by Will Podmore
Historians generally accept that the pact was not an alliance. As Geoffrey Roberts pointed out, “There was no specific agreement or intention on 23 August to partition Poland. … the first clause of the secret additional protocol to the pact concerned not Poland but Soviet-German spheres of influence in the Baltic. This was a curious textual order of priorities for two states that had just decided to carve up between them another major state. It makes much more sense to posit that there was no such agreement and to assume that what was agreed on 23 August was an eastern limit of German military expansion into Poland.”47 Richard Overy agreed: “The secret protocol drawn up in August only delimited spheres of interest; it did not arrange partition or control.”48 Samantha Carl noted, “The Non-Aggression Pact was not an alliance between the two nations, but instead called for neutrality if the other was attacked. … negotiations between the Soviet Union and the West broke down prior to the completion of the Non-Aggression Pact, not as a result of it. … the Non-Aggression Pact, although important because it prevented a two-front war in 1939, was not integral to the German war movement.”49
The Soviet Union used well the two years’ grace brought by the pact. In 1940, the Soviet government spent 56 billion rubles on defence, more than twice as much as in 1938, more than 25 per cent of all industrial investment. As a result, the defence industry developed at three times the rate of all other industries. During the time between the signing of the pact and the Nazi invasion, the value of the Soviet Union’s material resources nearly doubled, an impressive achievement.50
Roy Medvedev commented, “Of course he [Stalin] and his entourage always kept in mind the possibility of war with the capitalist countries, and in the late 30s this meant specifically Germany and Japan. Preparations for such a war were made by creating a modern defense industry, military aviation, an up-to-date navy, civil-defense training for the whole population, and so on. In 1939-1941 the army increased by 2.5 times, many troops and supplies were transferred to the western districts, war production increased, and the number of military schools grew. Especially after the war with Finland, a great deal of work was done toward retraining the Army. The development of new weapons was speeded up. More than a 100,000 men were put to work on the fortification of the new western borders. Airfields were modernized, ordnance depots and ammunition dumps set up, and military exercises for troops and commanders carried out.”51 Roberts summed up, “In the long run the pact paved the way for the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany.”52
Hitler attacks Poland
On 1 September 1939, Germany broke its 1934 non-aggression pact with Poland by invading. The Polish army was routed, suffering 210,000 casualties (70,000 killed, 140,000 wounded) and 700,000 captured. The German army lost 16,000 killed and 30,000 wounded. On 7 September, the Polish leaders fled to Romania, taking the country’s gold with them. Uniquely in World War Two, they appointed no successor government, leaving the Polish people unrepresented and defenceless.
Soviet forces entered eastern Poland on 17 September, dashing across Belarus and the West Ukraine for the Curzon line, beating the Nazis to it. The Polish Supreme Commander, Marshal Edward Rydz-Smigly, ordered his troops not to fight the Soviet forces, although he ordered them to continue fighting the German invaders. Hitler offered the Soviet Union all of eastern Poland up to the River Vistula and Warsaw, but Soviet troops moved only to the River Bug, that is, only into those lands that Polish forces had seized in 1920. American historian Timothy Snyder accepted that in occupying eastern Poland, “Usually the Red Army behaved well …”53
The Soviet occupation of western Ukraine and western Belarus saved these peoples from Nazi rule. The only alternative would have been to let Hitler send the Nazi army right up to the Soviet border. What would this have meant for Poland’s people? On 9 September, Hitler’s Chief of Staff General Franz Halder said, “it was the intention of the Führer and Goering to destroy and exterminate the Polish people.”54
As Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov explained to the Supreme Soviet on 31 October 1939, “Our troops entered the territory of Poland only after the Polish state had collapsed and actually ceased to exist. Naturally, we could not remain neutral towards these facts, since as a result of these events we were confronted with urgent problems concerning the security of our state. Furthermore, the Soviet government could not but reckon with the exceptional situation created for our brothers in Western Ukraine and Western Byelorussia, who had been abandoned to their fate as a result of the collapse of Poland.”
