Nazi Soviet Pact

10 Key excerpts on "Nazi Soviet Pact"

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  Nazis in Newark

  • Warren Grover(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  8

  The Nazi-Soviet Pact and World War II, 1939-1940

  The Nazi-Soviet Pact, a ten-year non-aggression agreement between Germany and the Soviet Union, was signed on August 23, 1939. A secret clause in the pact provided for the division of Poland and the Baltic countries between the two dictatorships. One week later, Germany invaded Poland, and France and Great Britain declared war on Germany. Shortly thereafter, Soviet Russia occupied eastern Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, and invaded Finland. World War II had begun.

  Prior to the outbreak of war, the brunt of anti-Nazi activities in the United States had been shouldered by predominantly Jewish groups engaged in boycott activities, demonstrations, and physical intimidation. With the exception of the Communist Party and its many front organizations, support from non-Jewish groups had been limited. With the advent of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, however, the Communist Party reversed its anti-Nazism and denounced both British and French imperialism and American support for the Allies.

  Throughout 1939, but especially immediately following the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Nazi aggression in Europe increasingly turned American public opinion against Hitler. American anti-Nazi policies were based on the fear that Germany would upset the balance of European power and threaten American interests. In the same way, increased government action against the German-American Bund was grounded in the fear that an alien group would become a “fifth column” in the advent of war with Germany. Jewish interests were not a consideration in formulating America's foreign policy vis-à-vis Germany and the German-American Bund. The need for groups like the Minutemen and the NSANL receded as both Federal and local governments stepped up efforts against the Hitlerites.

  As 1939 began, new voices in Newark's Christian community were raised against anti-Semitism. Conrad Hoffman, National Director for Jewish Evangelical Work, told over 150 pastors, elders, and women at a conference of the missionary societies of the Newark Presbytery that a tide of anti-Semitism was sweeping the world. He said that even American Jews were not immune to the threat because most Protestants here “are anti-Semitic in their outlook” and urged pastors and other church workers to educate people against anti-Semitism.1 Seton Hall College established a “Student's Crusade for Americanism” and its first release denounced the Bund and similar organizations for infringing on American principles. Paul Brienza, president of the group, said that allowing the Bund to exercise its rights of assembly and free speech was injurious to the cause of Americanism.2

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  Assured Victory

  How "Stalin the Great" Won the War, but Lost the Peace

  • Albert L. Weeks(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  This group claims that Stalin all along was plotting an offensive war of his own—above all, against Germany. Ultimately, Stalin was planning to extend his “preemptive” or “preventive” war against all of “capitalist-imperialist” Europe. As Molotov dictated to Chuev in his memoirs, referring to Stalin’s view of three world wars: “Stalin looked at it this way. World War I has wrested one country from capitalist slavery. World War II has created a socialist system. A third world war will finish off imperialism forever.” 7 SPECIFICS OF NAZI-SOVIET PACTS AND PROTOCOLS When the two sides got down to business in August, amid friendly toasts and extravagant ceremonies staged by the Soviets for the visit- ing German emissary, Joachim von Ribbentrop, two major agreements with their secret protocols followed. Nazi-Soviet Pacts and Aftermath 147 The Treaty of Nonaggression, known as the Nonaggression Pact, was signed on August 23, 1939. By its terms, each side pledged not to attack or support an attack against and not to ally itself with any group of powers directed against the other contracting party. Each promised to consult the other on all questions of common interest. A secret pro- tocol was attached to the pact that established the northern bound- ary for Lithuania, an independent, sovereign state, so that German and Soviet spheres of influence would be divvied up between the two powers. Likewise with sovereign, independent Poland, its boundary was redrawn so that its western half at the rivers Narew, Vistula, and San would fall to Germany while the eastern portion would fall to the Soviets—details of which were to be settled later “by friendly agree- ment.” Germany declared her “disinterestedness” in the Soviet demand that Bessarabia fall under Soviet “influence” but had not intended that the Soviets would usurp Lithuania as they did in August 1940.

