Author Interview: Roger Moorhouse : The Devils' Alliance Hiter's Pact with Stalin 1939-1941

Below is my interview with author RogerMoorhouse. Roger kindly lend me some of his time to chat about his book The Devils' Alliance Hiter's Pact with Stalin 1939-1941. If you haven't already check out my review of this must read title. Roger's replies to my questions appear in the red text below. Note to the reader I have deliberately left the formatting in tact so Roger's answers are left unedited.  

Can you introduce yourself and the other books you have written to the listener?

I am a freelance historian specialising in modern Germany and Central Europe. I studied at the School of Slavonic Studies of London University and went on to work as senior researcher to Professor Norman Davies.

As well as a co-authored book with Professor Davies, I am author of three solo books, Killing Hitler (2006), Berlin at War (2010) and my new book The Devils’ Alliance, which has just been published in paperback in the UK. The Devils’ Alliance is about the Nazi-Soviet Pact – in my opinion one of the most fascinating and least-understood episodes of World War Two.

Clearly the borders drawn up under the Nazi-Soviet Pact (hereafter the Pact) would end up defining the Cold War era. In light of this can you explain briefly the importance of this to people who are to young to recall the Cold War?

Well, the borders are important and they aren’t. The main frontier drawn up by Hitler and Stalin through inter-war Poland would be more or less precisely restored (unilaterally) by the Soviets in 1944, and is Poland’s eastern frontier to this day. So, in that respect it is perhaps peculiar to think that that line on the map is a direct result of Hitler and Stalin’s negotiations in 1939. It is even more remarkable to consider that the state of Moldova is itself a product of the Pact – it approximates to the Romanian province of Bessarabia, which was claimed by Stalin under the Pact and annexed in 1940. So, the modern map still bears the scars of Hitler and Stalin’s collaboration.

Regarding the Cold War, the most important frontier was not the Polish one, however, it was the East-West divide through Germany – the line of the Iron Curtain, from Travemünde to Trieste – which divided the capitalist west from the communist east. But that is another story.

Can you outline to the listener how the Nazi and Soviet Propaganda machines struggled to explain the Pact to their respective peoples? To what degree even in absolute dictatorships does public opinion matter?

Both the Nazis and the Soviets had spent most of previous decade before the signature of the Pact insulting one another. Indeed, both had made popular and political capital out of portraying the other as diabolical, sub-human and so on. For each of them, the other was the ultimate political bogey-man. So, one can only imagine what went through the minds of the ordinary Soviet and German people when the pact was announced in August 1939.

To some extent, given the brutal nature of both regimes, there was a lot of deferential thinking in evidence – the idea that “The Boss must know what he’s doing, and who am I to question him?” So few, on either side, dared to criticise the Pact openly. The Nazis came closest to open protest – it was said that the garden of the Nazi Party HQ was strewn with Party badges after the Pact was announced.

Neither side did much in the way of explanation – the new line was given and that was that. The Soviets tried to place agitators in town squares to explain and answer questions, but it proved too difficult. How do you defend the indefensible?

Curiously, public opinion does matter in a dictatorship. Every dictatorial system needs a degree of consent to be able to function: an absolute dictator who had no supporters would not last long. Also, there are few legitimate ways to vent dissent in a dictatorship (unlike in a democracy), so it is actually all the more imperative that the dictator carries at least a healthy proportion of his people with him.

Nazi Germany was very much a “consensual dictatorship” – had Hitler carried out a free plebiscite on his rule in 1939, I have no doubt that he would have scored about 80% or more. So public opinion matters – it has to be massaged and influenced; the people have to be carried along. This is why the Pact was such a problem for both the Nazis and the Soviets, as they struggled to rationalise it. I devote a chapter to this issue in the book – it is a fascinating subject.

Stalin expected a stalemate (aka WW1 trench warfare) when Hitler turned westwards towards France and the Low Countries. When the Germans won outright over France how much of Stalin's thinking was thrown off balance?

