Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact

Based on Wikipedia: Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact

The Deal That Made World War II Inevitable

In August 1939, two men who should have been mortal enemies shook hands in Moscow. One represented Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany. The other represented Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union. Their handshake would doom millions.

The document they signed—officially called the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—is better known by the names of the men who signed it: Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov and German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. But the real story wasn't in the treaty itself. It was in the secret protocol attached to it, a document so explosive that its existence wasn't proven to the Western world until the Nuremberg trials after the war.

That secret protocol carved up Eastern Europe like a Christmas ham.

How Sworn Enemies Became Temporary Friends

To understand how bizarre this pact was, you need to understand how much these two regimes hated each other. Nazi ideology held that Slavic peoples—including Russians—were "Untermenschen," a German word meaning "subhumans." Hitler had been ranting for years about the need for "Lebensraum," or living space, which Germany would seize from the Soviet Union. The Nazis also believed that the Soviet Union was controlled by what they called "Jewish Bolsheviks," combining their antisemitism with their anti-communism into one paranoid worldview.

The Soviets, for their part, viewed fascism as capitalism's last desperate gasp—a violent reaction against the inevitable communist future. The two ideologies had already been fighting a proxy war in Spain, where Germany and Italy backed Francisco Franco's Nationalists while the Soviet Union supported the Republican government.

So what changed?

The answer begins in Munich in September 1938.

The Betrayal That Set Everything in Motion

When British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain flew to Munich to negotiate with Hitler over Czechoslovakia, he made a fateful decision: the Soviet Union would not be invited. Stalin had actually indicated that the Soviets were willing to defend Czechoslovakia militarily, but only if France honored its own treaty obligations to do the same. The Western powers didn't want Soviet involvement.

The Munich Agreement that followed handed Hitler a chunk of Czechoslovakia—the Sudetenland—in exchange for his promise of "peace in our time." Within six months, Hitler had swallowed the rest of Czechoslovakia anyway, proving that appeasement had been a catastrophic miscalculation.

But from Moscow, the lesson looked different. Stalin concluded that Britain and France were either too weak to stop Hitler or, worse, were actively trying to point German aggression eastward. If the Western powers wouldn't stand with the Soviet Union against fascism, perhaps it was time to make other arrangements.

The Strange Courtship

Throughout early 1939, three separate diplomatic dances were happening simultaneously. Britain and France were belatedly trying to build an alliance with the Soviet Union. Germany was secretly hinting to Soviet diplomats that it could offer better terms. And everyone was watching to see which way Stalin would jump.

The British and French negotiations were halfhearted at best. Britain sent Admiral Sir Reginald Drax to Moscow to discuss military cooperation—but Drax arrived without written credentials and had been instructed to drag out the talks as long as possible. He wasn't even authorized to answer the crucial question: would Poland allow Soviet troops to cross its territory to fight the Germans?

This wasn't just bureaucratic incompetence. Poland genuinely feared Soviet "help" almost as much as German invasion. The Poles remembered that Russia had ruled most of their country for over a century before World War I. They suspected—correctly, as it turned out—that Soviet troops entering Poland might never leave.

Meanwhile, the Germans were moving with uncharacteristic patience. Hitler had initially dismissed the idea of dealing with the Soviets, but his foreign minister Ribbentrop saw an opportunity. At some point in early May 1939, Ribbentrop showed Hitler film footage of Stalin reviewing a military parade. According to Ribbentrop's later account, Hitler studied the Soviet dictator's face and remarked that Stalin "looked like a man he could do business with."

The courtship accelerated.

What the Secret Protocol Actually Said

On August 23, 1939, Ribbentrop flew to Moscow in a Focke-Wulf Condor aircraft. Within hours, the deal was done. The public treaty was straightforward: Germany and the Soviet Union agreed not to attack each other and not to support any third party that attacked either of them. This commitment would last for ten years.

The secret protocol was something else entirely.

It drew a line across Eastern Europe. Everything west of that line fell into Germany's "sphere of influence." Everything east belonged to the Soviets. Specifically:

• Poland would be partitioned between them
• Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and the Romanian region of Bessarabia were assigned to the Soviet sphere
• Lithuania was initially assigned to Germany, though this would change in a later agreement

Notice what this meant. Two totalitarian powers had agreed to divide up countries that had no say in the matter. The Baltic states—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—had been independent nations for only twenty years. Poland had been reborn after World War I ended over a century of partition. Now they were being partitioned again, by powers that officially despised each other.

One Week Later, the World Burned

The pact was signed on August 23, 1939. Germany invaded Poland on September 1. World War II had begun.