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  Secret Cables of the Comintern, 1933-1943

  • Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov, Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, Lynn Visson(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Yale University Press

    (Publisher)

  The Nazi-Soviet Pact 141 protracted negotiations with the Soviet Union on joint action against the aggressors and were attempting to use these negotiations “as a means to reach a compromise with Germany at the expense of the USSR.” British and French influence was also blamed for Poland’s rejection of possible Soviet assistance. By signing a nonaggression pact the USSR was undermining the plans of the reactionary bourgeois circles and the leaders of the Socialist International to direct aggres-sion against the USSR, thereby splitting the aggressors and obtaining a free hand to work to assist the Chinese people in their struggle against Japanese aggression. The Soviet-German negotiations, accord-ing to the Comintern, were a means “to force the British and French governments to conclude a pact with the USSR. Simultaneously it is necessary to show the Parties the need to continue with ever greater energy the antifascist struggle against the aggressors, in particular against German fascism.” 1 This Comintern decree shows that the ECCI leadership had not been warned of Stalin’s intentions and had not grasped the meaning of Stalin’s sharp shift toward a rapprochement with Hitler’s Germany, and through inertia it continued to repeat the previous formulae re-garding the struggle against German fascism. Stalin was perfectly well aware that the Nazi-Soviet Pact gave Hitler a free hand to attack Po-land. Moscow was receiving such information from various sources, including Soviet intelligence. A message to Moscow of 23 May 1939 from a Soviet intelligence agent stated, “The Soviet Union is a factor slowing down the unquestionably aggressive intentions of Germany in regard to Poland.

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  Hitler's Tyranny

  A History in Ten Chapters

  • Ralf Georg Reuth, Peter Lewis(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Haus Publishing

    (Publisher)

  Hitler, fearing that the British might thwart his campaign against Poland by making concessions, urged his diplomats to make haste. This also seemed advisable in the light of the negotiations that were taking place between Britain and the Soviet Union. Stalin was generous in agreeing to the terms proposed by the German dictator, and Hitler, sensing his imminent triumph, was keen to let the outside world know all about his diplomatic coup. Finally, on 23 August 1939, Ribbentrop and Molotov signed a non-aggression pact in the presence of Stalin, in which each side assured the other that it would not intervene in any armed conflict in which its co-signatory became involved. In addition, a secret additional protocol, which Stalin had insisted upon, defined the two powers’ respective spheres of influence in Eastern Central Europe. Latvia, Estonia, and Finland, and parts of Romania and Bessarabia, were deemed to belong to the Soviet sphere. The same was true of the east of Poland (which would cease to exist as a country). The dividing line was set along the rivers Pilica, Narew, Vistula, and San, roughly corresponding to the Curzon Line – the eastern border of the reconstituted state of Poland established at the Paris Peace Conference. As a consequence of the Polish–Russian War and the Peace of Riga in March 1921, this border had in the meantime been pushed some 200 kilometres further to the east.

  It was clear to the Germans that Hitler’s pact with Stalin would create the conditions for an isolated war against Poland. Some even regarded it as a sign of ‘destiny’. Most people, however, continued to ask themselves the same anxious question: would Britain take its guarantees at face value and forbear to intervene? They had no inkling that the stakes were much higher than this for their Führer. He assured the handful of insiders within his close circle of confederates, who knew that his entire focus was on the Soviet Union and who feared that the NSDAP would be damaged by the pact, that party members knew him and would trust him: ‘they know that I will never abandon my principles and they will recognise that the ultimate objective of this risky game is to eliminate the danger from the East’.24

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  Hitler and His Allies in World War Two

