Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet what he thought about Hitler’s somewhat uncanny silence in regard to Russia. , And in fact from this moment on the Soviet Union, hitherto merely a mighty shadow on the periphery, began to move into the center of events. Hitler’s reticence was as much a symptom of the changing situation as the sudden activity of the Western powers toward Russia. A secret race for alliances was beginning, heightened on all sides by distrust, fear, and jealousy. Upon the outcome of that race the question of war or peace would be decided.
The initial move had come on April 15, with an offer by France to the Soviet Union to adjust the treaty of 1935 to the changed world situation. For the system of collective security, which the appeasers had allowed Hitler to wrest from them during the period of lovely illusions and which they were now hurriedly trying to reinstate, could have a deterrent effect only if Moscow participated, thus convincing Hitler of the hopelessness of resorting to force. From the start the negotiations, into which England too soon entered, suffered from the mutual distrust of the participants. With reason, Stalin doubted the Western powers’ determination to resist, while the Western powers in their turn, and above all Chamberlain, could never overcome the deeply rooted suspicion that the bourgeois world felt for the land of world revolution. Nor were their advances of any great interest to Moscow, since clumsy diplomacy had obligated the West to defend the entire girdle outside the Soviet Union from the Baltic to the Black Sea.
In addition, the negotiating position of the Western powers was hampered by the constant efforts of the Eastern European nations to interfere. They passionately opposed any alliance with the Soviet Union and regarded any guarantees by her as sealing their own doom. In fact the Western diplomats were soon forced to realize that Moscow could be won over only by considerable territorial, strategic, and political concessions that did not look so very dissimilar to the ones they wanted to refuse, with the Soviet Union’s aid, to grant Hitler. If the efforts of the Western powers were inspired by the principle of protecting the small and weak nations against the expansionist greed of the great nations, they could not help falling into an insoluble dilemma. “On the basis of these principles,” the French Foreign Minister formulated this impasse, “a treaty with the Kremlin cannot be arranged, for these are not the Kremlin’s principles. Where community of principles is lacking, there can be no negotiating on the basis of principles. In that case only the primitive form of human conduct can obtain: force and exchange. Interests can be bartered, advantages that are hoped for and disadvantages which one wishes to avoid, booty that one would like to seize, violence that one will not put up with. All these factors can be weighed against one another, move for move, cash for cash…. Western diplomacy, on the other hand, provides a spectacle of well-meaning and dreamlike impotence.”121
The course of the negotiations of the following months must be seen in this light, especially the still controversial question of whether the Soviet side seriously sought an agreement or was not merely bent on keeping out of the obviously approaching conflict, even of furthering it, in order later to carry the doctrine of revolution into an exhausted, shattered Europe with better chances for success than ever before. Even while the protracted negotiations were in progress, constantly interrupted by fresh scruples on the part of the West, the Soviet Union began its bold double game with Hitler. After a speech by Stalin on March 10 had dropped the first hint, the Soviet Union several times approached the German government and made plain its interest in a rearrangement of relations. Ideological differences, the Russians indicated, “need… not disturb.” The Soviet Union replaced her Foreign Minister of many years’ standing, Maxim Litvinov—a man of Western orientation and Jewish descent who figured invariably in Nazi polemics as “the Jew Finkelstein”—by Vyacheslav Molotov, and inquired in Berlin whether this shift might favorably influence the German attitude.122
We have no reason to think that the leaders of the Soviet Union were unaware of Hitler’s changeless aim: the great war to the East, the conquest of an empire at Russia’s expense. But they were, unless all indications are deceptive, prepared for the moment to take into the bargain a tremendous increase in power for Hitler’s Reich, and even its first expansive step toward the East. Chief among their motives was the fear that the capitalist and Fascist powers might come to an arrangement after all, in spite of their momentary hostility, and divert German dynamism against the common Communist enemy in the East. Since the end of the World War, in which Russia had lost her western provinces and the Baltic countries, the Soviet Union had regarded itself as also a “revisionist power.” And Stalin evidently expected that Hitler would be more inclined to understand and treat generously the Soviet Union’s determination to reconquer the lost territories than would the slow-moving statesmen of the West with their scruples, principles, and moralistic pettiness. Fear and the determination to expand: these two fundamental motivations of Hitler were also Stalin’s.
