The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact

On the night of 23/24 August 1939, in an office in the Kremlin, 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 of the USSR, signed a treaty of non-aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The document bore the date 23 August, although the signatures were put to it after midnight. A smiling Joseph Stalin stood by the table. The public text provided that neither state would attack the other or support anyone who attacked it. Attached to the treaty was a secret additional protocol that divided Central and Eastern Europe between the two dictatorships: Finland, Estonia, Latvia, eastern Poland and Romanian Bessarabia were to belong to the Soviet “sphere of interest”, western Poland and Lithuania to the German one. The agreement, known in Poland as the Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact and in many countries also as the Hitler–Stalin Pact, assured Adolf Hitler that he could attack Poland without fear of a war on two fronts. Nine days later the Second World War began.

Two hostile states

For six years after Hitler came to power, Germany and the Soviet Union seemed implacable enemies. In Mein Kampf Hitler had written of conquering living space in the east and of “Jewish Bolshevism” as a mortal threat to Europe. Germany concluded the Anti-Comintern Pact with Japan, and in Spain German airmen fought the Republicans, who were backed by Moscow. The Soviet Union joined the League of Nations, concluded alliances with France and Czechoslovakia, and its Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Maxim Litvinov, championed collective security against aggressors.

The two states’ shared past, however, told a different story. After the First World War they were united by hostility to the Versailles order and to reborn Poland. In 1922 they concluded the Treaty of Rapallo, the Reichswehr trained in secret in Russia, and in 1926 the Treaty of Berlin bound both sides to neutrality should either be attacked by a third state. Even in the 1930s Stalin did not close the road to an understanding with Berlin and from time to time sounded it out through his emissaries.

The turning point came with the Munich Agreement. Britain and France decided the fate of Czechoslovakia without Moscow, and Stalin read this as proof that the West preferred to turn Hitler eastwards rather than fight him. On 10 March 1939, at the 18th Party Congress, he made the speech later known as the “chestnuts speech” (PL): the Soviet Union would not let itself be drawn into conflict by “warmongers” and would not pull other people’s chestnuts out of the fire. Historians still argue over whether this was a signal to Hitler, but that is how it was understood in Berlin. Five days later Germany occupied the Czech lands, and on 31 March Britain gave a guarantee to Poland, on which Hitler had since the autumn of 1938 been pressing demands concerning Gdańsk (Danzig) and an extraterritorial road across Pomerania. Warsaw’s refusal led Hitler to opt for war: on 3 April the Case White directive was issued, ordering readiness to attack Poland from 1 September.

A double game

In the spring and summer of 1939 Moscow was conducting two sets of talks at once. In the open it negotiated with Britain and France: on 17 April Litvinov proposed a tripartite military alliance with guarantees for all the states between the Baltic and the Black Sea. On the same day in Berlin the Soviet Ambassador, Alexei Merekalov, called on State Secretary Ernst von Weizsäcker and remarked that ideology need not stand in the way of good relations. On 3 May Stalin dismissed Litvinov, a Jew and the symbol of the policy of collective security, and entrusted foreign affairs to Molotov, who remained head of government. In Berlin the change was understood as an invitation.

The talks with the West dragged on for months. The parties argued over guarantees for the Baltic states, which did not want them, and over the definition of “indirect aggression”, which in the Soviet version would have allowed the Red Army to enter a neighbouring country if its government drew closer to Germany. London was in no hurry, because it did not trust Stalin and had a low opinion of an army bled white by the Great Purge. Military talks began in Moscow only on 12 August. The British mission was led by Admiral Reginald Drax, who did not even have written credentials, the French by General Aimé Doumenc, and the Soviet one by the People’s Commissar for Defence, Kliment Voroshilov. On 14 August Voroshilov put the question that decided the outcome: would the Red Army, in the event of war, be allowed to pass through Polish territory – through the Wilno corridor and through Galicia – in order to make contact with the Germans? The Polish government consistently refused. Foreign Minister Józef Beck and Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły believed that Soviet troops, once let in, would never leave, and that their entry might provoke Germany into war. Only on 23 August, under heavy pressure from Paris, did Beck agree that the French could declare in Moscow that, in the event of joint action against German aggression, Polish–Soviet cooperation “was not excluded”. By then it was too late.

