Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact

• 1. Introduction

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  The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed in Moscow on the 24th of August 1939, and within a week Germany had invaded Poland. What made this treaty so astonishing was not merely its contents but the sheer improbability of its existence. Two ideological enemies, one committed to the destruction of Bolshevism and the other to the end of fascism, shook hands and divided Eastern Europe between themselves in a secret protocol that neither side would admit to for decades. Winston Churchill called it a "never-to-be-forgotten transaction." The historian Geoffrey Roberts named it the "most stunning volte-face in diplomatic history."

  The pact raises a set of questions that cut to the heart of how the Second World War began. Why did two countries that had spent the better part of a decade as adversaries suddenly become partners? What exactly did they agree to in secret? And what happened to the nations that found themselves carved up between two powers that were supposed to be each other's worst enemies? The answers lie in a chain of diplomatic failures, strategic calculations, and hidden protocols that would shape the map of Europe for the rest of the twentieth century.

• 2. Collapse of Collective Security

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  At the 1938 Munich Conference, Britain and France agreed to Germany's annexation of part of Czechoslovakia without inviting the Soviet Union to the table. That exclusion was not incidental. Hitler's fierce anti-Soviet rhetoric had convinced Britain and France that Soviet participation would be both dangerous and useless. Joseph Stalin had offered to support Czechoslovakia militarily if France did the same. France did not, and the offer went nowhere.

  The policy of appeasement was carried forward by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French Prime Minister Edouard Daladier. From the Soviet perspective, the West seemed to be steering German aggression eastward. By early 1939, the Czechoslovak state that had been guaranteed by Munich had been completely dissolved, and on the 31st of March Britain pledged to protect Poland, Belgium, Romania, Greece and Turkey. Hitler was furious: such commitments blocked his territorial ambitions.

  From April to July 1939, informal consultations among the Soviet Union, Britain, and France gave way to formal negotiations. The military talks opened on the 12th of August in Moscow, with a British delegation headed by Admiral Sir Reginald Drax, a French delegation headed by General Aime Doumenc, and the Soviet delegation headed by Kliment Voroshilov, the commissar of defence, and Boris Shaposhnikov, chief of the general staff. Drax had no written credentials and had been instructed by London to prolong the discussions as long as possible and to avoid answering whether Poland would allow Soviet troops to enter if Germany invaded. Polish Foreign Minister Jozef Beck refused any such arrangement, fearing that Red Army troops who entered Polish territory would never leave. One day before the military talks opened, the Soviet Politburo had already pessimistically decided to consider German proposals seriously.

• 3. The Road to Moscow

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  In early May 1939, Stalin replaced his foreign minister Maxim Litvinov, who had served since 1930 and who had advocated rapprochement with the West and was also Jewish, with Vyacheslav Molotov. Many historians agree that Litvinov's Jewish ethnicity was viewed unfavourably by Nazi Germany and that his dismissal removed an obstacle to German-Soviet talks. Stalin immediately directed Molotov to "purge the ministry of Jews." The appointment sent a clear signal to both Berlin and to London and Paris.

  Sometime in early May at Berghof, Ribbentrop showed Hitler a film of Stalin reviewing his military in a recent parade. Hitler became intrigued with the idea of an alliance, and Ribbentrop recalled Hitler saying that Stalin "looked like a man he could do business with." Ribbentrop was given the go-ahead to pursue negotiations. Throughout early 1939, Germany had secretly hinted to Soviet diplomats that it could offer better terms than Britain and France. On the 19th of August, the 1939 German-Soviet Commercial Agreement was signed. Two days later, on the 21st of August, the Soviets suspended the tripartite military talks. That same day, Stalin received assurances that Germany would approve secret protocols placing the half of Poland east of the Vistula River, as well as Latvia, Estonia, Finland and Bessarabia, in the Soviet sphere of influence. Stalin replied that he would receive Ribbentrop on the 23rd of August.

  On the 23rd of August, two Focke-Wulf Condor aircraft containing German diplomats, officials, and photographers, about twenty in each plane, descended into Moscow. Ribbentrop's aircraft bore the German civil registration D-ACVH. As the Nazi emissaries stepped off the plane, a Soviet military band played Deutschland, Deutschland uber Alles. The swastika flags used had been borrowed from a local film studio, where they were kept for Soviet propaganda films. Ribbentrop and Gustav Hilger, along with German ambassador Friedrich-Werner von der Schulenburg and Stalin's chief bodyguard Nikolai Vlasik, entered an NKVD limousine bound for Red Square. Stalin himself greeted the visitors, a striking departure from his known habit of avoiding foreign meetings.

