World War II Behind Closed Doors (2 page)

Laurence Rees
London, May 2008

1
AN ALLIANCE IN
ALL BUT NAME

A SURPRISING FRIENDSHIP

Just before four o'clock on the afternoon of Wednesday, 23 August 1939, Stalin's personal car drove across Red Square. Inside was an unlikely guest of the Soviet leader. In one of the most remarkable turnarounds in the history of diplomacy, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Foreign Minister of Nazi Germany, the sworn enemy of the Soviet Union, was about to be welcomed into the Kremlin. As the car pulled past the domes of St Basil's cathedral and neared the Kremlin's Spasskaya gate, Ribbentrop was apprehensive. He had arrived in the Soviet Union only a few hours before and his unease had immediately been noted by the German General Ernst Köstring. ‘I tried to calm him’, recorded the general. ‘[But] Ribbentrop remained nervous and agitated’.
¹

The car was waved past the NKVD guards – the secret police – at the Kremlin gate and pulled up in front of the Senate building. There Ribbentrop, the German ambassador, Count Schulenburg, and Councillor Hilger from the German embassy (who was to act as interpreter) were escorted down a corridor to a shabby anteroom outside the office of Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet Foreign Minister. After a few minutes they were ushered into a rectangular room that contained a conference table along one wall and a desk at the end. Like all the offices of the Communist elite in the Kremlin, this one resembled, as one British visitor was later to remark, ‘a second class railway waiting room’.
²

Standing waiting to greet them was Molotov. But next to him was someone Ribbentrop was surprised to see – a shortish, sixty-year-old man
³
with pockmarked skin and discoloured teeth who
coolly appraised Ribbentrop with eyes that seemed to have a tinge of yellow about them. It was the supreme leader of the Soviet Union – Joseph Stalin. He rarely met foreigners, and so his presence in the room was a sign of great significance. ‘It was a move’, recorded Hilger, ‘that was calculated to put the [Nazi] foreign minister off balance’.
⁴

The contrast between the two most important people in that room could scarcely have been greater. Ribbentrop stood several inches taller than Stalin and was dressed – as he always was – immaculately. His perfectly cut, expensive suit contrasted sharply with Stalin's baggy tunic and trousers.

Ribbentrop was immensely pompous – ever conscious of the need to preserve his own dignity. Unlike the core of die-hard believers who formed National Socialism, Ribbentrop had joined the Nazi Party late, in 1932, only when it was clear that Hitler was a figure of real importance. In the 1920s, during the Weimar Republic, he had been a wealthy champagne importer. Many of the other leading Nazis had little respect for him. Joseph Goebbels, for example, the Nazi Propaganda Minister, alleged that ‘he bought his name, he married his money and he swindled his way into office’.
⁵
Hermann Göring, the commander of the Luftwaffe, told Hitler that Ribbentrop had been ‘an ass’ in his dealings with the British when he had been German ambassador in London. Hitler had replied, ‘But he knows quite a lot of important people in England’. Göring responded:
‘Mein Führer
, that may be right, but the bad thing is, they know him’.
⁶
Even some of the Nazis' own allies didn't think much of Ribbentrop. Count Ciano, the Italian Foreign Minister, remarked with contempt that: ‘The Duce [Benito Mussolini] says that you only have to look at his head to see that he has a small brain’.
⁷

Ribbentrop may have elicited little respect from his colleagues, but Stalin was accustomed to creating another emotion entirely in those who encountered him – fear. ‘All of us around Stalin were temporary people’, said Nikita Khrushchev, later himself leader of the Soviet Union. ‘As long as he trusted us to a certain degree, we were allowed to go on living and working. But the moment
he stopped trusting you, the cup of his distrust overflowed’.
⁸
Stepan Mikoyan,
⁹
son of the Politburo member Anastas Mikoyan, grew up in the Kremlin compound in the 1930s and confirms Khrushchev's judgement. ‘[Stalin] watched people's eyes when he was speaking’, said Stepan Mikoyan, ‘and if you didn't look him straight in the eye, he might well suspect that you were deceiving him. And then he'd be capable of taking the most unpleasant steps…. He was very suspicious. That was his main character trait…. He was a very unprincipled man…. He could betray and deceive if he thought it was necessary. And that's why he expected the same behaviour from others…anyone could turn out to be a traitor’. Stalin was, of course, first and foremost a revolutionary – he had been a Marxist terrorist before the Bolsheviks came to power, involved in bank robberies, kidnappings and other nefarious activities, and had served several periods in exile in Siberia as a result.