Yes, Stalin – like everyone else – was expecting a rerun of World War One in 1940. And, like everyone else, he was surprised when it didn’t happen.

Stalin’s rationale in signing the Pact in 1939 had been that Germany would thereby turn westward and attack the Western Powers. For Stalin, this would be win-win – his two geopolitical enemies fighting out a bloody and protracted conflict. So, when that didn’t happen, and Britain and France were swiftly defeated, he had to think again.

This is what led to the visit of the Soviet foreign minister to Berlin in November 1940 – it was effectively an attempt to reset the basis of the Nazi-Soviet relationship, to define new strategic goals. That ‘reset’ failed – and by the end of the year, Hitler would give the order for Operation Barbarossa – the attack on the Soviet Union. But Stalin, crucially, could not imagine that Hitler would attack him. He thought that the economic and strategic deal that he gave Germany was so good that Hitler would have to be mad to attack him. This was why he was taken by surprise in June 1941. So, the defeat of the British and French did prompt a partial Soviet rethink, but Stalin still did not imagine that he was next on the menu.

On page 54 you describe how the Soviet and Nazi occupation policies were virtually identical. Is it fair to say both regimes had the goal of removing anybody who could remotely mount a resistance movement? Also can you outline out Poles in vain tried to head to the Nazi or Soviet occupied areas for a chance of better treatment?

It is certainly curious to note the uncanny parallels between Nazi and Soviet occupation policies in occupied Poland. But we have to remind ourselves that both Berlin and Moscow were fundamentally antithetical to the existence of Poland, and both wanted it wiped from the map. Without this substantial territorial “carrot” I doubt whether it would have been possible for the Nazis and the Soviets to come to terms at all.

So, once in occupation of Poland – and the two divided the country almost in half – they set about destroying it; suppressing any independent thought and removing oppositional elements (real or imagined). For the Nazis, the criteria applied were racial – Poles and Jews were their primary targets – while for the Soviets class/political criteria were foremost – they targeted landowners, the middle class, anti-communists and so on. Those differences aside, the methods applied – repression, execution and deportation – were rather similar.

Tragically for the Poles caught in either zone of occupation, conditions were often so bad that they imagined that they would be better off in the other zone – and then often encountered desperate people travelling in the opposite direction.

Poland in this period is a dark mirror, reflecting – in two perfect examples – the hideous, brutal nature of 20^th Century totalitarianism.

The UK Communist Party was taking directions from Moscow. Before reading the book I hadn't known about the experiences of British Communist Harry Pollitt. What can tell about the reader about Harry's fight with his fellow Communists and his conscious?

Harry Pollitt is an interesting fellow. He’s probably the only communist in this story for whom I felt a modicum of respect. He was leader of the British Communist Party in 1939, when the Pact was announced, and he exhorted his followers to support the Poles in their defence against ‘fascism’. However, just after he made that proclamation, the Soviets invaded Poland too, and denounced the government in Warsaw as crypto-fascist and declared Polish resistance to be anti-Soviet imperialism. This, of course, left Pollitt out on a limb. But he stuck to his principles – he was removed from the leadership of the Communist Party, of course, but he maintained throughout that he had been right - which he had been. He was brought back to the leadership after Hitler’s attack on Stalin in 1941.

I admire him (a little) because he was secure enough in his own beliefs to defy the Kremlin – which was no mean feat for a card-carrying Communist.

Can you tell the listener a little about the proposals for Operation Pike? Also for the benefit of those who are newish to WW2 history , can you explain how the majority of public opinion still favoured the Soviet Union at the time?

Operation Pike shows how the Nazi-Soviet Pact completely turned political assumptions on their heads in 1939-40. It was an Anglo-French plan to launch air raids on the Soviet oil-fields of Baku and Batumi in the Caucasus, with the intention of thereby hurting Hitler’s Third Reich. It was insane. Neither Britain or France were actually at war with the USSR in 1940, but they were nonetheless seriously planning to bomb Soviet territory as a way of hitting Hitler. It is testament to the way in which the Nazi-Soviet pact had so completely shifted all political preconceptions in western capitals. Also, it shows how the west was well aware in 1940 that the Soviet Union stood in the enemy camp – it was only with Hitler’s invasion of June 1941, that Stalin became an ally of the west.

