This Day in Diplomatic History (Nazis, Soviets Conclude Nonaggression Pact)

August 23, 1939—In an act brazenly cynical even by totalitarian standards, the foreign ministers of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed an agreement forswearing military action against each other.

The Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact removed the last obstacle in the way of Adolf Hitler invading Poland and starting World War II. At the same time, both he and Joseph Stalin agreed, in secret protocols not officially revealed until 50 years later, on spheres of influence in Eastern Europe.

The two dictators, in effect, set about carving up most of Continental Europe between them.

The stunning move required ideological somersaults of almost Olympian proportions from Hitler, who, more than a decade previously, in Mein Kampf, had called for the dissolution of “Russia and her vassal border states”; Stalin, who, only four years before, had pushed the organization of international Communist parties known as the Comintern to forge broad antifascist coalitions in the Popular Front; and American Communists, who, having seen Stalin as the only Western leader unreservedly committed to containing Hitler, now found themselves forced to toe a new line enforced by the Kremlin.

Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin never met. Instead, these two men, bent openly on destroying each other for years, deputized their principal foreign ministers, Joachim von Ribbentrop and V.M. Molotov (here pictured with Stalin in the middle), to ink the agreements.

Anthony Read and David Fisher’s revealing history, The Deadly Embrace (1987), offers many dramatic details concerning the motives and maneuvers behind the pact.

Hitler pressed hard to have an agreement in place before his planned September 1 invasion of Poland, even going so far as to send Stalin a personal letter on August 20. The German dictator later called the following 24 hours the most agonizing of his life, with his doctors waiting anxiously in case something happened.

When he finally received the phone call that Stalin had agreed to have Ribbentrop fly to Moscow, Hitler cried out jubilantly, “I have the world in my pocket!”

It certainly must have seemed that way. Once again, Hitler’s remarkable skill in outguessing opponents—in gambling that they would not be able to mount a defense against his most outrageous maneuver—served him well. A non-aggression pact with the U.S.S.R. would allow him to achieve several purposes:

* assure him that a German thrust against the West, unlike in WWI, would not have to be countered on an Eastern front;

* convince naysayers among the German high command—including Luftwaffe head Herman Goering—that the military would not face a protracted conflict;

* unnerve the Western powers, who could no longer count on the Soviet Union as a counterweight to the Nazis on the Continent.

What did Stalin hope to gain from the agreement? Certainly, the pact would allow him a free hand not just in carving up Poland with Hitler, but also in bringing Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to heel.

But more might have been involved. Two weeks before Hitler and Stalin startled the world, the Soviet dictator had sent representatives to a meeting in which officials from France and Great Britain had exchanged military information to show their level of preparedness should war break out with the Nazis.

Before leaving, a British representative had been told to triple any estimate he offered about his country’s force levels: it would be discounted by a third, anyway. When he did as he was told, he was astonished to find his Soviet opposite number startled—not at the thought that the higher number was too high, but that it was too low.

Stalin confided to Nikita Khruschchev that the Soviet military force was in no condition to take on the now-well-oiled Nazi machine. Learning that the force levels of his would-be allies were in a state as parlous as his own, if not more so, could not have been reassuring.

The fact that the dictators concluded the agreement didn’t mean that all suddenly became well between them. In addition to Ribbentrop, Hitler sent, as his personal emissary to Stalin, an old acquaintance, Heinrich Hoffmann, who was instructed to take special photographs, “which sometimes give a much clearer clue to a man’s character than all the reports of some silly fathead in the Foreign Ministry!”

What Hitler had in mind: the shape and size of Stalin’s earlobes—details, the race-obsessed Fuehrer believed, that would indicate whether the Soviet leader possessed Jewish blood.

The well-known antipathy of the two leaders for each other provided all the cover they needed to move ahead with their plans in something close to broad daylight. U.S. intelligence, tipped off by a spy, warned Britain’s Foreign Minister, Lord Halifax—as far as they could without revealing their source—that he should prepare himself for a dramatic turn in relations between the two countries.

Halifax not only refused to believe it, but saw no reason to delay or even shorten his planned hunting trip in late August. That incident serves as a handy symbol for Britain’s willful state of illusion on the brink of war.

All of Europe would pay dearly for their leaders’ gamesmanship and lack of foresight.

The agreement caused unbelievable consternation in the West. It was savagely disillusioning to idealistic students who saw the Soviet Union as the only credible force against Hitler. In the early 1980s, one of my history professors at Columbia University recalled how the pact had led the scales dropping from his eyes in how he viewed the Communist Party.

In the Anti-Nazi League, one of Hollywood’s favorite political organizations of the period, the day after the pact was a disaster, a staff member, Bonnie Clair Smith, remembered, according to Nancy Lynn Schwartz’ The Hollywood Writers’ Wars. “The phones didn’t stop, and telegrams of withdrawal poured in. I don’t even think the Daily Worker came out that day.”

Yet there still remained some who were so committed to the Soviet Union as a workers’ paradise that they sought any excuse to explain away the astonishing event. One was the screenwriter Maurice Rapf, who,in his memoir Back Lot: Growing Up With the Movies, recounted his self-justification: “How did I accept the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939 which led to the Nazi invasion of Poland and the start of World War II? (I had a hard time with this but became convinced that Stalin was just buying time to prepare for the Nazi Invasion of the Soviet Union, which, in fact, was what Churchill and his European allies had wanted all along.)

Ideological U-turns remain the order of the day concerning the nonaggression act in Russia to this day. The current line being pedaled by Vladimir Putin is that the agreement—resulting from British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s desire to direct Soviet territorial designs to the East—entitled Russia to the “near abroad” Soviet republics, and that these Baltic states acquiesced in their takeover.

Seventy years after the event, the brazenness of dictators continues.