American professor of international law George Ginsburgs later agreed, “De facto, then, one may well accept the view that the Polish Government no longer functioned as an effective state power. In such a case the Soviet claim that Eastern Galicia was in fact a terra nullius may not be unjustified and could be sustained. If one accepts the more controversial Soviet assertion that the Government of Poland had disintegrated and disappeared, implying in addition that all territorial titles vested in it lapsed de jure too, then Eastern Galicia may be viewed on September 17, 1939, as terra nullius both de facto and de jure. In such circumstances the Soviet legal title by virtue of effective occupation of abandoned territory would be clear …”55
Article 16 of the League of Nations Covenant required members to impose sanctions on any member who ‘resorted to war’. But the League did not judge that the Soviet Union had done so. No country imposed sanctions on the Soviet Union, none broke off diplomatic relations. Romania and France did not declare war on the Soviet Union, although both had military treaties with Poland. All countries, including Poland’s allies Britain and France, agreed that the Soviet Union was not a belligerent.
Ex-Prime Minister David Lloyd-George pointed out, “The German invasion was designed to annex to the Reich provinces where a decided majority of the population was Polish by race, language and tradition. Russian armies marched into territories which were not Polish and which were forcibly annexed to Poland after the Great War despite fierce protests and armed resistance by the inhabitants. Inhabitants of the Polish Ukraine are of the same race and speak the same language as their neighbours in the Ukraine republic of the Soviet Union … White Russia was originally annexed by Poland as a result of a victorious war against Russia.”56 Ginsburgs later agreed that the Polish title to these territories “derives from a direct act of force and military conquest, not even remotely claiming parentage with the concept of national self-determination … on this particular item the Soviet plea was, by and large, successful in carrying its point.”57
Churchill, in a speech broadcast on 1 October, said, “that the Russian armies should stand on this [Curzon] line was clearly necessary for the safety of Russia against the Nazi menace. At any rate the line is there, and an Eastern front has been created which Nazi Germany does not dare assail.”58 He pointed out that the Soviet move into Poland was good for Britain, because it blocked Hitler’s path to the Balkans. Conservative MP Robert Boothby told the House of Commons on 20 September, “I think it is legitimate to suppose that this action on the part of the Soviet government was taken ... from the point of view of self-preservation and self-defence ... The action taken by the Russian troops ... has pushed the German frontier considerably westward ... I am thankful that Russian troops are now along the Polish-Romanian frontier. I would rather have Russian troops there than German troops.”59
In October, the Soviet Union sent forces into the Baltic states, throwing out the pro-Hitler dictatorships that had run them since the early 1930s, and signed treaties of mutual assistance with the new governments. Churchill acknowledged that these actions were ‘dictated by the imminence and magnitude of the German danger now threatening Russia, in which case the Soviet Govt. may well have been justified in taking in self-defence such measures as might in other circumstances have been open to criticism’.60 As he noted, “It was to our interests that the U.S.S.R. should increase their strength in the Baltic, thereby limiting the risk of German domi
nation in that area.”61 Lippmann wrote, “Every day it becomes clearer that Russia is constructing a great defense area from the Baltic to the Black Sea.”62
In 1939, the Soviet government persistently tried to reach an agreement with the Finnish government to protect the northern approaches to the Soviet Union.63 The Soviet Union needed the room in which to defend Leningrad, its second city, which was only 25 miles from the Finnish border.64 But the Finnish government, encouraged by the Nazi, British and French governments, refused. These governments then backed Finland’s war against the Soviet Union. By contrast, Churchill was ‘in favour of the Soviet demands for naval bases in Finland’. He explained that they were needed to ‘prevent German aggression in the Baltic Provinces or against Petrograd’. Britain should try ‘to persuade the Finns to make concessions’.
