Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact
The outcome of World War I was disastrous for both the German and Russian empires. The Russian Civil War broke out in late 1917 after the Bolshevik Revolution, and Vladimir Lenin recognized the independence of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland. Facing a German military advance, Lenin and Trotsky were forced to agree to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which ceded many western Russian territories to Germany. After the German collapse, a multinational Allied-led army intervened in the civil war from 1917 to 1922. On the 16th of April 1922, the German Weimar Republic and the Soviet Union agreed to the Treaty of Rapallo in which they renounced territorial and financial claims against each other. Each party also pledged neutrality in the event of an attack against the other with the Treaty of Berlin signed in 1926. Trade between the two countries had fallen sharply after World War I, but trade agreements signed in the mid-1920s helped to increase trade to per year by 1927. At the beginning of the 1930s, the Nazi Party's rise to power increased tensions between Germany and the Soviet Union, along with other countries with ethnic Slavs who were considered subhuman according to Nazi racial ideology. Moreover, the antisemitic Nazis associated ethnic Jews with both communism and financial capitalism, both of which they opposed. Nazi theory held that Slavs in the Soviet Union were being ruled by Jewish Bolshevik masters. Hitler had spoken of an inevitable battle for the acquisition of land for Germany in the east. The resulting manifestation of German anti-Bolshevism and an increase in Soviet foreign debts caused a dramatic decline in German, Soviet trade. Imports of Soviet goods to Germany fell to in 1934 by the more isolationist Stalinist regime asserting power and by the abandonment of postwar Treaty of Versailles military controls, both of which decreased Germany's reliance on Soviet imports. In 1935, following a prior German, Polish declaration of non-aggression, Hermann Göring, on behalf of Hitler, proposed a military alliance with Poland against the Soviet Union, but this was rejected by the Polish leadership due to such an alliance being a threat to their independence. In 1936, Germany and Fascist Italy supported the Spanish Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War, but the Soviets supported the Spanish Republic. As such, the Spanish Civil War became a proxy war between Germany and the Soviet Union. In 1936, Germany and Japan entered the Anti-Comintern Pact, and they were joined a year later by Italy, despite Italy having previously signed the Italo-Soviet Pact.
Under the Secret Additional Protocol of the 23rd of August 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union agreed to partition Poland; Latvia, Estonia, Finland and Bessarabia were allotted to the Soviet sphere, while Lithuania , apart from the Vilnius region, whose interests were recognized , lay in the German sphere. Lithuania including the Vilnius region, but excluding a strip of land, was only transferred to the Soviet sphere by the 28th of September 1939 Boundary and Friendship Treaty. According to the protocol, Poland, Romania, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland were divided into German and Soviet spheres of influence. In the north, Finland, Estonia, and Latvia were assigned to the Soviet sphere. Poland was to be partitioned in the event of its political rearrangement: the areas east of the Pisa, Narew, Vistula, and San rivers would go to the Soviet Union, and Germany would occupy the west. Warsaw, in turn, would be effectively divided between them into two parts. Lithuania, which was adjacent to East Prussia, was assigned to the German sphere of influence, but a second secret protocol, agreed to in September 1939, reassigned Lithuania to the Soviet Union. According to the protocol, Lithuania would be granted its historical capital, Vilnius, which was part of Poland during the interwar period. Another clause stipulated that Germany would not interfere with the Soviet Union's actions towards Bessarabia, which was then part of Romania. As a result, Bessarabia as well as the Northern Bukovina and Hertsa regions were occupied by the Soviets and integrated into the Soviet Union. Eleven days after the Soviet invasion of the Polish Kresy, the secret protocol of the Molotov, Ribbentrop Pact was modified by the German, Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty, allotting Germany a larger part of Poland and transferring Lithuania, with the exception of the left bank of the River Scheschupe, the Lithuanian Strip, from the envisioned German sphere to the Soviet sphere. On the 3rd of October, Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg, the German ambassador in Moscow, informed Joachim Ribbentrop that the Soviet government was willing to cede the city of Vilnius and its environs. On the 8th of October 1939, a new German, Soviet agreement was reached by an exchange of letters between Vyacheslav Molotov and the German ambassador.
