World War II Behind Closed Doors (3 page)

Once the British delegation arrived in Moscow, the Soviets soon found evidence to confirm Maisky's intelligence report from London that ‘the delegates will not be able to make any decisions on the spot…. This does not promise any particular speed in the conduct of the negotiations’.
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In fact, before he left for Moscow Drax had been specifically told by the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary that in case of any difficulties with the Soviets he should try and string the negotiations out until October, when winter conditions in Poland would make a Nazi invasion difficult.
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The British hoped that the mere threat of an alliance with the Soviet Union might act as a deterrent to the Germans.

It is not hard to see what caused the British to take this lackadaisical approach in their discussions with the Soviets. In the first place, British foreign policy had been predicated for years on the basis that a friendly relationship with Germany was of more value than an accommodation with the Soviet Union. Not only did many British loathe Stalin's Communist regime for ideological
reasons, but there was also little respect for the power and usefulness of the Soviet armed forces. Moreover, there was a further, intensely practical reason why the British found it hard to reach a comprehensive agreement with the Soviet Union that summer: the question of Poland. Difficulties of policy over this one country, which will haunt this entire history, were evident even before the war began. The British knew that in order for any military treaty to have meaning, the Soviets would have to be given permission to cross the Polish border to fight the Germans if, as looked likely, the Nazis decided to invade. But the Poles were against any such idea. In the face of this impasse the British delegation adopted the understandable – but ultimately self-defeating – tactic of simply ignoring the subject whenever the question of Poland and its territorial integrity came up in discussion. When the Soviet Marshal Voroshilov asked directly on 14 August if the Red Army would be permitted to enter Poland in order to engage the Nazis, the Allied delegation made no reply.

However, we must not run away with the idea that Stalin and the Soviet leadership were somehow driven into the hands of the Nazis by British and French misjudgement. Ultimately the Western Allies had very little to offer the Soviets at the bargaining table. Why, Stalin must have been thinking, should the Red Army be ‘drawn into conflict’ in order to help other, unsympathetic regimes out of their self-created difficulties? Stalin was just as ideologically opposed to Britain and France as he was to Nazi Germany. Each of these countries, according to Marxist theory, was dominated by big business and oppressed the working people. Only the Soviet Union, which proposed free education, free healthcare, ‘votes for all’ and common ownership, was a ‘proper’ state in Stalin's world view. And Lenin's own teachings called for the Soviet state to stand back in such circumstances and let the capitalists fight between themselves. So, dealing between these equally unpalatable other countries, it remained far more sensible from Stalin's perspective to consider an arrangement, albeit a potentially temporary one, with Nazi Germany. For as well as offering the Soviet Union a seemingly secure way out of any forthcoming
war, the Nazis could offer something the Western Allies never could – the prospect of additional territory and material gain for the Soviet Union. So the meeting on the afternoon of 23 August 1939 between Ribbentrop and Schulenburg for the Germans, and Stalin and Molotov for the Soviets, was, whilst not a meeting of minds, certainly a meeting of common interests.

THE NEGOTIATIONS BEGIN

A sign of the intensely practical nature of the talks was the swiftness with which the discussion turned to what was euphemistically described as ‘spheres of influence’. This deliberately innocuous phrase could mean as little or as much as each of the participants wished. Eventually, of course, after the Nazi invasion of Poland it was used to determine who should exercise control over various eastern European countries.

Ribbentrop announced: ‘The Führer accepts that the eastern part of Poland and Bessarabia as well as Finland, Estonia and Latvia, up to the river Duena, will all fall within the Soviet sphere of influence’.
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Stalin objected at once to the German proposals, insisting that the
entire
territory of Latvia fall within the ‘Soviet sphere of influence’. Ribbentrop felt unable to agree to Stalin's request without contacting Hitler. So the meeting was adjourned until he had received instructions directly from the Führer.