Tactically, Moscow’s initiatives could not have come more conveniently for Hitler. To be sure, anti- Bolshevism had been one of the great themes of his political career. The Communist Revolution had repeatedly provided him with compelling images of horror. Thousands of times he had conjured up the “human slaughterhouses” in the interior of Russia, the “burning villages” and “deserted cities” with their destroyed churches, raped women, and GPU executioners. National Socialism and Communism were “worlds apart,” he had declared; the gulf between them could never be bridged. Unlike the ideologically indifferent Ribbentrop, who soon after Stalin’s speech of March 10 had recommended an approach to the Soviet Union, Hitler was uncertain, the captive of his own ideology. And during the months of negotiations he repeatedly wavered. Several times he ordered the contacts to be broken off. Only his profound disappointment at the conduct of England and the vast profit to be had from avoiding the nightmare of fighting on two fronts during the planned attack on Poland finally persuaded him to set aside all his scruples. And just as Stalin entered upon the desperate gamble with the “Fascist world plague” in the expectation of ultimately triumphing, so Hitler reassured himself that later on he would be able to make up for his “betrayal,” since he had not abandoned his intention of bringing about a later confrontation with the Soviet Union. In fact, he was preparing for that by establishing a common border. What was involved, he shortly afterward told his intimates, was a “pact with Satan to drive out the devil.” And, on August 11, only a few days before Ribbentrop’s sensational trip to Moscow, Hitler informed a foreign visitor with almost incomprehensible candor: “Everything I am doing is directed against Russia; if the West is too stupid and too blind to grasp this, I shall be forced to come to an understanding with the Russians, strike at the West, and then after its defeat turn against the Soviet Union with my assembled forces.”123 Despite all his cynicism, his lack of scruple where tactics were concerned, Hitler was too much of an ideologist to follow the logic of his plans without uneasiness. He was never able to forget completely that the pact with Moscow was only the second-best solution.
As if circumstances were playing into his hands, a new improvement in his position came to him around this same time. Disturbed by the rumors of an impending conflict, Mussolini’s son-in-law and Foreign Minister, Count Galeazzo Ciano, invited Ribbentrop to Milan early in May and urged him to postpone the outbreak of the war for at least three years, in view of Italy’s inadequate preparations. The German Foreign Minister informed Ciano that the great conflict was planned only “after a long period of peace of from four to five years.” When the vague exchange of ideas produced a few other points of agreement, Mussolini abruptly took a hand personally in the negotiations. For years, out of an obscure feeling of anxiety, he had refused to define Italy’s relationship to Germany in a treaty of alliance specifying mutual obligations. Now he had Ciano announce without more ado that Germany and Italy had agreed on a military alliance.
Although Hitler might feel that this pact would strengthen his position vis-a-vis the Western powers, the alliance could only bring misfortune to Mussolini. The elementary rules of diplomacy should have taught him better: since he owed to the backing of Germany whatever conquests the world would ever permit him to make, his next move should have been to secure what he had acquired by coming to an agreement with the Western powers. Instead he now tied his country’s destiny unconditionally to a stronger power that was bent on war, and thus reduced himself to the status of a vassal. Henceforth he must, as he had once said in a moment of exuberance in Berlin, “march to the end” with Hitler.
The so-called Pact of Steel obligated each of the partners to provide military support to the other upon the outbreak of hostilities. It drew no distinction between attacker and attacked, between offensive and defensive arms. It was an unconditional pledge of military aid. Later, when Ciano first saw the German draft that was subsequently incorporated almost unchanged into the wording of the pact, he said: “I have never read a treaty like it. It is real dynamite.”
The pact was signed in a grand ceremony in the Berlin chancellery on May 22, 1939. “I found Hitler very well, quite serene, less aggressive, slightly aged,” the Italian Foreign Minister noted. “There are somewhat darker rings around his eyes. He sleeps little. Less and less.” Mussolini himself seems to have received the reports from his Berlin delegation with some anxiety. A week later he sent a personal memorandum to Hitler in which he once again emphasized Italy’s desire for a period of several years of peace. He recommended using this interlude for