This contrast between the self-important Ribbentrop and the shrewd and cynical Stalin manifested itself immediately in Molotov's office that August afternoon when Ribbentrop began the meeting by portentously announcing that: ‘The Führer has authorized me to propose a non-aggression agreement between our two countries that will last for a hundred years’.

‘If we agree to a hundred years’, replied Stalin, ‘people will laugh at us for not being serious. I propose the agreement should last ten years’.
¹⁰
So, with this none too subtle put-down, the negotiations between the Nazis and the Communists began.

These were discussions that would shock the world: a coming together of two ideological opposites; a meeting, as one Nazi put it, between ‘fire and water’;
¹¹
a marriage at first sight that made little sense. Indeed, how was it possible that Ribbentrop was ever admitted into the heart of the Kremlin in the first place? The Nazis, after all, had never hidden their hatred for the Soviet Union. During a speech at the Nuremberg rally in 1937, Hitler had referred to the country's leaders as ‘an uncivilized Jewish-Bolshevik international guild of criminals’ and stated that the Soviet Union was ‘the greatest danger for the culture and civilization of mankind
which has ever threatened it since the collapse of the states of the ancient world’.
¹²

In
Mein Kampf
[My Struggle] Hitler had explicitly written that he believed Germany should covet the agriculturally rich land of Russia and the rest of the Soviet Union: ‘We are putting an end to the perpetual German march towards the south and west of Europe and turning our eye towards the east…. However, when we speak of new land in Europe today, we must principally bear in mind Russia and the border states subject to her [the Soviet Union]. Destiny itself seems to wish to point the way for us here’.
¹³

But for the Nazis, by the summer of 1939 pragmatism had taken precedence over principle. Hitler wanted the German army to invade Poland within a matter of days. As he saw it, there were German territories to retrieve – the city of Danzig, West Prussia, and the former German lands around Poznań – as well as the rest of Poland's valuable agricultural land to conquer. But he knew that any move into Poland risked war with Britain and France. In March 1939 the British had promised to try to protect Poland from foreign aggression after Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, had finally realized when Hitler invaded the Czech lands that the promises the German Führer had made in the Munich Agreement the year before were worthless. Moreover, from the Nazi point of view, a vast question – the answer apparently unknowable – hung over their plan to invade Poland; what would be the reaction of the Soviet Union, Poland's neighbour in the East? If the Soviet Union formed an alliance with the French and British, the Germans would be surrounded by enemies.

So in the summer of 1939, off the back of trade talks that were taking place in Berlin, the Germans began to sound out the Soviets about a possible treaty of convenience. To begin with, not surprisingly, the Soviets were sceptical. During one discussion earlier that summer the Soviet trade negotiator, Astakhov, remarked to Schnurre, his opposite number on the German side, that his colleagues in Moscow were not ‘certain that the hinted changes in German policy are of a serious and non-conjunctural nature and are calculated for a long period’. Schnurre replied: ‘Tell me what proof
you want. We are ready to demonstrate the possibility of reaching agreement on any question – to give any guarantees’.
¹⁴
By 2 August the urgency of the Germans was palpable. Ribbentrop himself said to Astakhov that ‘there was no problem from the Baltic to the Black Sea’ that could not be resolved between them.
¹⁵
The economic treaty between Germany and the Soviet Union was signed on 19 August in Berlin. Ribbentrop then pressed the Soviets to allow him to come to Moscow to sign a non-aggression treaty. When the Soviets seemed to dither for a moment, Hitler himself stepped in and wrote a personal appeal to Stalin to allow Ribbentrop to come. The Soviets relented and Ribbentrop, with alacrity, arrived in Moscow on the 23rd.

