The German–Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty

On 28 September 1939, in Moscow, the Reich foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov, Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars and at the same time People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, signed in the presence of Joseph Stalin the German–Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty. The document bears the date of 28 September, although the signatures were not affixed until about five o’clock on the morning of 29 September. It was Ribbentrop’s second visit to the Kremlin in five weeks. The first had ended with the non-aggression pact and its secret protocol, which had divided eastern Europe into spheres of interest in advance. The second set the seal on what the armies of both states had done in the meantime: Poland, attacked by Germany on 1 September and by the Soviet Union on 17 September, was to vanish from the map. The treaty fixed a new boundary between the occupiers on the Bug and the San, while secret protocols transferred Lithuania to the Soviet sphere in exchange for the Lublin region and part of Mazovia, and bound both sides to suppress Polish “agitation” jointly. The same day brought the capitulation of Warsaw.

From pact to treaty

The secret protocol of 23 August had provided that the spheres of interest in Poland would be bounded “approximately” by the line of the rivers Narew, Vistula and San, and had left for later the question of whether some rump Polish state should be preserved. When the Red Army entered Poland, the Wehrmacht already stood far to the east of that line: near Lwów (Lviv), at Brest, in the Lublin region. On 18 September Stalin asked the German ambassador, Friedrich-Werner von der Schulenburg, whether the German generals, who were “reluctant to give up occupied territory”, would really withdraw behind the agreed line. They did. A joint communiqué of 22 September fixed the demarcation line along the rivers Pisa, Narew, Vistula and San, and at Brest, where the forces of the two states had met, Heinz Guderian’s corps handed the town over to the Red Army that same day at a joint ceremony.

On 19 September Molotov informed Schulenburg that Moscow had abandoned the idea of leaving a “rump Poland” and wished to divide the country along the four rivers, and that negotiations on the final settlement of the “Polish area” must be held in Moscow, since the Soviet leaders could not leave the country. Ribbentrop replied that Berlin shared this view and decided to fly there in person. On the evening of 25 September Stalin summoned Schulenburg to the Kremlin and put forward a new proposal. In his view an independent Polish rump state would be a source of constant friction between Germany and the USSR. He therefore proposed adding to the German part the whole of the Lublin Voivodeship and part of the Warsaw Voivodeship up to the Bug, in return for which Germany would give up Lithuania, which the August pact had assigned to its sphere. He announced at the same time that the Soviet Union would shortly take up “the solution of the problem of the Baltic states” and counted on Berlin’s full support. He named Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The problem was already being solved: for several days Moscow had been putting pressure on Estonia, using the escape of a Polish submarine from Tallinn as a pretext.

Three days in Moscow

Ribbentrop flew into Moscow at about six in the evening on 27 September. His delegation included, among others, the head of the Foreign Ministry’s legal department, Friedrich Gaus, the expert on trade with the East, Karl Schnurre, and the Gauleiter of Danzig, Albert Forster. The course of the talks is known in detail thanks to the notes of the embassy counsellor Gustav Hilger, who interpreted and kept the record. A copy survived among Schulenburg’s private papers and was published in 1991 by the German historian Ingeborg Fleischhauer.

The first conversation began at ten in the evening and lasted three hours. Ribbentrop opened with the war in the west, which in Germany, he said, was reportedly being called the “potato war”; he argued that the Siegfried Line was impregnable and that England did not want a long war. He then set out three matters: future relations between the two states, the final boundary, and the Baltic states. Hitler, he said, had chosen the Soviet Union. Germany’s real enemy was England, and towards England the interests of the two states coincided. Ribbentrop had brought a draft joint declaration that was to announce co-operation against England, and even a joint defence of their gains. On the boundary he asked for concessions: Germany was a “small” country short of oil and timber, so it would like to receive the oilfield on the upper San around Borysław and Drohobycz, the forests near Augustów and Białystok, and greater compensation for Lithuania. He drew on the map a line that would have left Białystok and western Lithuania on the German side.

Stalin refused almost everything. He gave assurances that co-operation with Germany had always been a principle of Soviet policy and that the Soviet Union would not allow Germany “to be brought down”, but he put off his answer to the draft declaration until the following day, merely remarking that the Bolsheviks had never felt any sympathy for England. On Poland he presented two variants. A division along the Vistula would mean that Germany would set up a protectorate in its part and the USSR something like a Polish Soviet republic in its own, and the Poles, striving for reunification, would begin to set the two states against each other. It was better, therefore, that all ethnically Polish lands should be in a single pair of hands – German ones. The Lublin region and eastern Mazovia had, by his reckoning, 4 million inhabitants, Lithuania only 2 million, so Germany was getting a good bargain, “because people are the most valuable thing one can get”. He would not give up the oilfield: he had promised it to the Ukrainians, who in his view would never renounce it. Instead he offered to sell half of its output, some 300,000 tonnes a year, and to deliver the other half from other Soviet fields in exchange for coal and steel pipes. In the north he agreed to cede only a narrow wedge around Suwałki between East Prussia and Lithuania.

