in the process; and Stalin was more than content to let him try. Given Hitler’s blessing, Stalin reckoned that he could clean up the states of Eastern Europe single-handed, and greatly strengthen the USSR in the process. They probably both believed that it was better to solve Europe’s problems before the USA, whose present military expenditure was less than Great Britain’s, was alerted to the dangers. The opportunity had to be grasped; it might not recur. One week after the British mission made its leisurely way to Moscow, Herr von Ribbentrop flew smartly in from Berlin.

In those summer days, when the weather was as sunny as the political forecast was grim, Hider’s ebullience grew. His rearmament record, which had increased the Wehrmacht’s front-line divisions from 7 to 51 in three years, excelled that of the Kaiser’s army in the decade before 1914. He felt sure that the West could be fooled as usual, that the ungrateful Poles could be punished in isolation. With the great Stalin thinking the same way as himself, he was ready for limited war, without knowing whether war would be needed. He had little inclination to listen to the whingeing Western diplomats, nor to those in his own camp, like Göring or Mussolini, who wanted to prolong the peace. At a military conference on 23 May he had ranted on about
Lebensraum
in the East and the inevitability of war sooner or later. On 14 June he had set a timetable for his generals to be ready in eight weeks’ time. On 22 August, when the eight weeks were up, he told another conference at the Berghof that ‘War is better now’. His notes ran: ‘No pity—brutal attitude—might is right—greatest severity.’
⁶⁰

The final piece of the preparations fell into place the very next day. On 23 August the news broke from Moscow that those mortal enemies, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, had followed up their recent trade agreement with a pact of non-aggression. What is more (though no one outside Moscow or Berlin was to know for certain until the Nazi archives were captured six years later), the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact had been supplemented by a secret protocol:

Moscow, 23 August 1939

On the occasion of the Non-Aggression Pact between the German Reich and the USSR, the undersigned plenipotentiaries … discussed the boundaries of their respective spheres of influence in Eastern Europe. These conversations led to the following conclusions:

1. In the event of a territorial and political rearrangement in the areas belonging to the Baltic States (Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), the northern boundary of Lithuania will form the boundary of the spheres of influence of Germany and the USSR. In this connection, the interest of Lithuania in the Vilna area is recognised by each party.

2. In the event of a territorial and political rearrangement of the areas belonging to the Polish state, the spheres of influence of Germany and the USSR shall be bounded approximately by the line of the rivers Vistula, Narew, and San. The question of whether the interests of both parties make desirable the maintenance of an independent Polish State, and how such a state should be bounded, can be definitely determined in the course of further political developments. In any event, both Governments will resolve this question by means of a friendly agreement.

3. With regard to Southeastern Europe, attention is called by the Soviet side to its interest in Bessarabia. The German side declares its disinterest in these areas.

4. This protocol shall be treated by both parties as strictly secret.

Hitler and Stalin had carved up Eastern Europe into spheres of influence. Their so-called ‘pact of non-aggression’ was the perfect blueprint for aggression.

Neither party had a good word for the Western Powers. Ribbentrop was confident that Germany could deal with the French army. As for Great Britain, ‘The Reich Foreign Minister stated that … England was weak and wanted others to fight for its presumptuous claim to world domination. Herr Stalin eagerly concurred … [but he] further expressed the opinion that England, despite its weakness, would wage war craftily and stubbornly.’
⁶²

The German–Soviet pact is often described as Hitler’s licence for war. This is true, but it is only half the story, for the pact was equally Stalin’s licence for war. From the moment the ink was dry, each of the signatories was free to assault its neighbours without hindrance from the other. Which is exactly what both of them did.

The Wehrmacht was due to march on 24 August; but the Führer, in one of his fits of nerves, failed to give the final order. He was also curious to see if a second Munich was possible. The Nazi press was publishing stories about Poles castrating Germans; and Göring was urging him to contact London. On the 25th the British Ambassador was summoned and handed a set of unlikely proposals. A Swedish friend of Göring’s was sent to talk directly with Whitehall. But then Chamberlain missed his cue by guaranteeing Poland’s independence once more in a formal Anglo-Polish Treaty. After that, the diplomats were wasting their time: there could be no second Munich. Hitler issued Directive No. 1 for the conduct of war against Poland at 1 p.m. on the 31st. [
GENOCIDE
]

The outbreak of the Polish campaign was stage-managed in best Nazi style. There was no declaration of war. Instead, SS Sturmbann führer Alfred Helmut
Naujocks received orders to round up a detachment of convicts, code-named
Konserven
or ‘Tin Cans’, and to take them to a German radio station at Gleiwitz in Silesia close to the Polish frontier. The studio was duly stormed by men dressed in Polish uniforms, and a rousing Polish chorus was broadcast to the sound of pistol shots. Once outside, the Tin Cans were mown down by the machine-guns of their SS minders, and their blood-soaked bodies were dumped where they would soon be found by the local police. The first casualties of the campaign were German convicts killed by German criminals. Before the night was out, the Nazi news service was announcing that the Polish Army had launched an unprovoked attack on the Third Reich.
⁶³

The Second World War in Europe, 1939–1945
⁶⁴

The invasion of Poland which began on 1 September 1939 did not mark the start of fighting in Europe. It had been preceded by the German attack on Lithuania in March 1939 and by the Italian invasion of Albania in April. But it transformed a series of essentially local wars into the setting for world-wide conflict. By involving the USSR, which was already engaged against the Japanese in Mongolia, it established the link between the European and the Asian theatres of operations. In theory Japan belonged to the Nazi system of alliances, even when the Nazi-Soviet pact put a clamp on the anti-Comintern club. But the fact that Japan, the USSR, Poland, Germany, and the Western Powers were all enmeshed in the web of conflict makes the best argument for contending that a Second World War had really begun.

