The Colonial Powers Munich Award to Hitler Is the Last Straw in Bringing About The ‘Infamous’ Molotov-Ribbinthrop Pact. Stalin’s Last Minute Surprise Switch to Collaboration and Temporary Safety
With Sudetenland gone to Germany, Czechoslovakia had lost 70% of its iron/steel industry, 70% of its electrical power and 3.5 million citizens to Germany as a result of the settlement. American historian William Shirer, in his The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960), took the view that Czechoslovakia would have been able to offer significant resistance. Shirer believed that Britain and France had sufficient air defenses to avoid serious bombing of London and Paris and would have been able to pursue a rapid and successful war against Germany. He quotes Churchill as saying the Munich agreement meant that “Britain and France were in a much worse position compared to Hitler’s Germany”. After Adolf Hitler personally inspected the Czech fortifications, he privately said to Joseph Goebbels, “we would have shed a lot of blood” and that it was fortunate that there had been no fighting.” [138].
“The Munich Agreement or what became known as the Munich Betrayal was an agreement concluded at Munich on 30 September 1938, by Nazi Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and the Kingdom of Italy. It provided “cession to Germany of the Sudeten German territory” of Czechoslovakia. “The Soviets, who had a mutual military assistance treaty with Czechoslovakia, felt betrayed by France, who also had a mutual military assistance treaty with Czechoslovakia. The British and French, however, mostly used the Soviets as a threat to dangle over the Germans. Stalin concluded that the West had actively colluded with Hitler to hand over a central European country to the Nazis, causing concern that they might do the same to the Soviet Union in the future, allowing the partition of the USSR between the western powers and the fascist Axis. This belief led the Soviet Union to reorient its foreign policy towards a rapprochement with Germany, which eventually led to the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939.” (Quoting in translation Klaus Hildebrand (1991) in his Das Dritte Reich, München: Oldenbourg. Grundriss der Geschichte. (in English: The Third Realm, Munich: Oldenbourg. Outline of History)
Stalin Warns World War Already Ongoing in Europe and Asia
Four days before the signing of the Molotov-Ribbenthrop pact Stalin in his speech at 18th Convention of the Soviet Communist Party in Moscow not only cruelly analyzed and exposed the policy of “non-intervention” and encouraging aggressors for what it was, but warned the world that
“a new imperialist war was already in progress since 1935, and had already involved over 500 million people in Ethiopia, Spain, China, Austria and Czechoslovakia. The war has created a new situation with regard to the relations between countries. It has enveloped them in an atmosphere of alarm and uncertainty. By undermining the basis of the postwar peace regime and overriding the elementary principles of international law, it has cast doubt on the value of international treaties and obligations. Pacifism and disarmament schemes are dead and buried. Feverish arming has taken their place. Everybody is arming, small States and big States, including primarily those which practice the policy of non-intervention. Nobody believes any longer in the unctuous speeches which claim that the Munich concessions to the aggressors and the Munich agreement opened a new era of ‘appeasement’. They are dis-believed even by the signatories to the Munich agreement, Britain and France, who are increasing their armaments no less than other countries.” [138A]
Describing the Run Up to the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact
On February 20, 1939, a pro-Nazi rally took place at Madison Square Garden, organized by the German American Bund. More than 20,000 people attended.[138B]
In the year previous to gaining the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia at Munich, Hitler had annexed Austria and in March 1939, his tanks rolled into the rest of Czechoslovakia. It seemed that Hitler was planning to strike next against its neighbor Poland. France and Britain pledged on March 31, 1939, to guarantee Poland’s security and independence.
On 28 April 1939, Hitler unilaterally withdrew from both the German-Polish Non-Aggression Pact of 1934 and the Anglo-German Naval Agreement of 1935.
In mid-March 1939, the Soviet Union, Britain and France began exchanging suggestions and counter-plans concerning a potential political and military agreement. On April 17, Soviet foreign minister Maxim Litvinov proposed a mutual assistance pact between the three powers for five to 10 years, including military support, if any were the subject of aggression.[139]
On April 26, the German government demands that all Jews register with the authorities all real estate and other assets exceeding 5000 marks. This is the first step toward expropriation of Jewish property; that is, Aryanization, a process whereby the Reich government seizes Jewish property and auctions it off to gentiles.[139A]
On May 3, Stalin replaced Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov with Vyacheslav Molotov. The dismissal of Litvinov, whose Jewish ethnicity was viewed with disfavor by the Nazis, removed an obstruction to negotiations with Germany.[140]
In May, Germany and Italy signed a treaty of alliance. Also in May, Hitler’s representatives began conducting trade talks with the Soviets just two years after Hitler had called the Soviet Union “the greatest danger for the culture and civilization of mankind which has ever threatened it since the collapse of the … ancient world.” [141]
Tripartite Talks Progress
On June 2, the Soviet Union insisted that any mutual assistance pact should be accompanied by a military agreement describing in detail the military assistance that the Soviets, French and British would provide. The Soviet Union also submitted a modification to a French and British proposal[142] that specified the states that would be given aid in the event of “direct aggression”, which included Belgium, Greece, Turkey, Romania, Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Finland.