  • Jonathan Adelman(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The Russians, not ready for such a pact with Germany before August 1939, now realized that time was urgent for Germany on the eve of World War II. The ten-year nonaggression pact called for continuing contact on all issues, not joining a hostile pact, ratification in the shortest possible time and deferring a decision on the division of Poland. A secret protocol gave Russia control of much of the Baltics. Stalin, while drinking a toast to Hitler’s health by asserting that “I know how much the German nation loves its Fueher,” also argued that “England, despite its weakness, would wage war craftily and stubbornly.” The Soviet Union, regaining its 1914 frontiers in Europe, took Karelia, the Baltics (after swapping parts of Eastern Poland for Lithuania), Eastern Poland, Bessarabia, and Northern Bukovina, with traditional spheres of influence by the summer of 1940 with German acquiescence. 132 As Gerhard Weinberg observed, in August 1939 the Russians gained much for Hitler made “the most extensive concessions to the Soviet Union, more even than Stalin thought to ask for.” This brought great benefits to the Soviet Union. Until June 1941 the Soviet Union, fearful of German military power and intentions, lacking strong allies and trying to keep out of World War II, would seek extensive cooperation to the point of appeasement of Nazi Germany. 133 Stalin, as Geoffrey Roberts has asserted, did not see the pact as making the Soviet Union an ally of Nazi Germany. Indeed, as he argued in a well known article, he asserted that the pact was the consequence of the breakdown of August 1939 negotiations with Great Britain and France,. . . the contingent and makeshift nature of the process that led to the pact. On the Soviet side the pact emerged from a process of short-term crisis management in which the Soviet leadership (primarily Stalin and Molotov) responded to the initiatives and actions of others. .

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  The Challenge of Grand Strategy

  The Great Powers and the Broken Balance between the World Wars

  • Jeffrey W. Taliaferro, Norrin M. Ripsman, Steven E. Lobell(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  The timeline for negotiations was compressed on August 21, when Hitler wrote Stalin requesting a Ribbentrop visit in the next two days. Stalin accepted. That day, Berlin announced that Ribbentrop would go to Moscow on August 23 to sign a deal. Thus, even before the Nazi-Soviet pact and its secret protocol were signed late on August 23, its political shockwaves were being felt. If Hitler in August 1939 had not been willing to make, as Wein- berg put it, “the most extensive concessions to the Soviet Union,” but instead had continued to confront the Soviets with hostility, Stalin would almost certainly have pursued the Anglo-Franco-Soviet alliance talks to completion. 79 In deciding to pursue accommodation with the USSR, so as to avert encirclement, Germany opted not to forge a stronger con- sistent alliance with Japan against the common enemy they straddled. Hitler’s deal with Moscow violated the terms of the secret protocol of the Anti-Comintern pact, which had stipulated that “without mutual assent,” neither of the two parties would conclude “political treaties with the Soviet Socialist Republics which do not conform to this agreement.” 80 Thus, the Pact not only divided Germany’s likely adversaries; it also undercut the German-Japanese alignment’s central anti-Soviet thesis. The strategic implications of this for Soviet interests in the Far East 78 Roberts, Soviet Union, 88–89. 79 Weinberg, FPHG, 629. 80 See Kawasaki, Chapter 9 in this volume. Powers of Division 263 should not be underestimated. 81 In the late 1930s, Soviet leaders were obsessed with the problem of fighting Germany and Japan simultane- ously; and in the summer of 1939, recall, the Soviets were engaged in high-intensity conflict with the Japanese around Nomonhan. 82 In short, the Nazi-Soviet pact served as wedge strategy for both Germany and the USSR.

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  Barbarossa 1941

  Reframing Hitler’s Invasion of Stalin’s Soviet Empire

  • Frank Ellis(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • University Press of Kansas

    (Publisher)

