Anti-Comintern Pact
On the 25th of November 1936, in the offices of a semi-official diplomatic bureau that operated outside Germany's formal foreign ministry, two ambassadors put their signatures to a document that would reshape the alignment of the world's great powers. Joachim von Ribbentrop signed for Germany. Kintomo Mushanokoji signed for Japan. The Anti-Comintern Pact, officially the Agreement against the Communist International, was on its face a declaration against communist subversion. But tucked beneath the public text was a secret additional protocol, one that specifically named the Soviet Union as the target and bound Germany and Japan to a defensive alliance against it. The public version mentioned only the Comintern. The secret version said something far more pointed.
What drove two countries with starkly different civilizations, racial ideologies that were in theory contradictory, and competing interests across Asia to sign this document? How did a junior military attache acting without authorization end up as the pact's chief architect? And why did Japan's own government spend months trying to water down a treaty its army was simultaneously building in secret? Those are the questions this documentary will trace.
Japan's path toward a pact with Germany ran through a long series of perceived humiliations. At the Washington Naval Conference of 1922, the United States and Britain forced Japan to surrender the territorial gains it had won in China during the First World War. German historian Bernd Martin called that conference the "Japanese 'Versailles'." Japan was granted parity with the US and UK in the Pacific and the right to build a navy that outmatched France and Italy, but Japanese nationalists and the Imperial Japanese Navy still denounced its restrictive terms.
The sense of betrayal ran deeper than the conference table. At the League of Nations in 1919, Japan's proposals for guaranteed racial equality had been rejected. The economic downturn of the 1920s then worsened the mood, culminating in the 1927 financial panic in Japan, known as the Showa financial crisis, which brought down the first cabinet of Prime Minister Reijiro Wakatsuki. The 1929 Great Depression accelerated the slide.
Out of this environment grew the Mukden Incident of the 18th of September 1931, when the Kwantung Army, without a central order from Tokyo, launched Japan's invasion of northeast China. The European great powers, particularly Britain, largely stood aside. In February 1932, Japan installed a puppet state in the region, the State of Manchuria, nominally headed by Puyi, the dethroned last emperor of the Qing dynasty who had reigned from 1908 to 1912 and briefly again in 1917. The Lytton Report laid blame for Manchuria squarely on Japan, yet British Foreign Secretary Sir John Simon declined to condemn Tokyo in his speech of the 7th of December 1932. Japan left the League of Nations entirely in February 1933.
On the German side, the domestic machinery for anti-communist agitation had already been running since 1933, when Joseph Goebbels established the Anti-Komintern, formally the Gesamtverband Deutscher antikommunistischer Vereinigungen, under the leadership of Dr. Adolf Ehrt. The agency denounced the Comintern as godless, pushed antisemitic propaganda, and in 1936 published a book called Der Weltbolschewismus connecting anti-communist and antisemitic conspiracy theories for an international audience. Significantly, the book was not released inside Germany itself, to avoid conflicts between its varied accounts and German state propaganda.
Hiroshi Oshima, Japan's military attache in Berlin, was the single most important individual on the Japanese side of the negotiations. He had first arrived in Germany in 1922, initially disappointed by the political weakness of the Weimar Republic. After the National Socialists came to power in 1933, he concluded that "there were things in the new Germany which were worthy of serious consideration." He spoke German fluently, had fought in the Japanese intervention in Siberia, and was a committed anti-communist.
Oshima's formal assignment was to investigate German military stability and the state of German-Soviet relations. But he treated it as a mandate to build an alliance. Working through Friedrich Wilhelm Hack, an associate from the Weimar years who had joined Ribbentrop's bureau in 1934, Oshima arranged meetings in Freiburg beginning in early 1935 that connected him with German defense minister Werner von Blomberg and with Wilhelm Canaris of the Abwehr. He first met Ribbentrop in March 1935. By the fall of that year, with Hitler's tentative approval, negotiations between Oshima and Ribbentrop were moving quickly.
None of this was authorized by Japan's ambassador, Mushanokoji, whose own instinct was caution. On the 4th of July 1935, Mushanokoji had warned embassy staff that rushing into an alliance with Germany could isolate Japan if Germany chose Britain over Japan as its partner. Oshima was the main voice of disagreement inside the embassy that day. He continued his back-channel efforts regardless, and the American military attache Hugh W. Rowan eventually noticed the frequency of Oshima's visits to German military facilities and concluded he was "being given access to important technical information in possession of the German army."
In late October 1935, the chief of the Japanese army's general staff, Prince Kan'in Kotohito, signalled that the army was positively disposed toward a pact with Germany. Kotohito had a personal connection to the effort: he had been a close associate of Oshima's father Ken'ichi Oshima, Japan's Minister of the Army from 1916 to 1918. That family tie likely helped protect Hiroshi Oshima from the punishment that would ordinarily follow such an extravagant overstepping of his assignment. Oshima had, after all, engaged in unauthorized diplomatic negotiations with a foreign head of government. Instead, his hyper-militarist superiors acknowledged the advance approvingly.