At the same time a second set of talks was under way, confidential and increasingly concrete. Formally they concerned trade: Germany needed Soviet oil, grain, timber and metals, which in the event of a British blockade it could not obtain elsewhere, and the USSR needed German machinery and military technology. On 26 July, in a Berlin restaurant, Karl Schnurre of the German Foreign Ministry assured the Soviet chargé d’affaires, Georgy Astakhov, that between the Baltic and the Black Sea there were no conflicts of interest that could not be settled. A few days later Ribbentrop repeated this in person. The talks gathered pace in mid-August, because Hitler had a deadline: the attack on Poland was planned for the last days of August, and the autumn rains could wreck the campaign. On 15 August the Ambassador in Moscow, Friedrich-Werner von der Schulenburg, informed Molotov that Ribbentrop was ready to come. Two days later Molotov replied that Moscow wanted a non-aggression pact with a protocol defining the interests of both sides – but first an economic agreement.

The credit agreement and Hitler’s telegram

The trade and credit agreement – the German–Soviet Commercial Agreement – was signed in Berlin at around 2 a.m. on 20 August but dated 19 August. Germany granted the USSR a seven-year credit of 200 million Reichsmarks at an effective interest rate of 4.5 per cent for the purchase of machinery, industrial plant, ships and military equipment. It was to be repaid in deliveries of raw materials from 1946. In addition, over the next two years the Soviet Union was to supply raw materials worth 180 million Reichsmarks. Pravda wrote that the agreement might be a step towards improving not only economic but also political relations.

Molotov proposed that Ribbentrop come on 26 or 27 August. For Hitler that was too late. On 20 August he sent a telegram directly to Stalin in which he accepted the Soviet draft treaty, wrote that the tension between Germany and Poland had become “intolerable” and that a crisis could break out any day, and asked that Ribbentrop be received on 22 or at the latest 23 August. Stalin replied the following afternoon: the Soviet government agreed to Ribbentrop’s arrival on 23 August. Hitler, who was awaiting the answer at the Berghof, made no secret of his delight, according to witnesses. Late on the evening of 21 August German radio announced that the Reich and the USSR would conclude a non-aggression pact. On the same day Voroshilov adjourned the talks with the Western missions without setting a new date.

The news stunned the world. On 22 August, at the Berghof, Hitler told the commanders of the Wehrmacht that Poland was now in the position in which he had wanted to see it, and that he did not fear intervention by the Western powers, because their leaders were “little worms” whom he had got to know at Munich.

A night in the Kremlin

On 22 August Ribbentrop and a delegation of several dozen people flew in two Focke-Wulf Condor aircraft to Königsberg, where he spent the night, and at around 1 p.m. on 23 August he landed in Moscow. At the airport swastika flags flew alongside Soviet ones; according to the recollections of those present, they had been borrowed from a film studio, where they had been used in making anti-fascist films. A band played the German anthem. After a short rest at the embassy, Ribbentrop drove to the Kremlin in the afternoon, where to his surprise not only Molotov but Stalin himself was waiting. The talks went on, with a break, from the afternoon until late at night. The interpreter was the embassy counsellor Gustav Hilger, and the text brought from Berlin had been drafted by the head of the German Foreign Ministry’s legal department, Friedrich Gaus.

The non-aggression treaty was agreed quickly. The secret protocol took up most of the time. Ribbentrop wanted to keep part of Latvia for Germany, but Stalin demanded the whole country, with the ports of Liepāja and Ventspils. Ribbentrop referred the matter to Hitler, who checked the map and replied briefly: “Yes, agreed.”