Hitler was waiting for news of the negotiations at the Berghof, his retreat in the mountains of southern Bavaria. That morning there had already been a commanders' conference at which Hitler had notified senior army figures that Ribbentrop was on his way from Königsberg to Moscow in order to sign a non-aggression pact. ‘The generals were upset, they were looking at each other’, said Herbert Döring, the SS officer who administered the Berghof, who witnessed events that day. ‘It took their breath away that such a thing could be possible. Stalin the Communist, Hitler the National Socialist, that these [two] would suddenly unite. What was behind it, nobody knew’.
²²

As the talks continued in Moscow, the atmosphere at the Berghof grew strained. ‘It was a sultry, hot summer evening’, recalled Döring. ‘Groups of ADCs, civilian staff, ministers and secretaries were standing around the switchboard and on the terrace, because the first call would come to the switchboard. And everybody was tense, and they waited and waited’. Suddenly the call from Moscow came through with news of Stalin's demand. ‘Hitler was speechless during the phone call, everybody noticed’, said Döring. ‘Stalin had put a pistol to his head’. And with this ‘pistol to his head’, Hitler agreed to grant Stalin the whole of Latvia as part of his ‘sphere of influence’.

Once the main issues around the ‘spheres of influence’ were decided, and then enshrined in a secret protocol to the pact, the conversation in Moscow became more discursive. Stalin revealed his frank views on the nation that would, by the summer of 1941, be his ally: ‘I dislike and distrust the British; they are skilful and stubborn opponents. But the British army is weak. If England is still ruling the world it is due to the stupidity of other countries which let themselves be cheated. It is ridiculous that only a few hundred British are still able to rule the vast Indian population’.
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Stalin went on to assert that the British had tried to prevent Soviet-German understanding for many years, and that it was a ‘good idea’ to put an end to these ‘shenanigans’.

But at the talks in Moscow there was no open discussion of the Nazis' immediate plan to invade Poland – nor, of course, of what the Soviet response to it was expected to be. The nearest Ribbentrop came to outlining Nazi intentions was when he said: ‘The government of the German Reich no longer finds acceptable the persecution of the German population in Poland and the Führer is determined to resolve the German-Polish disputes without delay’. Stalin's response to this statement was the noncommittal ‘I understand’.

A draft communiqué announcing the pact was shown to both Stalin and Ribbentrop. The Soviet leader seems to have found the flowery language of the first draft rather comic. ‘Don't you think we have to pay a little more attention to public opinion in our
countries?’ he said. ‘For many years now we have been pouring buckets of shit over each other's heads and our propaganda boys could never do enough in that direction; and all of a sudden are we to make believe that all is forgiven and forgotten? Things don't work so fast’.
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And with that, Stalin began to tone down the words of the statement.

At midnight, a woman wearing a red headscarf brought in first tea and then sweets, caviar, sandwiches and copious amounts of vodka, Russian wines and finally Crimean champagne. ‘The atmosphere’, recalled Andor Hencke, a German diplomat who acted as an additional translator, ‘which had already been pleasant, became warmly convivial. Stalin and Molotov were the most welcoming hosts imaginable. The ruler of Russia filled his guests’ glasses himself, offered them cigarettes and even to light them. The cordial and yet at the same time dignified manner in which Stalin, without losing face, attended to each one of us, left a strong impression on us all…. I translated what was probably the first toast that Stalin ever made to Adolf Hitler. He said: “Because I know how much the German people love their Führer, I want to drink to his health”!'
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The Non-Aggression Pact between the Soviet Union and Germany was finally signed in the early hours of 24 August 1939. German and Soviet photographers were allowed into the room to immortalize the unlikely friendship that had blossomed between the two countries. Stalin remarked that he had only one condition for any photographs: ‘The empty bottles should be removed beforehand’, he said, ‘because otherwise people might think that we got drunk first and then signed the treaty’.
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Despite Stalin's – albeit jocular – concerns about hiding the evidence of alcohol in the room, one of the German photographers, Helmut Laux, took a picture of Stalin and Ribbentrop each with a champagne glass in his hand. Stalin remarked that publishing a photo of the two of them drinking together might give the ‘wrong impression’. Laux started to remove the film from his camera in order to give it to Stalin – but the Soviet leader gestured to him not to bother, saying he trusted the word of a German that the photo in question would not be used.
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Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler's personal photographer, was also present, and with his innate sense of German superiority recalled the ‘antediluvian’ camera equipment of the ‘Russians’. He also approached Stalin directly: ‘Your Excellency’, he said, ‘I have the very great honour of conveying to you the hearty greetings and good wishes of my Führer and good friend, Adolf Hitler! Let me say how much he looks forward to one day meeting the great leader of the Russian people in person’. According to Hoffmann these words ‘made a great impression on Stalin’, who replied by saying that there ‘should be a lasting friendship with Germany and her great Führer’.
²⁸