• 4. The Secret Protocol

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  On the 23rd of August 1939, a ten-year non-aggression pact was signed. Both sides committed to neutrality if either went to war against a third power, and neither could join any group "directly or indirectly aimed at the other." The public terms of the agreement were remarkable enough that journalist John Gunther heard a joke circulating in Moscow that Stalin had joined the Anti-Comintern Pact.

  The secret protocol, however, was something else entirely. 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 along the Pisa, Narew, Vistula, and San rivers, with the east going to the Soviet Union and the west to Germany. Warsaw would effectively be divided between them. Lithuania, adjacent to East Prussia, was initially assigned to Germany, with the exception of the Vilnius region, whose "interests" were recognized in Soviet favour. A second secret protocol agreed in September 1939 transferred all of Lithuania, including Vilnius, to the Soviet sphere. Germany pledged not to interfere with Soviet actions toward Bessarabia, then part of Romania.

  At the signing, Ribbentrop and Stalin exchanged warm toasts and agreed that the Anti-Comintern Pact had been aimed not at the Soviet Union but at the Western democracies, and that it had "frightened principally the City of London and the English shopkeepers." German diplomat Hans von Herwarth, whose grandmother was Jewish, informed Italian diplomat Guido Relli and American charge d'affaires Charles Bohlen of the secret protocol the following day, but failed to reveal the annexation rights for territorial rearrangement. The existence of the secret protocol was denied by the Soviet Union until December 1989, when a commission headed by Alexander Yakovlev at the behest of Mikhail Gorbachev confirmed its existence to the Congress of People's Deputies.

• 5. World Reaction

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  John Gunther, who was in Moscow in August 1939, recalled that even the commercial agreement of the 19th of August had startled journalists and diplomats who still hoped for world peace. The announcement of the non-aggression pact two days later produced a different order of shock: "Nothing more unbelievable could be imagined. Astonishment and skepticism turned quickly to consternation and alarm."

  US Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes recorded in his diary on the 26th of August: "This Pact completely upset the diplomatic applecart... The Russian-German alliance has been a great shock... It is a terrible situation." Former US Ambassador to Moscow Joseph E. Davies reported to his Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles on the 22nd of August that Hitler "has won a smashing diplomatic victory" and warned that the resources of Russia supplementing the industry and science of Germany posed a real threat to Western civilization. British Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Sir Alexander Cadogan wrote simply: "Black day."

  Reactions in Germany ran in the opposite direction. Reich Minister of Armaments Albert Speer recorded his impression: "To see the names of Hitler and Stalin linked in friendship on a piece of paper was the most staggering, the most exciting turn of events I could possibly have imagined." A Berlin newspaper described the combination of 80 million Germans and 180 million Russians as a potential empire "stretching across the unprecedented greatest lebensraum of Europe and Asia." On the 24th of August, Pravda and Izvestia ran the famous front-page photograph of Molotov signing the treaty with a smiling Stalin looking on. Time magazine repeatedly referred to the pact as the "Communazi Pact" and its participants as "communazis" until April 1941.

• 6. Partition and Its Consequences

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  Germany invaded Poland from the west on the 1st of September 1939. Within days, the Luftwaffe was strafing civilian refugees on roads and conducting a bombing campaign. Germany also allowed Soviet radio signals broadcast from Minsk to assist German air forces, under the guise of "urgent aeronautical experiments." Within the first month of German occupation, massacres of Polish and Jewish civilians and prisoners of war took place in over thirty towns and villages.

  On the 17th of September, one day after a Soviet-Japanese ceasefire took effect following the Battles of Khalkhin Gol and one day after the Supreme Soviet approved the pact, Stalin ordered the Red Army into Poland from the east, stating concern for ethnic Ukrainians and Belarusians. On the 21st of September, Marshal Voroshilov and German military attache General Kostring signed a formal agreement coordinating military movements in Poland, including the "purging" of saboteurs. Joint German-Soviet parades were held in Lviv and Brest-Litovsk.