Britain and France declared war on Germany, honoring their guarantee to Poland. But they could do nothing to actually help the Poles. The German Blitzkrieg—lightning war—crushed Polish resistance with terrifying speed.

Then, on September 17, the Soviets invaded Poland from the east.

Stalin justified this by claiming he was protecting ethnic Ukrainians and Belarusians in eastern Poland. It was a transparent fiction. He was simply collecting his share of the spoils as agreed in the secret protocol. Poland, which had survived 123 years of partition between empires, lasted less than a month against two totalitarian states attacking from opposite directions.

Germany and the Soviet Union drew their new border through what had been Poland. They signed a "Boundary and Friendship Treaty" on September 28—friendship between two regimes that would be trying to exterminate each other less than two years later.

Stalin Collects His Dividends

With Germany occupied in the west, Stalin moved to cash in the rest of his agreement. In November 1939, the Soviet Union attacked Finland, starting what became known as the Winter War. The Finns fought with extraordinary courage—their small army inflicted devastating casualties on the invading Soviets—but they couldn't win against such overwhelming numbers. By March 1940, Finland had been forced to cede significant territory, including parts of Karelia, Salla, and Kuusamo.

The Baltic states fell without a fight. In the summer of 1940, the Soviet Union essentially annexed Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, absorbing them as Soviet Socialist Republics. This wasn't the "sphere of influence" language of the secret protocol—it was outright conquest.

Romania lost Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina, and the Hertsa region to Soviet demands. Stalin actually exceeded what he'd been promised in the secret protocol by taking Bukovina, which technically violated his agreement with Hitler. But Hitler had other concerns by then. He was busy conquering Western Europe.

The Inevitable Betrayal

Hitler had never intended the pact to last. For him, it was always a tactical maneuver—a way to secure his eastern flank while he dealt with France and Britain. The ideological war against "Jewish Bolshevism" remained his ultimate goal.

On June 22, 1941, Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, the largest military invasion in human history. Over three million German soldiers poured into the Soviet Union along an 1,800-mile front. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was dead.

Stalin, despite numerous warnings from his own intelligence services and from the British, was caught completely off guard. He had convinced himself that Hitler wouldn't attack, at least not yet. The first days of Barbarossa were catastrophic for the Soviet Union, with entire armies encircled and destroyed.

The Anglo-Soviet Agreement quickly replaced the Nazi-Soviet pact, as former enemies became allies against a common threat. The strange interlude of Nazi-Soviet cooperation was over. What followed was the deadliest conflict on the Eastern Front, with casualties numbering in the tens of millions.

The Long Shadow

The territorial changes set in motion by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact didn't simply reverse after the war. Many of the borders Stalin drew in 1939-1940 remained in place for decades—and some remain today.

The eastern portions of pre-war Poland that the Soviets seized in 1939 stayed Soviet after the war, eventually becoming parts of independent Ukraine and Belarus when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Vilnius, which had been part of Poland, was given to Soviet Lithuania. The Baltic states remained trapped inside the Soviet Union until 1991, their independence suppressed for half a century.

Parts of Finland seized in 1940 remain Russian territory today. The core of Bessarabia became the independent nation of Moldova after 1991, while other portions ended up in Ukraine.

As for the men who signed the pact: Ribbentrop was convicted of war crimes at Nuremberg and hanged in 1946. Molotov lived until 1986, dying at age 96, having outlived Stalin by over three decades. He never expressed regret for the pact, maintaining that it had been necessary to buy time for Soviet military preparations.

Lessons Written in Blood

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact offers several uncomfortable lessons about how the world works.

First, ideology is flexible when power is at stake. Two regimes that defined themselves in opposition to each other found common ground in territorial expansion. Their hatred was real, but it could be temporarily set aside when both saw advantage in cooperation.

Second, small nations caught between great powers have few good options. Poland, Finland, and the Baltic states all tried different strategies—some sought Western guarantees, some tried neutrality, some attempted to play both sides. None of these strategies saved them from becoming bargaining chips.

Third, appeasement doesn't work against expansionist powers, but neither does half-hearted deterrence. The Western powers tried appeasement at Munich and half-hearted alliance-building afterward. Both approaches failed because neither demonstrated genuine commitment to resisting aggression.

Finally, secret agreements between powerful states can redraw maps and destroy nations overnight. The countries divided up in that secret protocol had no voice in their fate. They learned about their dismemberment only when armies crossed their borders.

The pact lasted less than two years. The consequences lasted for generations. Some would argue they haven't ended yet.