During the night Ribbentrop telephoned Hitler. At three in the afternoon on 28 September he announced that the Führer accepted Stalin’s “second variant”, with minor amendments. The details were settled over the maps of the Chief of the General Staff of the Red Army, Boris Shaposhnikov. Stalin would not give up Augustów, through which an important railway line ran, but he agreed to bend the boundary southwards so that Germany received most of the Augustów Forest. Between the Narew and the Bug he gave up a bulge around Ostrołęka, Pułtusk and Ostrów Mazowiecka, so that the railway from Ostrołęka to Małkinia remained on the German side. In return the Germans moved the boundary northwards around Rawa Ruska and Lubaczów. There was a long dispute over Przemyśl. Ribbentrop argued that a town lying on both banks of a river could not be divided, especially as the Soviet Union was receiving “great and beautiful Lwów”, but Stalin and Molotov would not yield. The boundary followed the San, and the southern part of Przemyśl, on the right bank, went to the USSR. In the south the line ended at the source of the San, west of the Uzhok Pass, which remained on the Soviet side.

In the evening Molotov gave a dinner for the Germans in the Kremlin, attended by Stalin, Kliment Voroshilov, Lavrentiy Beria and other members of the leadership. He proposed toasts to each of the guests, and said of Ribbentrop that he was a man who never came in vain. The guests then went to the Bolshoi Theatre to see Swan Lake, while Stalin and Molotov concluded their negotiations with the Estonian foreign minister, Karl Selter: that same night the Soviet–Estonian mutual assistance pact was signed, opening the way for the Red Army to bases in Estonia. At one in the morning the talks with the Germans resumed. Stalin demanded that the second part of the joint declaration be toned down, because the German draft, which spoke openly of the imperialist aims of the western powers, in his opinion “expressed the truth too clearly”. Ribbentrop telephoned Hitler, who agreed to the change. At about five in the morning seven documents were signed. At noon on 29 September Ribbentrop flew back to Berlin.

What was signed

The public treaty had five articles. In the preamble the two governments declared that, “after the collapse of the former Polish state”, they regarded it as exclusively their task to restore peace and order in its territory. Article I fixed the boundary of “their respective state interests” in the territory of “the former Polish state” along a line marked on an attached map, which was to be described precisely in a supplementary protocol. Article II recognised this boundary as final and rejected any interference by third powers. Article III gave Germany the administration of the area west of the line and the USSR that of the area to the east of it. Article IV called this settlement a “firm foundation” for the development of friendly relations between the two peoples. The treaty came into force on signature. The map with the boundary drawn on it was signed by Stalin and Ribbentrop.

The new boundary ran from the point where East Prussia met Lithuania along the Pisa to the Narew, turned towards the Bug short of Ostrołęka, then followed the Bug southwards, then a stretch overland that left Rawa Ruska and Lubaczów on the Soviet side, to the San, and up the San to its source. The first secret supplementary protocol amended the August protocol: Lithuania passed into the Soviet sphere, and the Lublin Voivodeship and part of the Warsaw Voivodeship into the German one. Should the Soviet Union take “special measures” in Lithuania to protect its interests, a strip of land in south-western Lithuania, on the left bank of the Šešupė, was to go to Germany. The second secret protocol read: “Both parties will tolerate in their territories no Polish agitation which affects the territories of the other party. They will suppress in their territories all beginnings of such agitation and inform each other concerning suitable measures for this purpose.”

A confidential protocol on resettlement obliged the government of the USSR not to obstruct Reich citizens and other persons of German descent who wished to move from its territory to the German sphere. The resettlement was to be carried out by plenipotentiaries of the Reich, and the emigrants’ property was to be protected. Germany assumed the same obligation towards inhabitants of its sphere of Ukrainian and Belarusian descent. Two letters exchanged by Ribbentrop and Molotov announced an economic programme: Soviet raw materials in exchange for German manufactured goods, transit through the USSR from Romania, Iran, Afghanistan and the Far East, and additional deliveries of oil in a quantity corresponding to the annual output of the Borysław–Drohobycz oilfield.

The joint declaration of the two governments, published together with the treaty, opened the German “peace offensive”. Since Germany and the USSR had “definitively settled” the problems arising from the collapse of the Polish state and had created “a sure foundation for a lasting peace” in eastern Europe, it was in the true interest of all peoples to end the war between Germany on the one hand and England and France on the other. Should the efforts of the two governments fail, this would prove that England and France were responsible for the continuation of the war, and in that case Germany and the USSR would consult each other on the “necessary measures”. Of Ribbentrop’s ambitious draft, intended to forge an anti-British alliance, there remained only a vague undertaking to consult.

