German–Soviet Axis talks

• 1. Introduction

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  In November 1940, Vyacheslav Molotov stepped off a train in Berlin to what should have been an impossible scene: an orchestra inside Nazi Germany playing The Internationale, the anthem of world communism, for the first time since 1933. The station had been decorated with both Soviet and German flags. A basket of flowers awaited him. And waiting beside it was Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler's foreign minister, ready to discuss whether Stalin's Soviet Union would formally join the Axis powers alongside Germany, Italy and Japan.

  What unfolded over the next two days was one of the strangest diplomatic encounters of the Second World War. Two powers that had divided up Eastern Europe in secret, cooperated in the invasion of Poland, and traded raw materials through a British blockade were now sitting across a table in Berlin debating the partition of the entire world. The British Empire, Ribbentrop assured Molotov, was already finished. The only question was who would get which piece.

  But beneath the banquets and the back-channel telegrams, Hitler had already made up his mind. Even as Molotov toured the Reich Chancellery, Hitler was drafting the secret order that would become Operation Barbarossa. The Berlin conference was not a negotiation. It was a test, designed to buy time before an invasion Hitler had decided on months earlier. Whether Stalin understood this, and what he chose to believe, would shape the opening of the most destructive military campaign in history.

• 2. The Pact That Built the Talks

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  August 1939 produced one of the most startling reversals in modern diplomacy. After conducting parallel negotiations with a British-French alliance and with Germany, the Soviet Union chose Germany. On the 19th of August, the two countries signed a credit agreement trading German military and civilian equipment for Soviet raw materials. Four days later came the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact itself, with secret protocols carving Northern and Eastern Europe into two spheres of influence.

  At the signing, Ribbentrop told Soviet diplomats that there was no problem between the Baltic and the Black Sea that could not be solved between the two countries. Stalin responded warmly. As Ribbentrop departed, Stalin pulled him aside to state that the Soviet government took the pact very seriously and would guarantee on his word of honor that the Soviet Union would not betray its partner.

  Within weeks, the partnership was tested in blood. One week after the pact was signed, Germany invaded western Poland. Two weeks after that, Soviet forces crossed into eastern Poland from the east. On the 21st of September the two armies signed a formal agreement coordinating military movements, including the explicit "purging" of saboteurs. A joint German-Soviet parade was held in both Lvov and Brest. Molotov later admitted to German officials that the Soviets had needed a cover story for their invasion, claiming they were protecting Ukrainian and Belarusian populations, because they could find no other pretext.

  The Soviet Comintern moved in lockstep. It suspended all anti-Nazi propaganda, instructing communist parties across Europe to characterise the war as a clash between capitalist imperial powers. When anti-German demonstrations broke out in Prague, the Comintern ordered Czech communists to suppress what it called chauvinist elements. The French and British communist parties were directed to adopt an antiwar stance.

  Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania fared no better. The three Baltic states described in the pact's secret protocols were given no choice but to sign what was termed a Pact of Defence and Mutual Assistance, opening their territories to Soviet troop deployments. The German populace, unaware of the secret protocols, watched these occupations with confusion and unease. Hitler was left in what one account describes as the humiliating position of evacuating Volksdeutsche families who had lived in Finland and the Baltic countries for centuries, all while officially endorsing the invasions. When the Baltic governments wrote letters protesting to Berlin, Ribbentrop sent them back unopened.

• 3. The Raw Material Trap

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  Germany's invasion of Poland in 1939 created a problem that shaped every diplomatic calculation that followed. Hitler had pushed for war before German industry was ready, with full war production originally scheduled for 1942 or 1943. A British naval blockade had cut off most supply channels. The only power that could deliver the oil, rubber, manganese, grains, fats and platinum Germany needed was the Soviet Union.

  On the 11th of February 1940 the two countries signed a new trade pact more than four times larger than their August 1939 agreement. In the first year under this arrangement, Germany received hundreds of thousands of tons of cereals, oil and other vital raw materials, routed through Soviet-controlled and occupied Polish territories. The Soviets also opened the Northern Sea Route to German cargo ships and naval raiders. Only one raider, Komet, had used the route before June 1941, but the access forced Britain to protect sea lanes in both the Atlantic and the Pacific simultaneously.

  By the summer of 1940, the problem deepened. German occupations of France, the Netherlands and Belgium had added territory and population but reduced indirect supply options. Compared with 1938 figures, Germany and its expanded sphere of influence now lacked, among other items, 500,000 tons of manganese, 3.3 million tons of raw phosphate, 200,000 tons of rubber and 9.5 million tons of oil. The Baltic annexations compounded the shortage. Before the annexations, Germany had relied on the Baltic states for 96.7 million Reichsmarks of imports, at what the source characterises as blackmailed favorable economic terms. Those same goods now had to be purchased at Soviet prices.