After midnight – at around 2 a.m. on 24 August, according to most accounts – Molotov and Ribbentrop signed both documents. Hitler’s photographer Heinrich Hoffmann captured the moment: Molotov at the desk with a pen, behind him Ribbentrop and a beaming Stalin. Champagne was served and toasts were raised. According to a note by the German diplomat Andor Hencke, Stalin said: “I know how much the German nation loves its Führer; I should therefore like to drink to his health.” Molotov raised a toast to Stalin, recalling that it was his March speech, “well understood in Germany”, that had set the turn in motion. On parting, Stalin assured Ribbentrop that the Soviet government took the pact very seriously and gave his word of honour that the Soviet Union would not betray its partner. That same night Ribbentrop telephoned Hitler with news of the signing.

What was signed

The public treaty had seven articles. The parties undertook to refrain from any violence, aggression or attack against each other, whether individually or jointly with other powers. Should either become the object of belligerent action by a third power, the other was not to support that power in any way. The treaty provided for consultation on matters of common interest, a ban on joining any grouping directed against the other party, and the peaceful settlement of disputes. It was concluded for ten years and came into force upon signature, even before ratification. What mattered most was what it did not contain. The non-aggression pacts the USSR had concluded under Litvinov, including the one with Poland in 1932, allowed a party to denounce the agreement if the other attacked a third state. The pact with Germany had no such clause. If Germany attacked Poland, the Soviet Union would remain bound by its promise not to side with the victim.

The secret additional protocol had four points. The first stated that in the event of a “territorial and political rearrangement” in the area of the Baltic states (Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania), the northern border of Lithuania would be the boundary between the German and Soviet spheres of interest, and that both sides recognised Lithuania’s interest in the Wilno (Vilnius) area, which at that time belonged to Poland. The second provided that in the event of a similar rearrangement of the areas belonging to the Polish state, the spheres of interest would be divided “approximately” along the line of the rivers Narew, Vistula and San, and that whether both sides considered it desirable to maintain an independent Polish state, and what its borders should be, would be decided “in the course of further political developments” by friendly agreement. In the third, the Soviet side stressed its interest in Bessarabia, and the German side declared its complete political disinterest in those areas. The fourth required the protocol to be kept strictly secret. Because the Narew line did not reach the border of East Prussia, the river Pisa was added at Soviet request in an explanatory protocol of 28 August.

This division calls for the correction of a common simplification. In August 1939 Lithuania was not assigned to the Soviet Union but placed in the German sphere, with Germany merely recognising its claims to the Wilno region. Lithuania passed into the Soviet sphere only under a further agreement between Ribbentrop and Molotov, concluded on 28 September 1939. Nor did the protocol speak openly of occupation or partition. It used euphemisms about “spheres of interest” and “territorial rearrangements”, but set against the war that Hitler was to start within days, its meaning was clear: two powers were dividing the spoils between them in advance.

Reactions

On 24 August Pravda and Izvestia published the public text of the pact on their front pages, with a photograph of a smiling Stalin. The secret protocol became known sooner than its authors supposed. As early as 24 August the secretary of the German embassy in Moscow, Hans von Herwarth, an opponent of Nazism, passed its substance to the American diplomat Charles Bohlen, and Washington informed London. The Polish government did not receive this knowledge from its allies. In Warsaw it had long been assumed that a lasting understanding between Hitler and Stalin was unlikely, and the pact was regarded as a serious but not decisive worsening of Poland’s position.

In London the pact did not lead the government to withdraw its guarantee. On 22 August Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain wrote to Hitler that the agreement with Moscow would not alter Britain’s obligations to Poland, and on 24 August Parliament passed an emergency powers act in a single day. Ribbentrop and Hitler had counted on the opposite: that faced with the pact with the USSR, the Western powers would once again give way.

Germany’s allies felt the most humiliated. For more than three months Japan had been engaged in heavy fighting at Khalkhin Gol against Soviet and Mongolian forces, and on 20 August, three days before the pact was signed, the Red Army under Georgy Zhukov had launched a major offensive there. The government in Tokyo had spent months debating whether to turn the Anti-Comintern Pact into a military alliance with Germany, and now it learned from the press that Berlin had come to terms with its chief enemy. On 28 August Prime Minister Kiichirō Hiranuma resigned, declaring that a “complicated and baffling” situation had arisen in Europe. Italy, bound to Germany by the Pact of Steel, was presented with a fait accompli. Communists all over the world, who only days earlier had dismissed rumours of an agreement as fascist propaganda, had to change course, and the Communist International soon declared the war to be a conflict between imperialists in which workers should take no part.