Tripartite discussions between the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and France had broken down after the Soviet Union was excluded from the Munich Agreement in September 1938. Joseph Stalin, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, had indicated that the USSR was willing to support Czechoslovakia militarily if France did so as well. Subsequently, rapprochement between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany began in early 1939. Later that year, the Soviet, German pact was agreed, committing both sides to neither aid nor ally itself with an enemy of the other for the following 10 years. In mid-March 1939, attempting to contain Hitler's expansionism, the Soviet Union, Britain and France started to trade a flurry of suggestions and counterplans on a potential political and military agreement. Informal consultations started in April, but the main negotiations began only in May. Meanwhile, throughout early 1939, Germany had secretly hinted to Soviet diplomats that it could offer better terms for a political agreement than could Britain and France. The Soviet Union, which feared Western powers and the possibility of capitalist encirclements, had little hope of preventing war and wanted nothing less than an ironclad military alliance with France and Britain to provide guaranteed support for a two-pronged attack on Germany. As such, Stalin's adherence to the collective security line was purely conditional. Britain and France believed that war could still be avoided, and that the Soviet Union had been so weakened by the Great Purge that it could not be a main military participant. Many military sources were at variance with the last point, especially after the Soviet victories over the Japanese Kwantung Army in Manchuria. France was more anxious to find an agreement with the Soviet Union than Britain was. By the end of May, drafts had been formally presented. In mid-June, the main tripartite negotiations started. Discussions were focused on potential guarantees to Central and Eastern Europe in the case of German aggression. The Soviets proposed to consider that a political turn towards Germany by the Baltic states would constitute an indirect aggression towards the Soviet Union. Britain opposed such proposals because they feared the Soviets' proposed language would justify a Soviet intervention in Finland and the Baltic states or push those countries to seek closer relations with Germany. The discussion of a definition of indirect aggression became one of the sticking points between the parties, and by mid-July, the tripartite political negotiations effectively stalled while the parties agreed to start negotiations on a military agreement, which the Soviets insisted had to be reached at the same time as any political agreement. One day before the military negotiations began, the Soviet Politburo pessimistically expected the coming negotiations to go nowhere and formally decided to consider German proposals seriously.
A week after signing the pact, on the 1st of September 1939, Germany invaded Poland. Within a few days, Germany began conducting massacres of Polish and Jewish civilians and POWs, which took place in over 30 towns and villages in the first month of the German occupation. The Luftwaffe also took part by strafing fleeing civilian refugees on roads and by carrying out a bombing campaign. The Soviet Union assisted German air forces by allowing them to use signals broadcast by the Soviet radio station at Minsk, allegedly for urgent aeronautical experiments. Hitler declared at Danzig: On the 17th of September, the Red Army invaded Poland, violating the 1932 Soviet, Polish Non-Aggression Pact, and occupied the Polish territory assigned to it by the Molotov, Ribbentrop Pact. That was followed by co-ordination with German forces in Poland. Polish troops already fighting much stronger German forces on its west desperately tried to delay the capture of Warsaw. Consequently, Polish forces could not mount significant resistance against the Soviets. On the 18th of September, The New York Times published an editorial arguing that Hitlerism is brown communism, Stalinism is red fascism...The world will now understand that the only real ideological issue is one between democracy, liberty and peace on the one hand and despotism, terror and war on the other. On the 21st of September, Marshal of the Soviet Union Voroshilov, German military attaché General Köstring, and other officers signed a formal agreement in Moscow coordinating military movements in Poland, including the purging of saboteurs and the Red Army assisting with destruction of the enemy. Joint German, Soviet parades were held in Lviv and Brest-Litovsk, and the countries' military commanders met in the latter city. Stalin had decided in August that he was going to liquidate the Polish state, and a German, Soviet meeting in September addressed the future structure of the Polish region. Soviet authorities immediately started a campaign of Sovietisation of the newly acquired areas. The Soviets organised staged elections, the result of which was to become a legitimisation of the Soviet annexation of eastern Poland.