  In August 1940, the Soviets briefly suspended deliveries under the commercial agreement after tensions rose over Romania, the Finnish Winter War, German delays in their own counter-deliveries, and Stalin's fear that Hitler's war with the West might end sooner than expected. The suspension caused significant resource problems for Germany. Relations recovered by late August, partly because Britain's improving performance in the air battle over the country had convinced Stalin that Germany faced a prolonged western conflict. Germany's own generals warned Hitler that occupying western Russia would create more of a drain than a relief for Germany's economic situation. That assessment did not change Hitler's underlying intention.

• 4. Two Men With Opposing Visions

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  The tension at the heart of these negotiations was not only between Germany and the Soviet Union. It ran through the German Foreign Office itself. Ribbentrop and Hitler held fundamentally incompatible views of what the pact should achieve.

  Ribbentrop favored a genuine four-power continental bloc. His vision stretched from Yokohama to Spain, as he described it to Mussolini, with the Soviet Union as an active partner directing its ambitions southward toward the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf. As early as the talks with Mussolini, Ribbentrop had floated the idea of offering the Soviets a free hand in a southern direction. He believed that if the Soviets could be redirected away from the Balkans and toward British-controlled sea lanes, a lasting arrangement was possible.

  Hitler's foreign policy objective was different. He wanted pressure on Britain to force an alliance, and he wanted what he called lebensraum, or living space, in the east. As the Battle of France was still being fought in early June 1940, Hitler reportedly told Lieutenant General Georg von Sodenstern that the western victories had finally freed his hands for what he described as his important real task: the showdown with Bolshevism. By July 1940, he had already decided on invasion. The Berlin conference, which Ribbentrop arranged and championed, was a concession Hitler made to his foreign minister rather than a genuine pursuit of alliance.

  German Ambassador Friedrich von der Schulenburg occupied a third position. Posted in Moscow and better acquainted with Soviet thinking than almost anyone in Berlin, he had been contemplating a potential four-power pact since France fell. When he quietly learned of Hitler's invasion plans, he and others in the Foreign Office drafted a memorandum cataloguing the dangers. Their argument was direct: Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic states would become an economic burden, not a resource gain. Foreign Office State Secretary Ernst von Weizsäcker put his own view even more bluntly, writing that the Soviets in their current form were harmless, that occupation would produce no benefit, and asking why Germany should not simply let Russia stew next to it in its damp Bolshevism. Von der Schulenburg went further, concealing from his reports to Berlin the Soviets' genuine doubts about German good faith following the Romanian annexations.

• 5. Two Days in Berlin

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  Molotov's train pulled into Berlin at 11:05 in the morning on the 12th of November 1940. It was, the source notes, a bad omen for success that von Schulenburg, who had architected the meeting, was excluded from the greeting party. Molotov had spent much of the rail journey searching his carriage for listening devices. He found Ribbentrop waiting beside a large basket of flowers, an orchestra, and crowds of flags, Soviet and German together.

  Talks opened that morning at the Schloss Bellevue Hotel. Ribbentrop opened by declaring that England was beaten and it was only a question of time before she admitted defeat. He stated that Germany and Italy would never again allow an Anglo-Saxon to land on the European continent and that the Axis powers were not considering how they could win the war, but rather how rapidly they could end a war that was already won. He concluded that the time had come for the four powers, Germany, the Soviet Union, Italy and Japan, to define their spheres of interest, each expanding naturally in a southerly direction. When Ribbentrop suggested the Soviets might turn toward the sea, Molotov asked simply: which sea? Ribbentrop answered that the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea represented the most advantageous long-run access.

  That afternoon Molotov met Hitler at the Reich Chancellery. Hitler echoed Ribbentrop's invitation to think about the division of the world after victory, dismissing American interference by stating it could not endanger the freedom of other nations before 1970 or 1980. Molotov agreed in principle on Soviet participation in the Axis pact but only if the Soviets could participate as an active partner. He was, however, unimpressed by the vision on offer. He pressed for German troop withdrawals from Finland, a warm-water port in the Baltic and Soviet guarantees over Bulgaria. Hitler grew, by Molotov's own account, markedly agitated at the request to revoke the guarantees Germany had extended to Romania. When Molotov returned to his hotel that evening, he described being relieved at Hitler's amiability, but Stalin's telegram that night insisted that Soviet security could not be ensured without securing tranquility at the Bosporus Straits, adding that the question did not allow any procrastination.