  What emerges clearly in Molotov’s speech, as well as in Stalin’s own radio address on 3 July 1941, is the outrage born of the knowledge that Stalin and Molotov, both master schemers and plotters, have been totally outmaneuvered and outwitted by Hitler. Speculation about the Germans’ hostile intent in the international press and the clumsy denials in the TASS communiqué a week previously, not to mention the disregarded intelligence summaries, all helped expose Stalin’s grotesque miscalculations about Hitler’s intentions. The international humiliation inflicted on Stalin and Molotov by Hitler is palpable. On behalf of his shell-shocked boss, Molotov—who had colluded with von Ribbentrop to destroy Poland, imposed the cruel deception of treaties of friendship on the Baltic states, and used all kinds of spurious pretexts to justify the seizure of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina—in a fit of self-righteous rage, now declared that the German invasion was “an act of treachery unparalleled in the history of civilized peoples,” launched in spite of the Non-Aggression Pact. 105 All Molotov’s pitiful complaining about German violation of the pact and his instant and reflexive recourse to ideological insults such as “fascist” (rather neatly drawing attention to the fact that the Soviet Union had concluded a Non-Aggression Pact with fascist Germany) could not hide the fact that Hitler had acted with consummate skill, delivering Stalin and Molotov a master class in duplicity and treachery. Conclusion From the very beginning of what appeared to be a rapprochement between the Soviet Union and Germany in August 1939, the two parties relentlessly sought to maximize their territorial, economic, and military gains at the expense of the other party. This was done openly, if there was no other option; preferably, it was done covertly. In 1939 Poland, partitioned by the two totalitarian states, ceased to exist

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  Russia

  • Dmitri Trenin(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  By the spring of 1939, Stalin came to the conclusion that it would make more sense for the Soviet Union to do a deal with Germany. He was under no illusion that the war with Hitler could be averted, but hoped to buy time to complete Soviet rearmament programs. Stalin accepted the German offer to negotiate a trade agreement between the two countries. At the same time, however, he proposed to Paris and London that the USSR, France, and Britain give joint military guarantees to Eastern European countries – Poland, Romania, and the Baltic States – against Germany. In case of a crisis, the Red Army would march through those countries’ territories to Germany’s borders to uphold or restore the status quo.

  Warsaw and Bucharest, fearful of a de facto Soviet occupation, rejected this plan out of hand. Britain and France, who were mostly concerned with making sure that Germany didn’t attack in the west, ostensibly wanted to find some compromise. Yet the military delegations they sent to Moscow in August dragged their feet and lacked the proper authority to conclude a military pact. It was at that moment that Stalin, who was in parallel negotiating with the Germans, finally decided in favor of an agreement with Hitler, whom he considered more interested in making the deal. Stalin pronounced the stalled talks with the Western powers terminated, and notified Berlin that he would welcome Hitler’s envoy to the Kremlin.

  On August 23, 1939, Molotov and Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, in Stalin’s presence, signed a Soviet–German non-aggression pact. Stalin believed he was buying time before the start of an inevitable war with Germany. He was also seeking to improve the Soviet Union’s strategic position. Attached to the treaty was a secret protocol that delineated the respective spheres of influence of the two countries in Eastern Europe. The Soviet sphere extended to Estonia, Latvia, Finland, Bessarabia, and eastern Poland, mostly populated by ethnic Ukrainians and Belarusians. A month later, Lithuania was also added to this list. To Stalin, recovering the territory of the former Russian Empire meant advancing the Red Army positions by a few hundred kilometers westward, toward Germany.

  On September 1, 1939, the German Wehrmacht invaded Poland, thus starting World War II. On September 17, the Red Army entered Poland from the east to take control of the territories assigned to the USSR under the secret protocol. The Poles offered the Soviets little resistance. Poland’s eastern lands were promptly added to Soviet Ukraine and Belarus. During Ribbentrop’s follow-up visit to Moscow in late September, the USSR and Germany finally agreed on their new border, which cut through what only recently used to be Poland. It now ran roughly along the ethnically based Curzon line proposed in 1919 by the then British foreign secretary as a Russo-Polish border. Eastern Europe was thus divided between Germany and the Soviet Union.

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  The Road to Barbarossa

  Soviet-German Relations, 1917–1941

  • Norman Ridley(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Frontline Books

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 11

  THE MOLOTOV-RIBBENTROP PACT

  Eastern Europe in 1938.

