The Anti-Comintern Pact

On 25 November 1936 in Berlin Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Reich’s Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary, and the Japanese Ambassador to Germany, Viscount Kintomo Mushakōji, signed the “Agreement against the Communist International”, known from the outset as the Anti-Comintern Pact. It was the first political agreement between the Third Reich and the Empire of Japan. Its published content was modest: the two parties promised to exchange information on the activities of the Comintern and to cooperate in defending themselves against it. Its real meaning lay in a secret protocol – the only place in which the Soviet Union was named.

It is often said that the signatories agreed to go to war with the USSR if either of them was attacked by it. That is not the case. The secret protocol obliged the two parties only to refrain, in the event of an unprovoked Soviet attack on one of them, from any measures that would ease the position of the Soviet Union, and to consult immediately on how to protect their common interests. The pact contained no obligation to fight a joint war. The difference is fundamental: Germany and Japan concluded a military alliance only in 1940.

Two roads to Berlin

By the mid-1930s Germany and Japan found themselves in a similar position. After the Mukden incident and the proclamation of Manchukuo, Japan had been condemned by the international community and in 1933 had left the League of Nations. A few months later Germany did the same. Both states regarded the Versailles order as unjust, both relied more and more on force, and both saw the Soviet Union as their chief enemy. For Japan, after the seizure of Manchuria, the USSR was a direct neighbour along a border thousands of kilometres long, and the Red Army in the Far East was growing fast. For Adolf Hitler, “Bolshevism” was the ideological adversary, and the lands to the east the target of future expansion.

Moscow, for its part, changed course. In 1934 the USSR joined the League of Nations, in May 1935 it concluded mutual assistance treaties with France and Czechoslovakia, and in the summer of 1935 the Seventh Congress of the Comintern proclaimed the policy of popular fronts – cooperation between communists, socialists and liberals against fascism. The congress named Germany and Japan as the chief warmongers. In Berlin and Tokyo this was read as a sign of impending encirclement.

There were, however, many obstacles. The German Foreign Ministry under Konstantin von Neurath and the army command favoured Chiang Kai-shek’s China – Germany’s most important trading partner in Asia, a buyer of German arms and a supplier of tungsten. The Chinese army was trained by German military advisers, from 1934 under General Alexander von Falkenhausen. In April 1936 Germany granted China a credit of 100 million marks. A rapprochement with Japan threatened to cost all of this.

Ribbentrop and Ōshima

The idea therefore came not from the diplomats but from people outside their world. On the German side it was Ribbentrop, who ran the party’s “Ribbentrop Bureau” (Dienststelle Ribbentrop), a rival to Neurath’s ministry, and who in June 1935 had brought back from London the naval agreement with Britain. On the Japanese side it was the military attaché at the embassy in Berlin, General Hiroshi Ōshima, a fervent anti-communist who spoke excellent German and admired Hitler. Contacts between them were maintained by the German arms dealer Friedrich Wilhelm Hack, who also arranged meetings with the head of the Abwehr, Wilhelm Canaris, and the War Minister, Werner von Blomberg. Ōshima largely bypassed his own ambassador and worked through the channels of the Japanese Army General Staff.

In the autumn of 1935, with Hitler himself involved, Ōshima even proposed mutual assistance in the event of a Soviet attack. Both sides soon decided, however, that it would be easier to agree on a promise that neither would help the Soviet Union in a war with the other. Ribbentrop’s associate Hermann von Raumer suggested wrapping the agreement in the “cloak” of a struggle against the Comintern. After all, the Soviet government officially claimed that it was not responsible for the International’s activities, so it would find it hard to treat an agreement directed against the Comintern as a hostile act against the state.

The talks stalled for several months. In Berlin Neurath opposed them, in Tokyo the papers got stuck in the Foreign Ministry, and in February 1936 Japan was shaken by the revolt of young officers. The events of 1936 sped matters up: the ratification of the Franco-Soviet pact by the French Chamber of Deputies at the end of February, after which Hitler sent troops into the Rhineland; the Soviet–Mongolian mutual assistance protocol of March 1936; and in July the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, in which Germany and the USSR quickly took opposite sides. On 22 July 1936 Hitler, Ribbentrop, Ōshima and Raumer discussed the draft in Bayreuth, during the Wagner festival.

The Japanese Foreign Ministry, headed by Hachirō Arita in the government of Prime Minister Kōki Hirota, blunted the draft. It demanded that the commitments regarding the USSR be purely defensive, that in the event of war they provide only for consultations rather than an alliance, and that the agreement not harm relations with Britain and the United States. Its term was cut from ten years to five. The only thing the Japanese failed to achieve was the removal of the name of the USSR from the secret protocol. The text was initialled on 23 October 1936. The Privy Council in Tokyo debated it on 13 and 18 November and approved it unanimously on 25 November.

What was signed

The ceremony took place at the Ribbentrop Bureau rather than at the Foreign Ministry, because Hitler wanted to emphasise that this was a matter of world view. By then Ribbentrop had already been Ambassador in London for several weeks. Three documents were signed.

The main agreement opened with the statement that the aim of the Comintern was to disrupt and subjugate existing states by every means, and that tolerating its interference threatened not only the internal peace of nations but also world peace. In Article I the parties undertook to inform each other of the International’s activities, to consult on defensive measures and to carry them out in close cooperation. Article II provided for jointly inviting third states whose internal peace was threatened by the Comintern’s activities to take similar measures or to accede to the agreement. Article III laid down that the German and Japanese texts were equally authentic and that the agreement would enter into force on the day of signature and remain in force for five years.