The logic of the exchange

At first sight Stalin was giving away more than he was getting: he was renouncing a densely populated area, including Lublin and the suburbs of Warsaw, in exchange for the smaller Lithuania. But his calculation was well considered. The exchange relieved the Soviet Union of millions of Poles who would have been a source of resistance, and it brought the boundary closer to the Curzon Line, proposed by the western powers in 1919–1920 as an ethnographic frontier, which allowed the annexation to be presented as the “liberation” of Ukrainians and Belarusians. Lithuania completed Soviet control of the Baltic coast. Ingeborg Fleischhauer observes that giving up the lands of central Poland reduced the risk of conflict with Poland’s guarantors and, after Germany attacked the USSR, made it easier for Moscow to ally itself with Britain. Hitler, meanwhile, gained quiet in the east, population, raw materials and a free hand throughout the “Polish area”. According to the most frequently cited estimates, the USSR kept slightly more than half the territory of pre-war Poland, with some 13 million inhabitants, and Germany the smaller but far more densely populated part, with more than 20 million.

Both sides called their agreement a treaty of “friendship”, and Poland “the former Polish state”. Yet the Polish state had not ceased to exist. Its authorities, which had crossed the Romanian border on the night of 17–18 September, had been interned, but on 30 September President Ignacy Mościcki handed over his office to Władysław Raczkiewicz, who entrusted General Władysław Sikorski with forming a government. At home the fighting was still going on: the Modlin Fortress capitulated on 29 September, Hel on 2 October, and on 6 October the Battle of Kock, the last battle of the September Campaign, came to an end.

Its place in the war

On 4 October Schulenburg and Molotov signed a supplementary protocol describing the course of the boundary in detail. At the turn of September and October Red Army units left the fragments of the Lublin region they had already occupied, and around 8 October the Germans entered Chełm and Zamość. Thousands of people went east across the Bug with the Soviet troops, among them many Jews who feared German occupation. On 6 October, in a speech to the Reichstag, Hitler launched the “peace offensive” announced in the Moscow declaration, but the French prime minister, Édouard Daladier, and the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, rejected it on 10 and 12 October. On 31 October Molotov told the Supreme Soviet of the USSR that one swift blow by the German army, followed by one from the Red Army, had been enough for nothing to remain of this “ugly offspring of the Versailles Treaty”.

In the Polish lands both occupiers set about the “reorganisation” announced in Article III. By a decree of 8 October Hitler incorporated Pomerania, Greater Poland, Silesia, northern Mazovia and the Suwałki region into the Reich, and out of the rest of his sphere he created the General Government. In the east, after rigged elections to people’s assemblies on 22 October, the Soviet Union at the beginning of November incorporated the occupied lands into the Ukrainian and Belarusian SSRs. On 10 October it handed Wilno (Vilnius), together with part of the Wilno region, to Lithuania, which at the same time had to accept Soviet garrisons. The protocol on resettlement opened the way to the “Heim ins Reich” operation: under an agreement of 16 November 1939, some 130,000 ethnic Germans from Volhynia, Eastern Galicia and the Narew area left the Soviet sphere for the Reich in the winter of 1939–1940, and many of them were settled on the farms of Poles expelled from the incorporated lands. Far fewer people moved in the other direction. The protocol on Polish “agitation” was the basis for co-operation between the two repressive apparatuses against the Polish underground. Joint commissions for the exchange of prisoners and refugees were at work, and the literature also describes meetings between representatives of the Gestapo and the NKVD in 1940, although their course and significance remain a matter of dispute among historians.

The exchange of letters bore fruit in the trade agreement of 11 February 1940, thanks to which Soviet grain, oil and metals helped Germany to circumvent the British blockade. Lithuania, handed over to the Soviet sphere, was in June 1940, together with Latvia and Estonia, occupied by the Red Army and incorporated into the USSR. The Soviet Union kept the strip of Lithuania beyond the Šešupė that had been promised to Germany, and by a secret protocol of 10 January 1941 bought it from the Reich for 7.5 million dollars in gold. The new boundary of “friendship” lasted less than two years. On 22 June 1941 Germany crossed it, attacking the Soviet Union. In the Sikorski–Mayski Agreement of 30 July 1941 the Soviet government recognised that the German–Soviet treaties of 1939 concerning territorial changes in Poland had “lost their validity”, but it did not undertake to restore the pre-war frontier. The line of 28 September 1939, close to the Curzon Line, with minor changes in Poland’s favour, including Białystok and Przemyśl on the Polish side, became in 1945 the eastern frontier of post-war Poland.