But from November 1939 to March 1940, Chamberlain sent more arms to Finland to fight the Soviet Union than he sent to France, Belgium and Holland to fight the Nazis.65 He hoped to turn the Finnish war into a joint attack led by the British and French governments against the Soviet Union in ‘a sort of glorified Crimean War brought up to date’, as Conservative MP Leo Amery put it.66 The British and French governments proposed using Polish troops against the Red Army in Finland.67 French Prime Minister Edouard Daladier told the Finnish government that an Anglo-French expedition was ready to sail to its aid. The British government recruited 500 people for the Finnish Volunteer Force.68 Lippmann later admitted, “The most foolish thing I can remember in my many human errors is that during World War II I was one of the people who joined the hue and cry for war against the Soviet Union to save Finland. That was the most nonsensical thing that anybody ever proposed, but I can remember doing it.”69
Finland’s Commander-in-Chief General Carl Mannerheim told Chamberlain that he would not need help until May, but Soviet forces cracked the ‘impregnable’ Mannerheim line in a month and the Finns sued for peace in March. The Soviet Union won enough land to save Leningrad from Nazi occupation.70 These Soviet actions towards Poland, the Baltic states and Finland pushed its defence lines further west, increasing the distances that the Wehrmacht had to cover before it could reach Moscow and Leningrad, making it harder for Hitler to beat the Soviet Union.
Meanwhile, the British government was making preparations to destroy the Soviet oil industry. By April 1940, it had drawn up detailed plans to bomb Soviet oil wells in the Caucasus, including Baku, Batum and Grozny, a scheme known as Operation Pike. The attacks were to be launched from bases in Turkey and Iran.71 Fortunately, Turkey and Iran refused, wrecking the scheme.
In June 1940, the Soviet Union strengthened its defensive ties with the Baltic states. It insisted that Lithuania form a government that would honour the treaty of mutual assistance it had signed the previous autumn. The new government ended the 14-year dictatorship of President Antanas Smetona. It freed 1,000 political prisoners, legalised trade unions and dissolved the Concordat with the Vatican. It also dissolved the old parliament which had been elected under Smetona’s terror and with a small electorate restricted by property qualifications (in Vilna, only 30,000 of the city’s 250,000 inhabitants had been allowed a vote). It held elections for a new parliament. By December 1940, the Soviet government had given Estonia’s peasants 24,755 new farms and given more land to 27,609 farms. In Latvia, the Soviet reform created 52,000 new farms and 23,000 small farms increased their acreage. The Soviet government cancelled the debts peasants owed to the former governments.
In 1940, Nazi Germany stepped up its preparations for attacking the Soviet Union. It signed military treaties with the governments of Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and Finland. By allying with the aggressor Hitler, these governments broke their non-aggression treaties with the Soviet Union. In March, the Finnish government decided to fight as Hitler’s ally. In May, the first Nazi soldiers entered Finland and supervised the building of the Petsamo airbase later used by the Luftwaffe to attack Allied shipping.
On 13 October 1940, Germany formally proposed that the Soviet Union join the Axis, but the Soviet government refused.72 In order to isolate the Soviet Union, the Nazis lied that there was a Nazi-Soviet alliance, that the Soviet Union wanted to divide up the British Empire with the Axis and that the Soviet Union was preparing to attack Germany.
General Halder more accurately called Soviet deployments in June 1941 ‘purely defensive’.73 The Soviet government did all it could to give Hitler no excuse to accuse the Soviet Union of aggression, an excuse that the pro-Hitler groups in the British and French governments could have used to justify joining Hitler’s attack. If the Soviet Union had mobilised, Hitler would have declared it the aggressor. As Stalin told Marshal Zhukov ‘Mobilization means war’, as it had in 1914 when Germany declared war on Russia as soon as Russia mobilised.
The Nazis boasted they would defeat the Soviet Union in two months. The British government thought that a blitzkrieg on Russia would be ‘a campaign of little difficulty’, over in between ‘3 and 6 weeks’.74 The General Staff told the Cabinet that the Soviet Union would collapse in weeks. The Joint Intelligence Committee forecast that Moscow would fall in six weeks. Laurence Steinhardt, briefly US Ambassador to the Soviet Union, advised his government that “the Stalinist regime could not survive any invasion.”75 If Hitler had beaten the Soviet Union swiftly, he could then have turned his 240 victorious divisions against Britain.
Chapter 4
World War Two
Genocide
On 22 June 1941, the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in ‘a totally unprovoked and unconditional attack’.1 The invasion force, the largest in history, of 3.6 million troops, included four panzer groups fielding 19 panzer and 15 motorised divisions, with 3,350 tanks and 2,770 fighter and bomber aircraft, against 2.9 million defenders. This battle-hardened army had already conquered Poland, France and most of the rest of Europe. Nazi transport capabilities were ten times those of the Soviet forces. Romanian, Hungarian, Italian, Croat, Bulgarian, Finnish and Slovakian forces also joined the invasion.