On June 7th, Estonia and Latvia, countries bordering on the USSR that had been part of Imperial Russia, signed non-aggression pacts with Germany. This aroused suspicions that the Nazis had made arrangements in a region through which it could attack the Soviet Union.[143]
On August 2, Soviet political discussions with France and Britain were suspended with Molotov stating that they could not be restarted until progress was made in the scheduled military talks.[144]
During the summer of 1939, while conducting negotiations with both a British-French group and Germany regarding potential military and political agreements, the Soviet Union began to consider offers made by Germany. Just before the signing of the agreements, the parties had addressed past hostilities, with German Foreign Minister Joachim Ribbentrop telling Soviet diplomats that “there was no problem between the Baltic and the Black Sea that could not be solved between the two of us.” Diplomats from the two countries addressed the common ground of anti-capitalism, stating “there is one common element in the ideology of Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union: opposition to the capitalist democracies,” “neither we nor Italy have anything in common with the capitalist west” and “it seems to us rather unnatural that a socialist state would stand on the side of the western democracies.”
A German official explained that their prior hostility toward Soviet Bolshevism had subsided with the changes in the Comintern and the Soviet renunciation of a world revolution (“Soviet-German 1939 negotiations and past hostilities,” Alternative History,)
On August 14, the question of Poland was raised by Voroshilov for the first time, requesting that the British and French pressure the Poles to enter into an agreement allowing the Soviet army to be stationed in Poland.[145] The Polish government feared that the Soviet government sought to annex disputed territories, received by Poland in 1920 by the Treaty of Riga ended the Polish–Soviet War. The British and French negotiators communicated the Soviet concern over Poland to their home offices and informed the Soviet delegation that they could not answer this political matter without their governments’ approval.[146]
At the same time, Molotov spoke with Germany’s Moscow ambassador on August 15 regarding the possibility of settling by negotiation all outstanding problems of Soviet–German relations. The discussion included the possibility of a Soviet-German non-aggression pact, the future of the Baltic states and potential improvements in Soviet-Japanese relations.[147]
Meanwhile, in Soviet-British-French talks, the Anglo-Franco military negotiators were sent to discuss “general principles” rather than details, but on August 15, the British negotiators were instructed to move more quickly to bring the military talks to a conclusion, and therefore, were permitted to give Soviet negotiators confidential British information. The British confessed that Britain currently only possessed six army divisions but, in the event of a war, they could employ 16 divisions initially, followed by a second contingent of 16 divisions—a total far less than the 120 Soviet divisions.148 French negotiators stated that they had 110 divisions available.
In discussions on August 18–19, the Poles informed the French ambassador that they would not approve Red Army troops operating in Poland.[149]
On August 20, Germany and the Soviet Union signed a commercial agreement, dated August 19, providing for the trade of certain German military and civilian equipment in exchange for Soviet raw materials.[150]
(On August 21 Soviet General Zhukov, in a major military engagement during an undeclared border war, defeated a Japanese army that had invaded Soviet Mongolia from Japanese occupied Manchuria.)
On August 24, a 10-year non-aggression pact was signed with provisions that included: consultation; arbitration if either party disagreed; neutrality if either went to war against a third power; no membership in a group “which is directly or indirectly aimed at the other.” There was a secret protocol to the pact, according to which the nations of Northern and Eastern Europe were divided into German and Soviet “spheres of influence”. The USSR was promised an eastern part of Poland, primarily populated with Ukrainians and Belarusians. Article II of the text of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, executed August 23, 1939, read, “In the event of a territorial and political rearrangement of the areas belonging to the Polish state, the spheres of influence of Germany and the U.S.S.R. shall be bounded approximately by the line of the rivers Narev, Vistula and San.”] [151]
The announcement of the public part of the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression accord was met with utter shock and surprise by government leaders and media worldwide, and was dramatically devastating bitter news for communist organizations and jewish communities throughout the world.
The signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact had a disastrous impact on members of communist parties throughout the world. John Gates, a senior figure in the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), wrote:
The announcement on August 23,1939, that the Soviet Union and Germany had signed a non-aggression pact came like a thunderclap, not least of all to the communist movement. Leaders and rank-and-file members were thrown into utter confusion. The impossible had happened. We looked hopefully for an escape clause in the treaty, but the official text provided none… Statements now began to come from Moscow – both from the Soviet press and the Communist International – which made clear a big change in policy was under way. When the Nazis now invaded Poland and Britain and France declared war against Germany, the Soviet position was that British and French imperialists were responsible for the war, that this was an imperialist war and that neither side should be supported. …
Actually, a good case could be made for the Soviet Union’s non-aggression pact with Germany. For years Moscow had tried to reach an agreement with the West against fascism. Instead, the West had come to an agreement with fascism at Munich and behind the back of the Soviet Union. After Munich, the Soviet Union had every reason to believe that the West was not negotiating in good faith but was maneuvering to push Hitler into an attack upon the USSR. Convinced that Hitler was bent on war, unable to conclude a defensive alliance with the West, the Soviet Union decided to protect itself through a non-aggression pact. The West had only itself to blame for what happened. Churchill had warned the British government against such an eventuality. The Soviet Union undoubtedly gained temporary safety and additional time to prepare for the inevitable onslaught.(John Gates, The Story of an American Communist (1959) page 74)[151a]
The US Ambassador to USSR Witnessed Russian Awakening to the Ultimate Goal of the Colonial Powers in Arming and Promoting Nazi Germany
In his book, Mission to Moscow US ambassador to Russia from 1936 to 1938 Joseph Davies chronicles the desperation of the Russians in 1937, unable to get a defensive alliance with England and France and fully aware that the rearming of Germany in violation of the Versailles Treaty was directed at the Soviet Union and most obviously not meant to be only a ‘bulwark.’
A pro-Soviet film by the same name staring Walter Huston was made by Warner Bros. in 1943 in response to a request by President Roosevelt, and made specifically to improve Soviet-American relations. By the surprise non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, Stalin is credited with having foreseen the danger Hitler was capable of, though not that Stalin had derailed for the moment the West’s plan to have Hitler invade the USSR. A New York Times movie critic wrote,
“With a boldness unique in film ventures …, it comes out sharply and frankly for an understanding of Russia’s point of view. It says with a confident finality that Russia’s leaders saw, when the leaders of other nations dawdled, that the Nazis were a menace to the world.” Mission to Moscow, Based on Ex-Ambassador Davies’s Book, Stars Walter Huston, Ann Harding at Hollywood, By Bosley Crowther, (New York Times, April 30, 1943.) [152]
What Hitler called “a war of extermination” in Western Poland began only one week after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Hitler would again call for “a war of extermination” with the German invasion of the USSR, June 22, 1941, at the same time call for the eradication of all Jews. In December, 2019, Russian President Vladimir Putin in his comment on the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact reasonably shifted the blame for the Nazi-USSR pact away from the Soviets and on to the West’s emboldenment of Hitler with the Munich Agreement.[152a]
The arming of Nazi Germany for an attack on the Soviet Union was an obvious continuance of the colonial powers policy of total destruction of Soviet Russia since it’s inception. In 1917, after suffering more dead than the other empires in colonially empowered Europe’s First World War, the Russians had overthrown their Tsar and their capitalists, and had declared a socialist government. Almost immediately, fourteen armies of twelve capitalist nations, former WW I allies of Russia, invaded in support of a desperate regime change civil war that failed but took the lives of millions, three million from typhus alone. The US sent two armies, one to Murmansk, the other to Vladivostok. There are official US Army photos of Americans standing over dead Bolsheviks* posted in the margins of Wikipedia’s articles, ‘Polar Bear Expedition’ and ‘American Expeditionary Force Siberia’ (*the word ‘bolshevik’ in Russian means ‘majority’ referring to past voting results during a Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party Congress). Winston Churchill, Secretary of War 1918-1925, had declared that Bolshevism must be “strangled in its cradle.”[153] Washington had continued to deny the USSR diplomatic recognition until President Franklin Roosevelt established formal relations in November of 1933, nine moths after Hitler had been appointed chancellor of Germany and consolidated his dictatorship.
Why had Soviet leaders and writers, even during the onslaught of much vile, unfair and unfounded anti-Soviet propaganda during the Cold War after the Second World War, never managed to hold the Western colonial powers, the United States in particular, responsible for the Second World War in having rearmed Germany, intending (as Hitler’s had threatened) the destruction of the USSR? This has remained a mystery to this archival research peoples historian, all efforts contacting various well known historians in the field of recent Russian history in the US, and some in Russia notwithstanding.154] All the investments and joint venturing of US (and European) corporations building up Hitler’s Wehrmacht to the world’s number one military in only six years are documented in both business and tax records of US, Germany and other nations, and are in great part documented on the Internet with quite comprehensive statistics, a modest but indicting amount of which are presented in this book.