Notwithstanding this development – much western opinion, particularly on the left, was still broadly sympathetic towards the Soviets in 1940, seeing them as part of the solution to Nazism, rather than part of the problem. This is peculiar, given that – as I’ve noted – the USSR was essentially a German ally at that time, and had become very much part of the problem. It shows the tribal nature of politics and the fact that the ordinary voter hadn’t realised that the earth had shifted a little on its axis in August 1939.

On page 175 you talk about Germany having 2 Billion Reichsmarks of debt. What was the economic significance of this situation?

I wrote that Germany in 1938 had a 2 billion Reichsmarks cash-flow deficit, which is not quite the same thing as a debt. Still, it was proof that the German economy under the Nazis had become very imbalanced and was seriously overheating, with too many resources being pumped into capital projects and rearmament and too little going to the consumer section or in wage rises – which in turn would then have eased the Reichsbank’s cash flow crisis.

The wider significance is that there is an economic argument for the outbreak of war in 1939, which – though it doesn’t trump the other drivers of war – is nonetheless quite persuasive. Germany goes to war – in part – in 1939 to avoid having to address this imbalance and to get its hands on what it most grievously lacks: the raw materials of its neighbours. In this respect the Nazi-Soviet Pact – with its important economic counterparts – played a vital role.

German tooling/machinery was used to assemble Soviet T-34 Tanks. The Guns of ex German Cruiser Lützow would fire on advancing German troops. Does this symbolise the reluctant economic relations between the two powers the pact brought about?

I think the story of the Lützow, which crops up throughout the book, is very symbolic of the economic relationship between the Nazis and the Soviets; upon which the political relationship was largely based. The Lützow was one of only a few German capital ships in 1940, and so (though unfinished) its sale to the USSR was highly significant, and showed how seriously the Germans took the relationship. Later, as German engineers were required to supervise finishing the vessel in Leningrad, delays on the Lützow became symbolic of the wider deterioration of relations. So the Lützow became something like a bellwether for Nazi-Soviet relations. And then finally – in 1941 – it ended up firing German shells, form German guns, at advancing German troops. Poetic.

Relations between the Nazis and Soviets were not entirely reluctant either – both sides had long coveted what the other had; the Soviets’ raw materials and the Germans’ finished technological wares, and the economic relationship that began in 1939 was seen (by both sides) as a long-awaited boon. The problem was that the headline figures were difficult to realise in practice, particularly as the Soviets routinely obstructed fulfilment of the treaty terms. The frustration with the economic relationship was one of the drivers of Hitler’s decision to invade in 1941.

On page 215 a RAF bombing raid allows Molotov to point out to a rambling Ribbentrop that the British were not yet defeated. Aside from the seriousness of their discussion, when you were researching the book were you at all amused by the incident?

Not really I’m afraid – it is an anecdote that I have known for a long time, so it barely raised a smile! There is not much humour in this book unfortunately. It is a very dark period. But I don’t like po-faced history, so I like to find the humanity in the story. One anecdote from the book that did make me smile – was this: a Polish woman was being deported to Siberia by the Soviets (that’s not funny), and she had something of a breakdown when they came at dawn banging on her door (that’s not funny either). So, her toddler bravely stepped in to do the packing for her (that’s also not funny). But, when she finally got to Siberia, she found what he had packed for her two year sojourn in a frozen wilderness – a French dictionary and some Christmas decorations. (that is darkly comic).

Can you describe Winston Churchill's reaction upon hearing Germany had invaded the Soviet Union?

He was delighted. He knew that now Britain was no longer alone and that the Soviets would absorb much of the German pressure. The German invasion of the USSR meant that Britain was saved. He had a cigar – even though it was breakfast time!