Execution of German foreign policy officially belonged to Konstantin von Neurath's foreign ministry. But Ribbentrop ran his own parallel operation, the Dienststelle Ribbentrop, created in late 1934 and answerable directly to Hitler rather than the ministry. The rivalry between the two was structural and bitter. Neurath was jealous of Ribbentrop's access and opposed the Japanese alignment on substantive grounds as well: Germany had signed a major commercial treaty with China in April 1936 and extended a credit of 100,000,000 marks for Chinese purchases of German goods. China was Germany's largest Asian trade partner, and the German military held Chinese arms contracts that it valued.
In Japan, the bureaucratic tangle was equally absurd. Critical documents relating to the pact negotiations got lost inside the Japanese foreign ministry between January and February 1936, discarded by low-ranking officials before they ever reached Foreign Minister Koki Hirota or his deputy Mamoru Shigemitsu. The matter only resurfaced in March 1936, in the aftermath of the failed military coup of February 26 and the German remilitarization of the Rhineland, when it reached the new foreign minister Hachiro Arita.
Arita's position was awkward. He and Mushanokoji favored a modest agreement specifically targeting the Comintern, not a full military alliance. But they were dealing with Oshima, who was technically the army's subordinate, not the foreign ministry's. To avoid a clash with the army, Arita and Mushanokoji had to give Oshima formal latitude to negotiate a full alliance while personally preferring a weaker text. Mushanokoji was specifically instructed to take a passive stance toward the Germans and let them initiate talks, so that the foreign ministry would not appear to be advancing the process.
The final decision on the German side came not from any formal diplomatic channel but from Hitler personally. Over the summer of 1936, unbeknownst to Neurath, Hitler began reassessing the relative importance of China and Japan. In July, Oshima, Ribbentrop, and a Dienststelle specialist named Dr. Hermann von Raumer met Hitler at Bayreuth, where Hitler made personal edits to the draft treaty. Only after that meeting did the draft reach ambassador Mushanokoji.
The public text of the Anti-Comintern Pact, signed on the 25th of November 1936, was terse and ostensibly defensive. In its first article, Germany and Japan agreed to share information about Comintern activities and to coordinate countermeasures. The second article opened the pact to additional members whose domestic peace was threatened by communist disruption. The treaty's initial duration was five years, reduced from ten after Japanese foreign ministry objections to the Bayreuth draft.
The supplementary protocol, also public, called for close cooperation between each country's competent authorities in exchanging intelligence about the Comintern and taking domestic legal measures against anyone working on its behalf.
But the document that mattered most was the secret additional protocol. Unlike the public texts, it named the Soviet Union explicitly and described a specific defensive arrangement: if either Germany or Japan were subjected to an unprovoked attack by the USSR, the other party would take no measures that would ease the Soviet position. The secret protocol also prohibited either signatory from concluding political treaties with the Soviet Union without the other party's consent. The treaty was signed in the offices of Dienststelle Ribbentrop rather than the German foreign ministry. Ribbentrop later testified at Nuremberg that Hitler had wanted to avoid using official state channels for what he described as an ideological question.
The Japanese had fought to limit the secret protocol's reach. Tokyo had initially requested that even the secret text avoid naming the Soviet Union directly, and had pushed to confine any obligation strictly to an information exchange. The first two requests partly succeeded: the public text avoided naming the USSR, and the obligation was framed as defensive only. The third request, to keep the Soviet Union's name out of the secret protocol entirely, failed. The USSR was named. And the offensive provisions that the foreign ministry had opposed were only excluded because the Japanese military leadership itself, fearing a premature war against the Soviet Union while Japan was already fighting in China, had insisted they be kept defensive.
Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov, speaking to the All-Union Congress of Soviets on the 26th of November 1936, the day after the pact was signed, cast doubt on what had been made public, declaring it to be "only a camouflage for another agreement which was simultaneously discussed." He was right. Soviet ambassador in Tokyo Konstantin Yurenev had even approached Japanese Foreign Minister Arita before the signing, on the 16th and again on the 20th of November, and on the second contact directly accused the Japanese foreign service of holding secret negotiations against the USSR. Arita did not reply. In a later political note to Hungary in January 1939, Litvinov called the Anti-Comintern Pact a "political instrument mainly in the hands of the Japanese, who had hostile intentions against the Soviet Union."
The pact's consequences for Soviet-Japanese trade were concrete. By 1939, Japanese imports from European Russia had fallen to their lowest level since 1914, exports to European Russia to their lowest since 1926. Japanese imports from Asiatic Russia hit their lowest point since 1887, and exports to Asiatic Russia since 1914. The pact's prohibition on bilateral Japanese-Soviet agreements without German consent made it difficult to reverse this decline.