The party lasted into the small hours, and when the Germans finally took their leave Stalin was, according to Hoffmann, ‘well and truly lit up’!
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The Soviet leader clearly understood the incongruity – almost the comic nature – of this pact with his former enemy. ‘Let's drink to the new anti-Cominternist’, he said at one point, ‘Stalin’!
³⁰
But his last words to Ribbentrop were spoken with apparent sincerity: ‘I assure you that the Soviet Union takes this pact very seriously. I guarantee on my word of honour that the Soviet Union will not betray its new partner’.
³¹

Back at the Berghof, the atmosphere grew ever more anxious in the hours before news of the signing of the pact came through. Herbert Döring watched that evening as Hitler and his guests stared at a dramatic sky over the high mountain peaks. ‘The entire sky was in turmoil’, he remembered. ‘It was blood-red, green sulphur grey, black as the night, a jagged yellow. Everyone was looking horrified – it was intimidating…. Everyone was watching. Without good nerves one could easily have become frightened’. Döring observed one of Hitler's guests, a Hungarian woman, remark: ‘My Führer, this augurs nothing good. It means blood, blood, blood and again blood’. ‘Hitler was totally shocked’, said Döring. ‘He was almost shaking. He said, “If it has to be, then let it be now”. He was agitated, completely crazed. His hair was wild. His gaze was locked on the distance’. Then, when the good news that the pact had been signed finally arrived, Hitler ‘said goodbye, went upstairs and the evening was over’.

The reaction of the British public to the rapprochement between Germany and the Soviet Union might have lacked the drama on the terrace at the Berghof, but it was certainly one of immense surprise. ‘This is a new and incomprehensible chapter in German diplomacy’, declared one British newsreel. ‘What has happened to the principles of
Mein Kampf?
Equally, what can Russia have in common with Germany?’
³²

All over the world individual Communist parties struggled to make sense of the news. In Britain, Brian Pearce,
³³
then a devoted follower of Stalin, simply fell back on straightforward faith: ‘We did have this idea that Stalin was a very clever man, a very shrewd fellow, and when the pact came I think the attitude of most Communists – those that were not absolutely shocked by it, even in some cases to the point of leaving the party – was, well, it's hard to understand but after all it is a complicated situation…maybe Comrade Stalin, with all that he must know through his intelligence sources, thinks that this is the best way to keep Russia out of a situation in which he [Stalin] would be just let down by the Western allies’.

In Germany, SS officer Hans Bernhard
³⁴
heard the news of the signing of the pact as he waited with his unit to invade Poland. For him the signing of the pact ‘was a surprise without doubt. We couldn't make sense of it… in German propaganda for years it had been made clear that the Bolsheviks were our main enemy’. As a result, he and his comrades saw this new arrangement as ‘politically unnatural’.

But Lord Halifax, the British Foreign Secretary, was not so taken aback. Four months before, on 3 May, he had warned the British Cabinet of the possibility of a deal between Stalin and Hitler.
³⁵
Both the British and French governments now realized that the agreement between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany freed Hitler's hands for an invasion of Poland – and so it proved. On 1 September German troops crossed into Poland and two days later, Britain, in accordance with its treaty obligations with Poland, declared war on Germany. The Second World War had begun.