Molotov said, “Our cause is just. The enemy will be beaten. Victory will be with us.” The war became a war fought by the peoples of most of the world’s countries allied to defend their national independence against the Axis powers.
Operation Barbarossa “was not only the most massive military campaign in history, but it also unleashed an unprecedented campaign of genocidal violence.”2 As Hitler told two hundred Wehrmacht officers on 30 March 1941, “We are talking about a war of extermination.” He wrote in Mein Kampf, “If our hearts are set on establishing our great German Reich, we must above all things force out and exterminate the Slavonic nations – the Russians, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Bulgarians, Ukrainians, Byelorussians. … Twenty million people must be wiped out.”3 His deputy, Hermann Goering, echoed, “Kill everyone opposed to us. Kill, kill! Not you will answer for this, but I! Hence, kill!”4 The invading forces mercilessly assaulted Soviet civilians, they raped, pillaged and murdered wherever they went.
Hitler said, “The destruction of the major Russian cities is a prerequisite for the permanence of our power in Russia.”5 His ‘Hunger Plan’ was to cut Moscow and Leningrad off from the grain-producing Ukraine and seize Soviet food production to feed the German people. Erich Koch, Reichskommissar for Ukraine, aimed to ‘smash Ukrainian industry and drive the proletariat back to the country’.6 De-industrialising the Soviet Union would destroy the working class and turn the country back into the wheat supplier for Western Europe that it had been before the revolution.
The head of the Wehrmacht, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, signed the final version of the infamous ‘Commissar Order’ on 6 June, “In the struggle against Bolshevism, we cannot count on the enemy acting according to the principles of humanity or international law. In particular the political commissars at all levels, as the real leaders of resistance, can be expected to treat prisoners of war in a hate-filled, cruel, and inhuman manner.” Having projected onto the
enemy the treatment the Nazis themselves intended to inflict, Keitel went on, “The troops must be made aware: 1. In this struggle to show consideration and apply principles of international law to these elements is wrong. … 2. Political commissars are the originators of barbaric, Asiatic methods of fighting. Thus, they have to be dealt with immediately and … with the utmost severity. As a matter of principle, therefore, they will be shot at once.”7
The Soviet Union and Germany both recognised the 1907 Hague Convention on the treatment of POWs, but, as Overy pointed out, “When the Soviet government tried in the first weeks of the conflict to reach agreement through the International Red Cross on mutual respect for prisoners’ rights, the German government refused to comply.”8 Of 5.74 million Soviet soldiers captured during the war, 3.3 million died. The Nazis carried out what Berkhoff rightly called a ‘genocidal massacre’ of Soviet POWs.9 The Soviet government could not have saved them.
Active defence
The Soviet government knew that in May 1940 the French had been defeated because they had massed their forces on the border, as well as in Belgium, so instead it planned defence in depth. Marshal Zhukov pointed out, “the Nazi command had seriously counted on our rushing the main forces of the Fronts closer to the frontier, where it planned to encircle and destroy them. That, indeed, was the main objective of Plan Barbarossa at the start of the war.”10 And, “the Soviet Union would have been smashed if we had organized all our forces on the border.”11
Historians now largely agreed that the Soviet Union was not unprepared for the invasion but had a strategy to oppose it. As military historians Bryan Fugate and Lev Dvoretsky concluded, “It is an enduring myth of the twentieth century that the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 caught Stalin and the Red Army totally by surprise … . Stalin and the Soviet High Command were not caught off guard by the invasion but in fact had developed a skilful, innovative, and highly secret plan to oppose it … . This strategy would ensure the nation’s ability not only to survive the biggest and most violent invasion in history but indeed to prevail over it.”12 Overy agreed, “the absence of preparation is a myth. The Soviet political and military leadership began to prepare the country from the autumn of 1940 for the possibility of a war with Germany.”13 Mawdsley noted, “It is unfair, however, to charge Stalin and his government with not preparing the USSR for war.”14 Fugate summed up, “Viewed from any standpoint, the USSR was as well-prepared for war in June 1941 as it possibly could have been.”15