Hitler's Tyranny by Ralf Georg Reuth

Author:Ralf Georg Reuth
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781913368623
Publisher: Haus Publishing
Published: 2022-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

7

The Hitler–Stalin Pact

Why did these sworn enemies sign such an agreement?

The Nazi–Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of August 1939 has remained a political hot potato right up to the present day. Prior to the break-up of the Soviet Union, Moscow always denied the existence of a secret supplementary protocol to the pact, in which the two dictators carved up Eastern Central Europe between them. In 1992, however, President Boris Yeltsin authorised publication of the document. In 2020, on the occasion of the ‘Seventy-Fifth Anniversary of the Great Victory over Fascism’, his successor Vladimir Putin declared that the pact had been necessary to safeguard the security and political interests of the Soviet Union at the time. According to Putin, the real cause of the Second World War was the Munich Agreement, in which the Western powers permitted the disintegration of Czechoslovakia against the wishes of the Soviet Union, and in so doing paved the way for Hitler’s boundless expansion. The beneficiaries back then had been, he claimed, not only Germany but also Poland. For Stalin had apparently pushed for a coalition against Hitler and had only formed an alliance with him after Poland announced that it was ‘unwilling to enter into any obligations regarding the Soviet Union’.1 Moreover, Putin continued, it was only after the outbreak of war, when it became clear that German troops were about to ‘swiftly occupy the whole of Poland’ that the Red Army also invaded the country. Such a blatant rewriting of history is reason enough to revisit the question of how the pact between Hitler and Stalin came about and what role it played in the strategic calculations of both dictators.

What Putin, with his twisted logic, brazenly tried to present to the world as the defensive action of a ‘peace-loving Soviet Union’ against National Socialist aggression, cannot be justified as such even in the most superficial way. For thanks to their aspiration to global revolution, the Bolsheviks under their leader Lenin had Central Europe in their sights right from the outset. This was no different under Stalin, even though priority was given to strengthening socialism within the Soviet Union; and Germany was assigned a key role in these plans for world revolution. If revolution succeeded there, it was argued, then there was nothing to stop it taking root in other European countries. The West saw things in exactly the same way. Accordingly, these nations regarded the antagonism between Germany and Russia as fundamental to maintaining the balance of power in Europe. Even after the First World War, therefore, British prime minister David Lloyd George noted: ‘If Germany goes over to the spartacists, it is inevitable that she should throw in her lot with the Russian Bolshevists.’2

When, on 21 August 1939, the official German news agency issued the following communiqué, it was clear to any politically-minded contemporary that Europe would never be the same again: ‘The Reich government and the Soviet government have agreed to sign a mutual nonaggression pact. The Reich minister for foreign affairs von Ribbentrop will arrive in Moscow on Wednesday 23 August to bring negotiations to a close.

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