In hindsight, it is abundantly clear that a major global conflict had long been brewing, however, it was the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that is now viewed as the final treachery that would lead to war.
While, in essence, the pact was billed as a non-aggression agreement between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, it contained a secret annex that divided Central Eastern Europe into two separate spheres of influence.
“In the event of territorial and political transformations in the territories belonging to the Polish State, the border of the interest zones of Germany and the USSR will run approximately along the line of the Narew, Vistula and San rivers,” this addendum asserted.
“The question of whether it is desirable in mutual interests to maintain an independent Polish state, and what the borders of this state will be, will only be clarified over the course of further political events. In any case, both governments will resolve this issue by means of a friendly agreement,” it continued.
The business-like formality of the language belied its meaning – at the stroke of a pen, both sides had agreed on the division of Poland.
These final details had not taken long to hammer out. Germany’s foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, had flown into Moscow on the afternoon of August 23, 1939. Greeted by a military band and the sight of fluttering Nazi banners that had been hurriedly acquired from a film set, Ribbentrop and his entourage were then spirited by limousine to the Kremlin.
There the German delegation was met not just by the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the USSR Vyacheslav Molotov, but also Stalin himself. Although usually averse to meeting foreigne delegates, Stalin’s presence underscored the momentous nature of what was taking place.
Written in two copies – German and Russian – the agreement comprised seven articles and the secret annex. After it was signed, toasts were raised at a ceremonial banquet.
Ribbentrop returned to Germany the following morning and was personally greeted by Hitler who hailed him as “the new Bismarck” on account of his diplomatic prowess.
For all the handshakes and sense of congratulatory warmth, history had now been set on a cruel and irreversible course.
But whereas at face value Stalin appeared the biggest winner from the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Hitler too had reason to rejoice. While the USSR stood to swallow more territory as a direct result of the pact, the promise of non-aggression meant that once Nazi Germany had taken its bite of Poland, its forces would then be free to concentrate on the West without facing a war on two fronts.
Despite its importance, history, however, has tended to airbrush the seismic importance of the Molotov-Ribbentrop deal.
To quote directly from historian Roger Moorhouse, “the Nazi-Soviet Pact still barely features in the Western narrative; passed over often in a single paragraph, dismissed as an outlier, a dubious anomaly, or a footnote to the wider history. Its significance is routinely reduced to the status of the last diplomatic chess move before the outbreak of war, with no mention made of the baleful Great Power relationship that it spawned.”
Moorhouse continues: “Under its auspices, Hitler and Stalin found common cause in destroying Poland and overturning the Versailles order. Their two regimes, whose later conflict would be the defining clash of World War Two in Europe, divided Central Europe between them and stood, side by side, for almost a third of the conflict’s entire timespan.”
The Nazi-Soviet cooperation set in motion by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact would fuel the early phase of the war and open the gates for a succession of further agreements.
“Across two expansive economic treaties, they [Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union] traded secrets, blueprints, technology and raw materials, oiling the wheels of each other’s war machines,” says Moorhouse. “Stalin was no passive or unwilling neutral in this period, he was Adolf Hitler’s most significant strategic ally.”
All this was to come. For Poland, more pressing problems loomed. The signing of the pact had stunned the world; two ideological opposites had, to all intents and purposes, pledged to push aside their differences to enable their own territorial goals. Any sense of wider European political and military balance, fragile as it had been, had instantly eroded.
With news quickly leaking as to the secret annex, for many the question became not ‘if’ Europe would go to war, but ‘when’.
The answer would come just over a week later. On September 1, 1939, German forces launched their Blitzkrieg on Poland. True to his scheming, Machiavellian nature, Stalin resisted the temptation to order his own invasion of Poland, choosing instead to bide his time to weigh up the reaction of Poland’s Western Allies.
He need not have worried. Although France and Britain both declared war on Germany on September 3, any notion that they would strike back militarily soon proved ill-founded. Buoyed by their inertia, Stalin ordered his forces to invade Poland’s east on September 17.
As always, there was a pretext: illustrating the depth of the Soviet Union’s cunning, Molotov told Poland’s ambassador in Moscow that Stalin was only ordering troops in due to the “disintegration” of the Polish government. The Soviet Union, argued Molotov, was obliged to send troops into Poland to safeguard the people of Ukraine and Belarus.
Fighting the Wehrmacht on one side, and the Red Army on the other, Poland’s fate was sealed and the country finally surrendered on October 6.
For all this, the outcome had all but been set in stone the moment Ribbentrop and Molotov had entered their agreement – and it is for this reason that since 2008, August 23 has been designated ‘European Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Totalitarian Regimes’.