On 31 August the Supreme Soviet of the USSR ratified the pact, and Molotov called the day of its signing a turning point in the history of Europe.

Why Stalin chose Hitler

Historians have argued over Stalin’s motives for decades. Some stress fear: the Soviet Union, weakened by the purges and threatened by Japan in the Far East, did not believe – so the argument goes – that Britain and France would really fight, and feared being left alone against Germany. The pact gave it time and moved its border westwards. Others point out that Hitler offered Stalin what the West could not and would not give: the lands of his neighbours. Britain and France proposed the joint defence of states that themselves did not want Soviet help. Germany proposed their partition. Stalin may also have counted on a war between Germany and the Western powers exhausting all sides, allowing the Soviet Union to enter the game at a moment of its choosing. The text of an alleged speech by Stalin at a Politburo meeting on 19 August, in which he supposedly set out this plan and which has circulated since the autumn of 1939, is, however, regarded by most scholars as a forgery or at best a doubtful source.

For Hitler the calculation was simpler. The pact removed the threat of a war on two fronts and wrecked the possibility of an alliance between the West and the USSR, while deliveries of Soviet raw materials blunted the effects of a British blockade. Hitler did not, however, abandon his goal of conquering living space in the east. The agreement with Moscow was for him a means, not a change of programme.

The pact’s long shadow

The pact opened the way to war. On 1 September 1939 Germany invaded Poland, and on 3 September Britain and France declared war on Germany. On 17 September the Red Army, breaking the non-aggression pact of 1932, entered Poland from the east, and the Soviet government announced that the Polish state had ceased to exist. On 28 September Ribbentrop flew to Moscow again and signed with Molotov the Boundary and Friendship Treaty: the dividing line was moved from the Vistula to the Bug, Germany received the Lublin Voivodeship and part of the Warsaw Voivodeship, and the Soviet Union received Lithuania in exchange. Secret protocols bound both sides to suppress Polish “agitation”. The occupiers also held several Gestapo–NKVD conferences. In the territories seized by the USSR the NKVD deported hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens, and in the spring of 1940 it murdered some 22,000 Polish officers, police officers and members of the intelligentsia at Katyn and other sites.

The Soviet sphere defined in the protocol was soon occupied. In the autumn of 1939 Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had to accept Soviet bases, and in June 1940, while Germany was crushing France, they were occupied and annexed to the USSR. Finland refused to make concessions and was attacked on 30 November 1939; in the Winter War it preserved its independence but lost part of Karelia. In June 1940 Romania gave up Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, which the protocol had not mentioned. Until June 1941 the Soviet Union supplied Germany with oil, grain, metals and rubber. On 22 June 1941 Hitler attacked his partner, and the pact ceased to exist.

The secret protocol lived on long after the pact itself had died. The German original was probably lost, but a microfilm copy survived from the archives of the German Foreign Ministry. In 1946 the defence of one of the accused at the Nuremberg tribunal tried to introduce it, and in 1948 the US State Department published it in a collection of documents on German–Soviet relations. For half a century the Soviet Union claimed it was a forgery, and Molotov denied its existence to the end of his life. On 23 August 1989 some two million Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians formed the Baltic Way, a human chain from Tallinn to Vilnius. On 24 December 1989 the Congress of People’s Deputies of the USSR, on the basis of the work of a commission chaired by Alexander Yakovlev, confirmed the existence of the protocol and declared it null and void from the moment of signing. The Soviet original, kept in the archive of the Party leadership, was made public in 1992. Since 2009, 23 August has been observed as the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism.

In Poland and the Baltic states the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact is a symbol of the collusion of two totalitarian regimes and is sometimes called the fourth partition of Poland. It was the pact that forced Poland in 1939 to fight two neighbours at once, and the dividing line of autumn 1939, close to the Curzon Line, became Poland’s eastern border after the war in 1945.