  The Katyn massacre followed on the 5th of March 1940, when 22,000 members of the military as well as intellectuals were executed, labelled "nationalists and counterrevolutionaries." That followed interrogations of 300,000 Polish prisoners of war at Soviet camps, a selection process to determine who would be killed. In occupied Polish territories, the German campaign called the Intelligenzaktion ran from autumn 1939 to spring 1940, killing about 60,000 Polish nobles, teachers, social workers, priests, judges and political activists. In Operation Tannenberg alone, more than 16,000 members of the intelligentsia were murdered and 750,000 Polish peasants were forced from their homes. Between one and two and a half million Polish citizens were transported to the Reich for forced labour. Around 380,000 Jews were held in the Warsaw Ghetto, of whom at least 43,000 died of starvation and disease.

• 7. The Pact Unravels

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  The economic relationship between Germany and the Soviet Union was substantial. On the 11th of February 1940, the two countries entered a trade pact more than four times larger than the August 1939 agreement. 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, and 500,000 tons of phosphates. The Soviets received the plans to the battleship Bismarck, 30 of Germany's latest warplanes including the Bf 109, Bf 110, and Ju 88, plus samples of German artillery, tanks, and chemical-warfare equipment. The Soviets also provided Germany with a submarine base called Basis Nord near Murmansk and access to the Northern Sea Route.

  By summer 1940, relations were souring. Stalin's invasion of Northern Bukovina violated the pact, as it fell outside the Soviet sphere agreed upon with the Axis. Germany's unilateral occupation of Romania in early September 1940, targeting its oil fields, angered Moscow, which pointed out that Germany was required under Article III to consult with the Soviet Union first. After Germany joined the Tripartite Pact with Japan and Italy in September 1940, Ribbentrop invited Molotov to Berlin to discuss a "continental bloc" stretching from Gibraltar to Yokohama. Molotov negotiated in November 1940, but Hitler broke off talks and resumed planning for the invasion of the Soviet Union. Stalin, trying to demonstrate peaceful intent, signed a neutrality pact with Japan on the 13th of April 1941. He did not know that Hitler had ordered military planning for an eastern invasion as early as late 1940.

  Germany unilaterally terminated the pact at 03:15 on the 22nd of June 1941 by launching Operation Barbarossa. Stalin had ignored repeated warnings. Within six months, the Soviet military had suffered 4.3 million casualties and three million more had been captured. The Soviet exports of raw materials to Germany had continued uninterrupted until the moment of invasion, enabling Germany to maintain its stocks of rubber and grain from the first day of Barbarossa through to October 1941.

• 8. The Secret Surfaces

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  The German original of the secret protocols was presumably destroyed in the bombing of Germany. In late 1943, however, Ribbentrop had ordered the most secret German Foreign Office records from 1933 onward, around 9,800 pages, to be microfilmed. When the Berlin Foreign Office departments were evacuated to Thuringia at the end of the war, a civil servant named Karl von Loesch was entrusted with the microfilm copies. Rather than destroying them as ordered, he buried them as personal insurance. In May 1945, von Loesch approached British Lieutenant Colonel Robert C. Thomson and American counterpart Ralph Collins, offering to reveal the documents' location in exchange for transfer to the American zone at Marburg. Both documents, the treaty and the secret protocol, were found in August 1945 by US State Department employee Wendell B. Blancke, head of a special unit called Exploitation German Archives.

  The protocols first surfaced publicly during the Nuremberg trials, through an affidavit introduced by Alfred Seidl, attorney for defendant Hans Frank, written from memory by a Nazi Foreign Office lawyer who had been present at the Moscow signing. Seidl later obtained the German text from an anonymous Allied source and tried to place it in evidence while questioning Ernst von Weizsacker, a former Foreign Office State Secretary. The Allied prosecutors objected, but Weizsacker was permitted to describe the protocols from memory, corroborating the earlier affidavit. The full text was first published on the 22nd of May 1946 in a front-page story in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The protocols gained wider attention when included in a 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. President Harry S. Truman personally approved the publication in November 1947, though it was held back until diplomatic talks in London that December proved inconclusive.

  The Soviet Union officially denied the protocols' existence until 1989. Vyacheslav Molotov died in 1986 having categorically rejected their existence to the end. On the 23rd of August 1986, the forty-seventh anniversary of the pact's signing, tens of thousands of demonstrators in twenty-one cities, including New York, London, Stockholm, Toronto, Seattle, and Perth, participated in Black Ribbon Day rallies. The Soviet copy of the original document was declassified in 1992 and published in a scientific journal in early 1993, the last piece of the paper trail finally accounted for.