The motivation of the Germans is thus not hard to read. Hitler's long-term policy – almost a messianic vision – remained clear. The Soviet Union was his ideological enemy – an enemy, in addition, that possessed rich farmland its people were not ‘worthy’ of owning. One day there would be a new German Empire on this land. But now was not the moment to pursue visions. Now was the moment to deal with the urgent and practical problem of neutralizing a potential aggressor. The Nazi regime was nothing if not dynamic. And the speed at which the Nazis moved to instigate and then close this deal astonished and impressed the Soviets. ‘The fact that Mr Ribbentrop acted at a tempo of 650 kilometres an hour called forth the Soviet government's sincere admiration’, said Molotov in a speech in September 1939. ‘His energy and his strength of will were a pledge to the firmness of the friendly relations that had been created with Germany’.
¹⁶

Whilst it is relatively easy to see what the Germans were getting out of the deal, it is initially less simple to explain the attitude of the Soviets; because, unlike the Germans, the Soviets had a choice of partners. They could have rejected the Germans and decided to form an alliance with the British and the French. At a cursory glance, that would seem to have been the logical course of action; not least because in July 1932 the Soviets had signed a non-aggression treaty with Poland. In addition, neither the British nor the French were as vehemently opposed to the Soviet Union as the
Nazis, and the British had already made peaceful overtures towards Moscow. But Stalin knew that Britain in particular had previously preferred a policy of appeasement to the Germans, rather than alliance with the Soviets – a policy symbolized by the fact that the Soviet Union had not even been consulted about the Munich Agreement of September 1938 when Chamberlain signed away the ethnically German Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia to the Nazis.

When Chamberlain returned from Munich he had quoted Shakespeare's
Henry IV Part 1:
‘…out of this nettle danger, we pluck this flower, safety’. But in a scathing article in
Izvestiya
, the Soviets responded with a quote of their own from the same play: ‘The purpose you undertake is dangerous; the friends who you have named uncertain; the time itself unsorted; and your whole plot too light for the counterpoise of so great an opposition’.
¹⁷

And the fact that it had taken the Nazi invasion of the remainder of the Czech lands on 15 March 1939 to make the British suddenly realize the possible benefits of an arrangement with the Soviet Union did not impress Stalin, who five days earlier had made a bitter speech to the 18th Party Congress in Moscow. He talked of a ‘war’ that was being waged by ‘aggressor states who in every way infringe upon the interests of the non-aggressive states, primarily Britain, France and the USA, while the latter draw back and retreat, making concession after concession to the aggressors. Thus we are witnessing an open redivision of the world and spheres of influence at the expense of the non-aggressive states, without the least attempt at resistance, and even with a certain connivance, on their part. Incredible, but true’.
¹⁸
It was partly this contempt for the passivity of the ‘non-aggressive’ states that led Stalin, in this same speech, famously to warn that the Soviet Union was not prepared to ‘be drawn into conflict by warmongers who are accustomed to have others pull their chestnuts out of the fire for them’.

Nonetheless, Stalin and the Soviet leadership were still prepared to consider a possible treaty of mutual assistance with Britain and France. But there were problems from the very start.
In sharp contrast with the ‘650 kilometres an hour’ attitude of the Nazis, the Western Allies were perceived as dawdling through the discussions. On 27 May the British and the French proposed a military and political alliance, but Molotov dismissed the plan. It was vague and lacked the necessary detail, especially when it came to explaining just how the Soviet Union would be expected to respond to a German attack on Poland.

As far as the Soviets were concerned, the British lack of commitment to a serious alliance was crystallized in their mission to Moscow that summer, led by the splendidly named Admiral the Hon. Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax. The Soviet ambassador to London, Maisky, had previously asked whether the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, would come to Moscow that summer to discuss matters directly with Molotov. Instead the British despatched first the more minor head of the central department of the Foreign Office, and then this obscure quadruple-barrelled admiral. To make matters worse Drax and his team displayed no sense of urgency, leaving England on 5 August on a merchant ship that took four days to reach Leningrad.