The Devils' Alliance: Hitler's Pact with Stalin, 1939-1941 by Roger Moorhouse

Author:Roger Moorhouse [Moorhouse, Roger]
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780465054923
Publisher: Perseus Books, LLC

BY THE LATE SUMMER OF 1940, THE GERMAN-SOVIET RELATIONSHIP was in trouble. Strategically, the two regimes appeared to be on a collision course. The mood of collaboration of late 1939 had shifted increasingly to one of confrontation, with growing suspicions on each side that the other was acting in bad faith. Typical in this regard, perhaps, was an NKVD assessment, drawn up for the first anniversary of the pact in 1940, which drew the following stark conclusion: “Intoxicated by victory, the German Government together with the Italians and without the consent of the USSR, violated the agreement of 23 August 1939 by deciding the fate of the Balkan peoples.” The irony and the root of the problem was that Berlin could just as easily have accused Stalin of the very same thing.

In economics, too, the relationship was faltering. Despite the not inconsiderable benefits that had accrued for both sides over the previous year or so, both Moscow and Berlin were feeling dissatisfied. The Germans, frustrated that the connection with Moscow was not bearing the rich fruit they had expected, were well aware that other sources, such as occupied France or Romania, were proving more bounteous than the USSR. The Soviets, meanwhile, knew that their relationship with Germany, turbulent at best hitherto, was in need of recalibrating to acknowledge the huge changes that the intervening year of warfare had brought. Trade, which both sides had regarded as an essential component of the political arrangement, had become merely an indicator of a deeper malaise.

Even the ex-Lützow, grimly symbolic of the relationship, was in difficulties. At the end of September 1940, though only two-thirds completed and moored in her dock in Leningrad, the ship was formally incorporated into the Red Navy and given the name Petropavlovsk, commemorating a Russian victory against the British and French in the Crimean War. However, in a microcosm of the wider problems, the tentative cooperation on board the ship between the German and Soviet crew and engineers had all but collapsed, with interminable haggling effectively paralyzing any genuine progress on finishing the vessel. The Soviets requested that their training be carried out in Russian, for instance, with specialist officers being sent to German factories for instruction. They also demanded that a Red Navy training detail should be permitted to serve aboard the Admiral Hipper. Unsurprisingly, the German authorities refused. Then, when an article appeared in the Soviet newspaper Izvestia in October 1940 outlining the historical background of a number of Soviet warships, including the Petropavlovsk, the vessel’s German origins were not mentioned. The cynic might have surmised that the Nazi-Soviet Pact was already being airbrushed out of history.

In such circumstances, it naturally fell to Ribbentrop, as one of the progenitors of the Nazi-Soviet alignment, to attempt to revivify it. In mid-October, he addressed Soviet concerns with a letter sent to Stalin personally, in which he advocated inviting Molotov to Berlin for talks preparatory to a revision of the pact through a new “delimitation of mutual spheres of influence.”

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