  On the 13th of November talks continued with the same friction. Molotov demanded to know the precise meaning of the New Order in Europe and what it meant for Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, Greece, Swedish neutrality and passage from the Baltic Sea. That night, because of British aerial bombardment, Ribbentrop and Molotov conducted the final session of talks in an air-raid shelter. There Ribbentrop presented a written draft pact. Molotov accepted it as a basis for discussion, then asked cuttingly why, if England's defeat was sealed, they were meeting in a bomb shelter. What Molotov did not know was that on that very night, Hitler had issued secret Instruction No. 18, directing German forces to continue preparations for war in the east irrespective of the results of the discussions.

• 6. The Counterproposal and the Silence

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  Molotov returned to Moscow having described the meetings as producing nothing to boast about. His account was that neither Hitler nor Ribbentrop had addressed the actual questions on Turkey and the Balkans. But the Soviet side did not drop the negotiation. Stalin personally directed Molotov to draft a far broader counteroffer.

  On the 25th of November 1940, the Soviets delivered their response. It opened by accepting the draft four-power pact on political cooperation and economic mutual assistance. But where Ribbentrop's draft contained two secret protocols, Stalin's contained five. German troops would depart Finland in exchange for a Soviet guarantee of nickel and wood shipments and continued peace. A mutual assistance pact with Bulgaria, to be signed within the coming months, would permit Soviet military bases there. The center of Soviet territorial domination would be directed south of Baku and Batumi, the ports now in Azerbaijan and Georgia, pointing toward Iraq and Iran. Japan would renounce rights to oil and coal concessions in northern Sakhalin as compensation. And the Soviet-Bulgarian mutual assistance treaty would be affirmed as a political necessity.

  Alongside these terms, the Soviets dramatically increased their economic offers. They committed to delivering 2.5 million tons of grain by the 11th of May 1941, one million tons above their existing obligations, and promised full compensation for Volksdeutsche property claims. The German negotiator on the ground could not conceal his surprise. He telegrammed Berlin immediately that Molotov's proposals must be viewed as a surprising indication of goodwill and that the offer on Baltic property claims considerably exceeded German expectations.

  Hitler never answered. Molotov asked German officials for a response on several occasions over the following months. On the 17th of January 1941, seven days after the two countries signed a German-Soviet Border and Commercial Agreement, Molotov again raised the unanswered November 25 offer, expressing astonishment that it had received no reply. On the 1st of March 1941, Bulgaria joined the Axis without Soviet input, further unsettling Stalin. Germany's silence was its answer. Hitler privately told his military chiefs that Stalin demands more and more, that he was a cold-blooded blackmailer, and that a German victory had become unbearable for Russia, meaning she must be brought to her knees as soon as possible. On the 5th of December, Hitler received military plans for the invasion and approved them. On the 18th of December, he signed Führer Directive No. 21 for an operation now named Barbarossa, with an initial date set for the 15th of May 1941 and the stated objective that the German Wehrmacht must be prepared to crush Soviet Russia in a quick campaign.

• 7. Stalin's History, Rewritten

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  Germany broke what remained of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact on the 22nd of June 1941, when its forces crossed into the Soviet Union. Von der Schulenburg, the ambassador who had worked hardest to prevent the invasion, was executed as one of the conspirators in the plot to assassinate Hitler on the 20th of July 1944.

  For Stalin, the problem was what the diplomatic record now showed about Soviet intentions. In 1948, one month after the United States publicly released captured Nazi foreign ministry documents describing the negotiations in detail, the Soviet Information Bureau produced a book titled Falsifiers of History. Stalin personally edited it: he received draft sections in translation, struck passages by hand and rewrote entire portions before the book's release in February 1948.

  In Falsifiers, Stalin claimed he had been merely probing Germany, testing his enemy's intentions, and had outright rejected Hitler's proposal to divide the world. That version became binding. Without exception, all historical studies, official accounts, memoirs and Soviet textbooks published until 1990 reproduced it. Later, Soviet diplomat Victor Israelyan stated plainly that the book certainly did nothing to disprove the existence of Soviet-German cooperation in the first years of the war, a cooperation that to a certain degree assisted Hitler's plan.

  Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, offered a different kind of evidence. She remembered her father saying after the war: together with the Germans we would have been invincible. Whether that was a statement of regret, retrospective calculation, or something else, she did not say. What the released documents showed was that the Soviets had come to Berlin prepared to make genuine concessions, had submitted a detailed counterproposal with sweeping economic offers, and had waited in silence for months for a German reply that was never going to come.