The published supplementary protocol announced close cooperation between the authorities of the two states in exchanging information, “stringent measures” within the framework of existing law against persons working for the Comintern at home or abroad, and the establishment of a standing commission.

The secret supplementary protocol had three articles. The first stated that if one of the parties became the object of an unprovoked attack or threat of attack by the USSR, the other undertook to take no measures that would ease the position of the Soviet Union, and the two parties would consult immediately on how to protect their common interests. The second forbade both states to conclude with the USSR, without mutual consent, any political treaties contrary to the spirit of the pact. The third tied the protocol to the term of the agreement. In secret letters attached to the protocol it was established that it did not apply to treaties concluded earlier, above all the German–Soviet neutrality treaty of 1926. That same day Mushakōji asked whether the pact would hinder Japan’s ongoing negotiations with the USSR on fisheries and the borders of Manchukuo, and was told that it would not.

It was, then, a promise of benevolent neutrality and consultation, not an alliance. The word “unprovoked” gave each side a loophole, and the commitment itself concerned a defensive war. This was exactly what the Japanese army wanted: it did not intend to be dragged into a German war of aggression in Europe, while it hoped that Germany would tie down Soviet forces in the west.

Reactions

In the evening a celebratory dinner was held, attended, besides Hitler, by Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, Neurath and State Secretary Ernst von Weizsäcker. From the military only Canaris came. The generals, loyal to the Chinese orientation, thereby made it clear that they did not share the enthusiasm. The German press launched an anti-communist campaign and propaganda for friendship with Japan. The authorities of the Third Reich never admitted the existence of the secret protocol.

In Japan the pact aroused little enthusiasm. Newspapers were puzzled by the haste and doubted whether Germany would really sacrifice its soldiers in a Japanese war with the USSR. The navy considered that Germany would be of no use in a possible war with Britain and the United States, and that closer ties with it would only make agreement with the Anglo-Saxon powers harder. The last of the genrō, Prince Kinmochi Saionji, told those around him that Germany had taken almost all the benefit from the agreement and that Japan had, if anything, lost by it. Meanwhile Tokyo’s hope that anti-communist slogans would win over the British proved illusory. In London and Washington the agreement was seen as heralding cooperation between states that wanted to change borders by force.

Moscow reacted most sharply. Even before the signing, the Soviet Ambassador in Tokyo asked Arita about secret clauses and was told that the talks concerned only the Comintern. A few days after 25 November the Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Maxim Litvinov, declared at the Extraordinary Eighth Congress of Soviets that the published text was merely a cover for another agreement negotiated at the same time. He was right. Soviet intelligence had known about the secret talks since at least the turn of 1935 and 1936, when it intercepted Ōshima’s cables to the General Staff. The USSR refused to sign a new fisheries convention with Japan that had already been negotiated and agreed only to extend the old one by a year. Trade between the two states began to shrink, and incidents on the Manchukuo border multiplied.

The pact invites others

Under Article II the pact was meant to be open. At the signing itself Ribbentrop announced that Italy would soon “raise the anti-Bolshevik banner in the south”. Benito Mussolini, who a month earlier had concluded an agreement with Germany that he called the Berlin–Rome “Axis” in Milan on 1 November 1936, held back for the time being. German aircraft and tanks were already fighting in Spain alongside the Italians: ten days earlier the Condor Legion had gone into action over Madrid.

Poland, too, was urged to join. In February 1937 Göring, who had come to Poland to hunt, sounded out Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły on the matter, according to Polish accounts, and in the years that followed Berlin returned to the subject several times. The Foreign Minister, Józef Beck, refused every time, because joining a bloc directed against the USSR would have wrecked Poland’s policy of balance between its two neighbours, under which the declaration with Germany and the non-aggression pact with Moscow were treated as of equal weight.

Significance

The Anti-Comintern Pact was modest in content but great in significance. For the first time it linked two states that were undermining the international order in Europe and Asia, and gave them a common ideological banner. Hitler showed that he could make alliances without Britain, and Japan that it was not alone after leaving the League of Nations. The price was paid above all by China. After the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in July 1937 Germany manoeuvred for several months, but in 1938, when Ribbentrop became Foreign Minister, it recognised Manchukuo, halted arms deliveries to Chiang Kai-shek and recalled his German advisers.

The circle of signatories widened. Italy joined in November 1937, Hungary and Manchukuo in February 1939, and General Franco’s Spain in March. Attempts to turn the pact into a full military alliance foundered, however, on a difference of aims: Japan wanted an alliance against the USSR, Ribbentrop above all against Britain. When on 23 August 1939 that same Ribbentrop signed the pact with Molotov in Moscow, Tokyo regarded it as a breach of the 1936 secret protocol, all the more painful because Japanese troops were at that very moment suffering defeat in the Battle of Khalkhin Gol. The government of Kiichirō Hiranuma resigned.

The pact did not die. In September 1940 Germany, Italy and Japan concluded the Tripartite Pact, by then an open alliance directed against the United States and Britain. After Germany attacked the USSR, on 25 November 1941 – the fifth anniversary of its signing – the Anti-Comintern Pact was extended for five years and was joined by Bulgaria, Finland, Romania, Slovakia, Croatia, occupied Denmark and the collaborationist government of Wang Jingwei in Nanjing. By then it had become above all a propaganda badge of membership of Hitler’s camp. The word “anti-communism”, under which two revisionist powers had shaken hands in 1936, later served to justify the war of annihilation in the east.