The Red Army’s role in Poland remained uncertain until the confrontation with Japan was resolved. The decisive Soviet victory at Khalkin-gol on 28 August, achieved by the armour of an unknown general called Zhukov, seems to have been the precondition for an active Soviet policy in Europe. It was perhaps no accident that Stalin delayed his entry into Poland until a truce was signed in Mongolia on 15 September, and Zhukov’s divisions could return across the Urals.
⁶⁵

The German–Soviet Pact had created a new geopolitical framework in Europe. The Great Triangle was now turned round, with the Western Powers (Britain, France, and Canada) facing a combination of the Centre and the East (see Appendix III, p. 1312). The Triangle was not quite complete, however, since the Western Powers and the USSR both avoided direct confrontation. This meant that the West would close its eyes to Stalin’s aggressions, so long as Stalin would limit his anti-Western activities to propaganda and to logistical support for Germany.
⁶⁶
None the less, the German-Soviet Pact transformed the European scene. It enabled Germany and the USSR to destroy Poland and to re-establish the common frontier which had existed throughout the nineteenth century. After that, it permitted them to clear away all the minor states which cluttered their path. In the slightly longer term, it gave Hider the chance to attack the West with Stalin’s support and encouragement.

Map 26.
Europe during the Second World War, 1939–1945

In later years the Ribbentrop–Molotov pact was to be justified on the grounds that it gave the Soviet Union time to construct its defences. Given what happened two years later, the argument looks plausible; but this could be yet another classic case of reading history backwards. In 1939 there was indeed a possibility that Hitler would turn on the USSR after defeating the West; but this was only one contingency, and not necessarily the most likely or the most immediate one. At least three other scenarios had to be considered. One was the possibility that Germany would be defeated in the West, as in 1918. Another was the prospect that Germany and the West would fight each other to a bloody stalemate, after which the USSR could emerge as the arbiter of Europe without firing a shot. This was Goebbels’s view of the Soviet game. ‘Moscow intends to keep out of the war until Europe is … bled white,’ he noted. ‘Then Stalin will move to bolshevize Europe and impose his own rule.’
⁶⁷
A third possibility was that Stalin would use the interval of Hitler’s western war to prepare and launch an offensive of his own.

Thanks to the closure of the relevant Soviet archives, historical knowledge on these matters remains tentative. But two indications are important. First, there is very little evidence to show that the Red Army gave priority after August 1939 to preparing defence in depth. On the contrary, it favoured a theory of revolutionary attack. Stalin had often stressed that communism was not the same as pacifism; speaking to cadets in 1938, he stressed that the Soviet state would take the military initiative whenever required. Secondly, studies of the Red Army’s dispositions in the early summer of 1941 suggest that the two previous years had been spent creating a distinctly offensive posture.
⁶⁸
They go a long way to explaining the disaster which then overtook it (see below). In that case, one would have to conclude that Stalin entered his pact with the Nazis, not to win time for defence, but to outplay Hitler in the game of calculated aggression.
⁶⁹

What is certain is that the German–Soviet Pact led Europe into events which no one could have foreseen. In the first phase, 1939–41, whilst the pact still held, Nazi and Soviet adventures proceeded apace in each of their designated spheres. The Red Army met with varied fortunes; but the Wehrmacht’s stunning conquest of Western Europe came more swiftly than the most starry-eyed German general could have imagined. In the second phase, 1941–3, the Nazi war-machine was thrown into the East. The German–Soviet war constituted the central military contest whereby Europe’s fate would be decided. The Western Powers, reduced to the control of one embattled island, could only exert a peripheral influence. In the final phase, 1943–5, the Soviet Army in the East combined with growing British and American forces in the West to ensure Germany’s downfall.

The Nazi–Soviet Partnership (September 1939–June 1941)
. Thanks to the secret protocols of the German–Soviet pact, many participants in the opening campaign of the Second World War entered the fray on false premisses. The Western Powers thought that they had guaranteed an ally under threat from Nazi aggression; in fact, they had guaranteed an ally which was to be attacked by the Soviet Union as well as the Third Reich. The Poles thought that their task was to hold off
the German advance for fifteen days until the French crossed the German frontier in the West; in feet, they faced the impossible task of holding off both the Wehrmacht and the Red Army on their own. The French launched no offensive; the British limited their assistance to dropping leaflets over Berlin.