In France, the pact was read as a German power grab in eastern Europe, threatening Czechoslovakia and Poland in particular. In the United States, American Ambassador to Japan Joseph Grew analyzed its anti-communist rhetoric in a 1937 report as a banner for "have-not" countries united primarily against the British Empire's global position. Secretary of State Cordell Hull wrote in his memoirs that "nothing could have been more logical and natural than an alliance of Berlin and Tokyo," citing shared militarism, conquest, and disregard for treaties. President Franklin D. Roosevelt believed the pact contained secret clauses dividing the world into spheres of influence and eventually attempted to use the USS Panay incident of 1937 to break it by appealing separately to Germany and Italy.
In Japan itself, the public reaction was notably muted. Parts of the Japanese press were openly critical, questioning why the negotiations had been conducted in such secrecy and doubting whether Germany would actually sacrifice its soldiers in a Soviet-Japanese war. The IJN remained the treaty's sharpest internal critic. Its officer class calculated that Japan's navy was inferior to those of Britain and the United States, and that Germany and Italy could offer almost nothing to help Japan in a potential naval conflict with those powers.
Italy joined the Anti-Comintern Pact on the 6th of November 1937. Its path there ran through the failure of the Stresa Front, a 1935 Franco-British initiative to contain German expansion, which Italy's invasion of Ethiopia in October 1935 had effectively destroyed. After the League of Nations imposed economic sanctions on Italy, Mussolini's government needed a new partner. Italy's accession to the pact was also a trade-off: Mussolini agreed to Hitler's ambitions for Austrian annexation. Ribbentrop had quoted Mussolini's the 1st of November 1936 phrase about an "axis" between Germany and Italy, and Italy completing the pact in 1937 formalized the diplomatic triangle that would later become the Axis powers. Under the terms of its entry, Italy was legally recognized as an original signatory.
Spain and Hungary joined in 1939. The Nazi regime explicitly described signing as a "litmus test of loyalty." The German state paper Volkischer Beobachter cited communist activities in Hungary and Manchukuo as the stated justification for those two countries' entry.
The pact's coherence began unraveling before it even reached its fifth anniversary. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 was a shock to Tokyo. Japan distanced itself sharply from Germany because Germany had negotiated a non-aggression agreement with the very country the Anti-Comintern Pact was designed to contain. The Tripartite Pact of September 1940 replaced the Soviet Union with the United States as the primary named threat, though it formally applied to the USSR as well. By December 1941, even that arrangement had become, as historians note, virtually inoperative.
The Anti-Comintern Pact was renewed in November 1941, bringing in several new members, but the renewal was more symbolic than strategic. The secret additional protocol, the document that had given the pact its real teeth, remained exclusive to Germany and Japan throughout. No subsequent member ever signed it. The pact ceased to exist entirely with the end of the Second World War. China, after the Pearl Harbor attack, declared war on Germany and Italy on the 9th of December 1941, citing German and Italian support for Japanese aggression as its explicit reason.
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Common questions
When was the Anti-Comintern Pact signed and by whom?
The Anti-Comintern Pact was signed on the 25th of November 1936 by Joachim von Ribbentrop for Germany and Kintomo Mushanokoji for Japan. It was signed in the offices of the Dienststelle Ribbentrop rather than the German foreign ministry.
What did the secret additional protocol of the Anti-Comintern Pact contain?
The secret additional protocol specifically named the Soviet Union as the target and established a defensive arrangement: if either Germany or Japan was subjected to an unprovoked attack by the USSR, the other party would take no measures to ease the Soviet position. It also prohibited either signatory from concluding political treaties with the Soviet Union without the other party's consent. No other country that later joined the pact ever signed this secret protocol.
Who was Hiroshi Oshima and what was his role in the Anti-Comintern Pact?
Hiroshi Oshima was Japan's military attache in Berlin and the single most important individual on the Japanese side of the negotiations. Acting without authorization from Japan's ambassador, he used back-channel contacts through Friedrich Wilhelm Hack to build relationships with Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Canaris, and Werner von Blomberg. He later became Japan's ambassador to Germany in 1938-1939 and again in 1941-1945.
Which countries joined the Anti-Comintern Pact and when?
Germany and Japan were the original signatories in November 1936. Italy joined on the 6th of November 1937 and was legally recognized as an original signatory under its entry terms. Spain and Hungary joined in 1939. Several additional countries joined during the Second World War, with the pact formally renewed in November 1941.
How did the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact affect the Anti-Comintern Pact?
The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 caused Japan to distance itself sharply from Germany, because Germany had concluded a non-aggression agreement with the Soviet Union, the very country the Anti-Comintern Pact was designed to contain. The September 1940 Tripartite Pact subsequently redirected the alliance's focus toward the United States as the primary threat.
How did the Soviet Union respond to the Anti-Comintern Pact?
Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov publicly declared the day after the signing that the published text was "only a camouflage for another agreement which was simultaneously discussed." Internally, the USSR viewed the pact as an attempted encirclement by Germany and Japan. Soviet-Japanese trade declined sharply in the years following the pact, with Japanese imports from European Russia by 1939 falling to their lowest level since 1914.
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