In mid-June 1940, while international attention focused on the German invasion of France, Soviet NKVD troops raided border posts in Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. State administrations were liquidated and replaced by Soviet cadres, who deported or killed 34,250 Latvians, 75,000 Lithuanians and almost 60,000 Estonians. Elections took place, with a single pro-Soviet candidate listed for many positions, and the resulting people's assemblies immediately requesting admission into the Soviet Union, which was granted. The Soviets annexed the whole of Lithuania, including the Šešupė area, which had been earmarked for Germany. Finally, on the 26th of June, four days after the armistice between France and Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union issued an ultimatum that demanded Bessarabia and unexpectedly Northern Bukovina from Romania. Two days later, the Romanians acceded to the Soviet demands, and the Soviets occupied the territories. The Hertsa region was initially not requested by the Soviets but was later occupied by force after the Romanians had agreed to the initial Soviet demands. The subsequent waves of deportations began in Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina. Stalin turned his sights on Finland and was confident that its capitulation could be attained without great effort. The Soviets demanded territories on the Karelian Isthmus, the islands of the Gulf of Finland and a military base near the Finnish capital, Helsinki, which Finland rejected. The Soviets staged the shelling of Mainila on the 26th of November and used it as a pretext to withdraw from the Soviet, Finnish Non-Aggression Pact. On the 30th of November, the Red Army invaded Finland, launching the Winter War with the aim of annexing Finland into the Soviet Union. The Soviets formed the Finnish Democratic Republic to govern Finland after Soviet conquest. The leader of the Leningrad Military District, Andrei Zhdanov, commissioned a celebratory piece from Dmitri Shostakovich, Suite on Finnish Themes, to be performed as the marching bands of the Red Army would be parading through Helsinki. After Finnish defenses surprisingly held out for over three months and inflicted stiff losses on Soviet forces, under the command of Semyon Timoshenko, the Soviets settled for an interim peace. Finland ceded parts of Karelia, Kuusamo, and Salla together with Hanko leased as a naval base, which resulted in approximately 422,000 Finns losing their homes.
Germany and the Soviet Union entered an intricate trade pact on the 11th of February 1940 that was over four times larger than the one that the two countries had signed in August 1939. The new trade pact helped Germany surmount a British blockade. In the first year, Germany received one million tons of cereals, half-a-million tons of wheat, 900,000 tons of oil, 100,000 tons of cotton, 500,000 tons of phosphates and considerable amounts of other vital raw materials, along with the transit of one million tons of soybeans from Manchuria. Those and other supplies were being transported through Soviet and occupied Polish territories. The Soviets were to receive a naval cruiser, the plans to the battleship Bismarck, heavy naval guns, other naval gear and 30 of Germany's latest warplanes, including the Bf 109 and Bf 110 fighters and Ju 88 bomber. The Soviets would also receive oil and electric equipment, locomotives, turbines, generators, diesel engines, ships, machine tools, and samples of German artillery, tanks, explosives, chemical-warfare equipment, and other items. The Soviets also helped Germany to avoid British naval blockades by providing a submarine base, Basis Nord, in the northern Soviet Union near Murmansk. That also provided a refueling and maintenance location and a takeoff point for raids and attacks on shipping. In addition, the Soviets provided Germany with access to the Northern Sea Route for both cargo ships and raiders though only the commerce raider used the route before the German invasion, which forced Britain to protect sea lanes in both the Atlantic and the Pacific.
Germany unilaterally terminated the pact at 03:15 on the 22nd of June 1941 by launching a massive attack on the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa. Stalin had ignored repeated warnings that Germany was likely to invade and ordered no full-scale mobilisation of forces although the mobilisation was ongoing. After the launch of the invasion, the territories gained by the Soviet Union as a result of the pact were lost in a matter of weeks. The southeastern part was absorbed into Greater Germany's General Government, and the rest was integrated with the Reichskommissariats Ostland and Ukraine. Within six months, the Soviet military had suffered 4.3 million casualties, and three million more had been captured. The lucrative export of Soviet raw materials to Germany over the course of the economic relations continued uninterrupted until the outbreak of hostilities. The Soviet exports in several key areas enabled Germany to maintain its stocks of rubber and grain from the first day of the invasion to October 1941. In an effort to demonstrate peaceful intentions toward Germany, on the 13th of April 1941, the Soviets signed a neutrality pact with Japan, an Axis power. While Stalin had little faith in Japan's commitment to neutrality, he felt that the pact was important for its political symbolism to reinforce a public affection for Germany. Stalin felt that there was a growing split in German circles about whether Germany should initiate a war with the Soviet Union. Stalin did not know that Hitler had been secretly discussing an invasion of the Soviet Union since summer 1940 and that Hitler had ordered his military in late 1940 to prepare for war in the East, regardless of the parties' talks of a potential Soviet entry as a fourth Axis power.