  On the other side of the European continent, Litvinov was unnerved by the growing influence of Germany and Poland over Romania and once again the idea of a Soviet-Romanian pact was brought up but the question of Romania allowing the transit of Soviet troops in the event of a German attack on Czechoslovakia was still the stumbling block to Soviet ambitions. The exile of Titulescu in late 1937 had changed the Romanian position somewhat but still they refused to accept Soviet promises that they would retire beyond the Dniestr at the cessation of any hostilities. The formation of an ultra-right government in Romania at the end of December 1937 seemed to once again put an end to talks but the urgency of the need for Soviet transit forced it to remain on the table. Already Soviet aircraft were overflying Romanian airspace, much to the annoyance of the Poles. These aircraft were Soviet SB 2 bombers, sixty-one of which had been bought by the Czechs and almost three times more contracted to be built under licence in Czechoslovakia. These aircraft had been purchased long before tensions had escalated in the Sudetenland and were straight commercial purchases which theoretically did not constitute military aid.

  During the 1920s, the question of the Anschluss (political union of Austria with Germany) had never been of much concern to Moscow, having been perceived as a ‘German question’. As late as 1931, Izvestia had published an article welcoming Anschluss but as Hitler rose to power it dawned on them that Austria held the key to German domination of Europe. Annexation of that country by Germany would provide a springboard that might launch them into Drang nach dem Osten and put them right on the Soviet Union’s border. It now became of paramount importance that Moscow oppose Anschluss .

  At this time, the Soviet Union, Italy and Germany were active participants in the Spanish Civil War. Litvinov denounced fascist aggression and castigated the Western Powers for their failure to support the democratically-elected government of Spain against Franco’s insurrection. The ideological war between Berlin and Moscow was now coming to the fore as a dominant factor, having been conveniently relegated to a side issue for almost two decades. And then on 11 March 1938 German troops crossed the Austrian frontier and the Anschluss of Austria was declared. Three days later the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs called upon Britain, France and the United States to join them in a conference to discuss international action to prevent further German aggression. The collective show of disdain for such a move was evident and ably articulated by the British Prime Minister Chamberlain when he accused the Soviets of crying wolf by calling for ‘a concerting of action against an eventuality which has not yet arisen’.1

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  Foreign Pol France 1914-45 V7

  • Nere(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  239 On this point we differ from the interpretation of W . E. Scott, op. cit., p. 16.

  However this may be, the fact that these two negotiations were parallel and simultaneous is remarkable. In August 1931 the French and Soviet negotiators came to an agreement on a proposal for a pact. In August 1931 Poland too made known her approval of the French attitude and her wish to adopt a similar one, and in fact a Polish-Soviet pact of non-aggression was initiated on 26 January 1932. France, like Poland, made her final agreement subject to the conclusion of a similar pact between the USSR and Rumania. However, an obstacle arose here: as a result of the events of 1919 Bessarabia, which had formerly been under Russian control, had passed into the hands of Rumania. The USSR had never recognized this transfer of territory. Consequently, the Soviet-Rumanian negotiations came up against the contradictory claims of the Soviets, who wished to mention in the pact the existence of their territorial claims, and of the Rumanians who wanted the pact to give a guarantee of their possession of Bessarabia. First Polish and then French mediators endeavoured on the other hand to find a formula vague enough for nothing to be deduced from it on the subject. How much would a pact of non-aggression based on such an ambiguity really have been worth? Why did the Soviets concern themselves only with these claims with respect to Rumania, when they also had territorial claims with respect to Poland? So many questions could be asked, to which there was not necessarily any answer.

  W. E. Scott, the remarkable historian who dealt with the Franco-Soviet negotiations, thought that he could detect a deliberate slowing down on the part of the French, during the autumn of 1931 and the spring of 1932. Our documents do not enable us to settle this question, but we can discuss some of the reasons put forward. One of these referred to a Franco-German rapprochement 240 during this period. This rapprochement

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