German Russian Peace Agreement 1939

When the Nazis attacked Poland on the morning of September 1, 1939, the Soviets stood there and watched. Two days later, World War II began with the British declaration of war on Germany. The Soviets invaded eastern Poland on September 17 to occupy their “sphere of influence” as set out in the secret protocol. Russia largely embraced the Soviet narrative: World War II did not begin with the generalized start date of September 1, 1939, when Nazi forces attacked Poland, but in 1941, when Hitler unleashed his forces on the Soviet Union. “There is not much to gain for Moscow when we talk about 1939. Any focus on the Pact contradicts the myth of the `Great Patriotic War`, which portrays the USSR as a victim and provokes the start of the war in 1941,” says Jan Claas Behrends, a historian at the Potsdam Centre for Contemporary History near Berlin. “If you put the spotlight on 1939, it deconstructs this essential narrative.” When anti-German protests erupted in Prague, Czechoslovakia, the Comintern ordered the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia to use all its forces to paralyze “chauvinist elements.” [208] Moscow quickly forced the French Communist Party and the Communist Party of Britain to take anti-war positions. On September 7, Stalin called Georgi Dimitrov, who sketched out a new Comintern line on the war that said the war was unjust and imperialist, which was approved by the Secretariat of the Comintern on September 9. Thus, the Western communist parties now had to be against the war and vote against the war credits. [209] Although the French Communists voted unanimously in parliament on September 2 for war credits and on September 19, the French Communists voted unanimously for war credits. After declaring its “unwavering will” to defend the country, the Comintern officially ordered the party to condemn the September 27 war as imperialist.

On October 1, the French Communists advocated listening to German peace proposals, and leader Maurice Thorez deserted from the French army on October 4 and fled to Russia. [210] Other communists also deserted from the army. Germany and the Soviet Union concluded a complicated trade pact on February 11, 1940, more than four times the size of the two countries signed in August 1939. [216] The New Trade Pact helps Germany overcome a British blockade. [216] In the first year, Germany received one million tonnes of cereals, half a million tonnes of wheat, 900,000 tonnes of oil, 100,000 tonnes of cotton, 500,000 tonnes of phosphates and significant quantities of other vital raw materials, as well as the transit of one million tonnes of soybeans from Manchuria. These and other supplies were transported through occupied Soviet and Polish territories. [216] The Soviets were to receive one naval cruiser, plans for the battleship Bismarck, heavy naval guns, other naval equipment, and 30 of the newer German fighter jets, including the Bf 109 and Bf 110 fighters, and the Ju 88 bomber. [216] The Soviets also received oil and electrical equipment, locomotives, turbines, generators, diesel engines, ships, machine tools, and samples of German artillery, tanks, explosives, chemical warfare equipment, and other items. [216] Putin had nothing to lose by allowing the original copies to be published, argued Paul Goble, a longtime Eurasian expert. “First of all, Putin is now flaunting the pact to show that he really doesn`t care what the West thinks, something that plays with his base and that he can get away with it because Western leaders with their own problems are not willing to face what they are doing,” Goble said. And secondly, Russian commentators and their subsequent Russian professors are increasingly returning to the Soviet description of the pact: it is all the fault of the West. For Behrends, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact symbolizes Putin`s desire to return to spheres of influence.

“Before 1914, Eastern Europe was ruled by empires. Sovereign nation-states emerged after the First World War. The Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 marked the return of imperial rule. Eastern Europe fell under Nazi or Soviet occupation,” Behrends explained. But for most Russians, the existence of the pact, not to mention its meaning, risks disappearing from the collective radar. Uvarova, the teacher, said that with the school year, which begins on September 1, there will be no classes to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the pact on August 23. “But it wouldn`t be marked anyway, to be honest,” she said. “September 1 would be marked as the beginning of the Second World War” if classes on the subject were held on the first day of school. “But the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact would not do that,” she said. “We don`t draw attention to that.” On September 21, the Soviets and Germans signed a formal agreement to coordinate military movements in Poland, including the “purge” of saboteurs.

[140] Joint German-Soviet parades were held in Lviv and Brest-Litovsk, and the countries` military commanders gathered in the latter city. [141] Stalin had decided in August to liquidate the Polish state, and a German-Soviet meeting in September dealt with the future structure of the “Polish region.” [141] The Soviet authorities immediately began a campaign to Sovietize[142][143] the newly acquired territories. The Soviets held elections in stages,[144] the result of which was to legitimize the Soviet annexation of eastern Poland. [145] Moreover, Japan must not only swallow the affront to its prestige; it must also take into account the price Germany has paid Russia for its neutrality in the West. Does it happen to be a free hand in the Far East? This certainly seems to be a possible explanation. On the other hand, if everything is misleading and delicate, one cannot exclude the suggestion that Japanese consternation could be falsified, that Japan has not been ignored and that Russia is ready to give it a free hand in China and against Britain in exchange for an absolute assurance of peace on both fronts, allowing the Soviet government to: devote their attention to the enormous development work in Central Asia. However, there is no evidence to support this view, and it is more natural to assume that Japanese dismay is sincere. There are other aspects of the pact that commentators were quick to grasp, in particular the agility of the Soviet and German leaders and the docility of their peoples. But it is not entirely true to say that “ideologies” have become meaningless, because the real separation was never between fascism and communism, but between freedom and tyranny. The elimination of the Polish elites and the intelligentsia was part of the General Plan East.

The Intelligence Action, a plan to eliminate the Polish intelligentsia, Poland`s “ruling class,” took place shortly after the German invasion of Poland and lasted from the fall of 1939 to the spring of 1940. As a result of the operation, about 60,000 Polish nobles, teachers, social workers, priests, judges and political activists were killed in ten regional actions. [178] [179] It continued in May 1940, when Germany launched Action AB,[176] More than 16,000 members of the intelligentsia were murdered in Operation Tannenberg alone. [180] Germany also planned to integrate the whole country into the Third Reich. [174] These efforts led to the forced resettlement of two million Poles. Families were forced to travel during the harsh winter of 1939-1940, leaving almost all their belongings without compensation. [174] In Operation Tannenberg alone, 750,000 Polish peasants were forced to leave and their belongings handed over to the Germans. [181] Another 330,000 were murdered. [182] Germany planned the possible relocation of ethnic Poles to Siberia.

[183] [184] On October 3, Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg, the German ambassador to Moscow, informed Joachim Ribbentrop that the Soviet government was ready to cede the city of Vilnius and its surroundings. .