The German original of the secret protocols was presumably destroyed in the bombing of Germany, but in late 1943, Ribbentrop had ordered the most secret records of the German Foreign Office from 1933 onward, amounting to some 9,800 pages, to be microfilmed. When the various departments of the Foreign Office in Berlin were evacuated to Thuringia at the end of the war, Karl von Loesch, a civil servant who had worked for the chief interpreter Paul Otto Schmidt, was entrusted with the microfilm copies. He eventually received orders to destroy the secret documents but decided to bury the metal container with the microfilms as personal insurance for his future well-being. In May 1945, von Loesch approached the British Lieutenant Colonel Robert C. Thomson with the request to transmit a personal letter to Duncan Sandys, Churchill's son-in-law. In the letter, von Loesch revealed that he had knowledge of the documents' whereabouts but expected preferential treatment in return. Thomson and his American counterpart, Ralph Collins, agreed to transfer von Loesch to Marburg, in the American zone if he would produce the microfilms. The microfilms contained a copy of the Non-Aggression Treaty as well as the Secret Protocol. Both documents were discovered as part of the microfilmed records in August 1945 by US State Department employee Wendell B. Blancke, the head of a special unit called Exploitation German Archives. News of the secret protocols first appeared during the Nuremberg trials. Alfred Seidl, the attorney for defendant Hans Frank, was able to place into evidence an affidavit that described them. It was written from memory by Nazi Foreign Office lawyer, who wrote the text and was present at its signing in Moscow. Later, Seidl obtained the German-language text of the secret protocols from an anonymous Allied source and attempted to place them into evidence while he was questioning witness Ernst von Weizsäcker, a former Foreign Office State Secretary. The Allied prosecutors objected, and the texts were not accepted into evidence, but Weizsäcker was permitted to describe them from memory, thus corroborating the Gaus affidavit. Finally, at the request of a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter, American deputy prosecutor Thomas J. Dodd acquired a copy of the secret protocols from Seidl and had it translated into English. They were first published on the 22nd of May 1946 in a front-page story in that newspaper. Later, in Britain, they were published by The Manchester Guardian. The protocols gained wider media attention when they were included in an official State Department collection, Nazi, Soviet Relations 1939, 1941, edited by Raymond J. Sontag and James S. Beddie and published on the 21st of January 1948. The decision to publish the key documents on German, Soviet relations, including the treaty and protocol, had been taken already in spring 1947. Sontag and Beddie prepared the collection throughout the summer of 1947. In November 1947, President Harry S. Truman personally approved the publication, but it was held back in view of the Foreign Ministers Conference in London scheduled for December. Since negotiations at that conference did not prove to be constructive from an American point of view, the document edition was sent to press. The documents made headlines worldwide. State Department officials counted it as a success: The Soviet Government was caught flat-footed in what was the first effective blow from our side in a clear-cut propaganda war. Despite publication of the recovered copy in western media, for decades, the official policy of the Soviet Union was to deny the existence of the secret protocol. The secret protocol's existence was officially denied until 1989. Vyacheslav Molotov, one of the signatories, went to his grave categorically rejecting its existence. The French Communist Party did not acknowledge the existence of the secret protocol until 1968, as the party de-Stalinized. On the 23rd of August 1986, tens of thousands of demonstrators in 21 western cities, including New York, London, Stockholm, Toronto, Seattle, and Perth participated in Black Ribbon Day Rallies to draw attention to the secret protocols.
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Common questions
What was the Molotov, Ribbentrop Pact signed on?
The Molotov, Ribbentrop Pact was signed on the 23rd of August 1939. This neutrality pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union included a secret additional protocol that partitioned Eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence.
How did the Molotov, Ribbentrop Pact affect Poland in 1939?
Germany invaded Poland on the 1st of September 1939, followed by the Red Army invading on the 17th of September to occupy territory assigned to it by the pact. The agreement stipulated that areas east of the Pisa, Narew, Vistula, and San rivers would go to the Soviet Union while Germany occupied the west.
When did the Soviet Union annex Lithuania Estonia and Latvia under the Molotov, Ribbentrop Pact?
Soviet NKVD troops raided border posts in Lithuania Estonia and Latvia in mid-June 1940. State administrations were liquidated and replaced by Soviet cadres who deported or killed hundreds of thousands of citizens from these nations before their admission into the Soviet Union.
What trade agreements existed between Germany and the Soviet Union after the Molotov, Ribbentrop Pact?
Germany and the Soviet Union entered an intricate trade pact on the 11th of February 1940 that was over four times larger than the one signed in August 1939. This agreement provided Germany with millions of tons of cereals oil cotton phosphates and soybeans while supplying the Soviets with naval cruisers warplanes and heavy machinery.
How was the secret protocol of the Molotov, Ribbentrop Pact discovered and published?
The secret protocols were first published on the 22nd of May 1946 in a front-page story by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch after being recovered from microfilm records found by US State Department employee Wendell B. Blancke. The documents had been buried by Karl von Loesch during the war and later transferred to Allied forces for examination.