The only plausible answer as to why Russians haven’t openly and logically held the United States responsible for the second world war and the genocidal Nazi invasion of their country is their shame for the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of mutual assistance between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.
However, given the obviousness of the colonial powers heavily arming Nazi Germany under such a pathetic and oft repeated excuse as to make Nazi Germany a ‘bulwark against the communist Soviet Union,’ and then refusing all entreaties of the Soviets to form a protective alliance in the face of Hitler’s ever increasing power and belligerence, Stalin’s surprise signing a non-aggression pact with Hitler’s Nazi Germany seems to have been a last resort defense of Russia.
Were the Soviets to wait for Hitler’s attack, openly prepared by US, UK and France’s rearming of Germany in open violation of the prohibitions in the Versailles Treaty, while allowing Hitler’s illegal warplanes to bomb Spain?
J. Jankovsky-Novak aka Jay Janson spent eight years as Assistant Conductor of the Vietnam Symphony Orchestra in Hanoi and also toured, including with Dan Tai-son, who practiced in a Hanoi bomb shelter. The orchestra was founded by Ho Chi Minh, and it plays most of its concerts in the Opera House, a diminutive copy of the Paris Opera. In 1945, our ally Ho, from a balcony overlooking the large square and flanked by an American Major and a British Colonel, declared Vietnam independent. Everyone in the orchestra lost family, “killed by the Americans” they would mention simply, with Buddhist unaccusing acceptance. Jay can be reached at: [email protected] .
End Notes for Chapter Eleven- The Colonial Powers Munich Award Precipitates Nazi-USSR Pact
- Joseph Goebbels diary, 2 October 1938, p. 2.; Angela Hermann, “Der Weg in den Krieg” 1938/39. Quellenkritische Studien zu den Tagebüchernvon Joseph Goebbels.(München 2011) (ISBN 978-3-486-70513-3
138A. J. V. Stalin (Author) Problems of Leninism (English edition, Moscow, 1953), pp. 756-7;
- Derek Watson. (2000), “Molotov’s Apprenticeship in Foreign Policy: The Triple Alliance Negotiations in 1939”, Europe-Asia Studies,52 (4): 695–72
139A. A 1938 Nazi Law Forced Jews to Register Their Wealth ..Smithsonian.com
- Shirer, William, Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,1990, pp. 480–1
- Laurence Rees, War of the Century: When Hitler Fought Stalin,(New Press, 1999)
- Shirer 1990, p. 502 also “Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact negotiations explained”
https://everything.explained.today/Molotov–Ribbentrop_Pact_negotiations
- J. Haslam,The Soviet Union and the Struggle for Collective Security in Europe, 1933-39 (London, 1984), pp. 207, 210. ISBN 0-333-30050-5, ISBN 978-0-333-30050-3
- Shirer 1990, p. 504
- Shirer 1990, pp. 533–4
- Shirer 1990, p. 535
- Shirer 1990, p. 521
- Shirer 1990, pp. 533–4
- Shirer 1990, p. 536
- Shirer 1990, p. 668
- “The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, 1939,” Fordham U. Modern History Sourcebook: https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/1939pact.asp151a.
151a. John Gates, The Story of an American Communist (1959) page 74 “The Nazi-Soviet Pact,” Spartacus Educational
- https://www.nytimes.com/1943/04/30/archives/mission-to-moscow-based-on-exambassador-daviess-book-stars-walter.html
152a. “Putin rebuffs Western criticism of 1939 Stalin-Hitler pact”
https://apnews.com/article/3ece3d93f5d39db0056d5e8b54f0126d
- Jeffrey Wallin, “Cover Story: Churchill’s Greatness,” 10/4/2006, The Churchill Center
- Stephen F. Cohen (born in 1938, died in 2020, was the preeminent American scholar and professor emeritus of Russian studies at Princeton University and New York University. His academic work concentrated on modern Russian history since the Bolshevik Revolution and Russia’s relationship with the United States. He suggested I might ask various other professors, who also declined to offer an opinion. I emailed this question to in Russian language to historian and journalist on contemporary affairs, Nikolay Starikov, without response. I explained to all that it concerned a book thematic to WWII and Holocaust could not have happened without American corporations’ heavy investment and joint venturing with the Nazi build up of its Armed Forces.
