The Fragile Alliance: Triumphs, Gains, Tensions

Chapter 3 Section 9

FUNDRAISING for this project: pdf of high quality pictures of etruscan sculpture of "the parthenon collection"--for free or give a small donation

Click here to navigate the table of contents.

This below is Chapter 3 Section 9:

9. The Fragile Alliance: Triumphs, Gains, Tensions

The unexpected occurred immediately, but as such it offered no way out. Within a few days, the concentrated attack of the National Socialist industrial state inflicted decisive defeats on the armies of the nationalist agrarian state, not least as a result of the rapidly won air supremacy, and by September 8 General Hoepner’s Panzer Corps had reached the suburbs of Warsaw. So the “congratulations and greetings” that Molotov conveyed to the Reich government that day hardly came from a happy heart, and the Soviet government was apparently found itself embarrassed when it was asked from Berlin to proceed with occupying the intended zone of influence. Only on September 17th, when the bulk of the Polish army was destroyed in the great battle in the Vistula bend, did the Red Army move into the areas of eastern Poland to come to the aid of the “Ukrainian and Belarusian blood kin,” but the world could not now deceive itself into believing that the “non-aggression pact” had in fact been a partition pact, and the spirit of the treaties with Poland (though not their wording) should have prompted the Western powers to declare war on the Soviet Union as well as on Germany. If doubts still existed in view of the first reports, they would have been removed by Molotov’s speech of October 31, in which the People’s Commissar very much emphasized the friendly relations with Germany and proudly emphasized that “two blows, first delivered swiftly by the German Wehrmacht and then by the Red Army” would have left nothing of “this ugly product of the Versailles Treaty.”

But the Western Powers did not stir even on their fronts against Germany, and there began that strange war, or “Sitzkrieg,” or “Phony War,” which was to last until May of the following year. However, since September 28, the date of Ribbentrop’s second visit to Moscow, Germany and the Soviet Union had been bound together by a “treaty of borders and friendship” to which several secret and confidential additional protocols belonged. Thus it was decided, in accordance with Stalin’s suggestion, that no residual Polish state would remain and that Germany and the Soviet Union alone would have the task of ensuring to the people living in the former Poland “a peaceful existence corresponding to their national characteristics.” The Soviet Union, as well adapted itself to the language of its allied enemy. A significant change in the Secret Additional Protocol of August 23 was made by stipulating that Lithuania, except for the tip of Mariampol, fell within the Soviet Union’s sphere of interest, while Germany took possession of the bulk of ethnographic Poland, so that, with some deviations, the “Curzon Line" of 1920 formed the western frontier of the Soviet Union. It was a change of extraordinary weight, since it blocked the Germans from even looking into the Baltic States and, on the other hand, gave them the full burden of dominating the Poles, but Ribbentrop agreed in a “Blitz” negotiation, which had analogies to the “Blitzkrieg” from the point of view of, but from the point of view of overwhelming success. So, then, it was an unequal provision when both parties pledged themselves “to not tolerate any Polish agitation in their areas that would have a spillover effect on the territories of the other party.” On the other hand, one might see an extraordinary gain for Germany in the joint declaration of both governments that England and France would be responsible for the continuation of the war if they evaded the joint efforts of the two powers to restore a state of peace. Evidently the Soviet government had good reason to believe that the Western powers would not give in, and their own actions contributed greatly to this, for the conduct of the Soviet Union had created a storm of indignation in Britain and France, and it was inconceivable that the Western powers could demand less than the re-establishment of the Polish state, including its eastern territories, as a price for peace.

In the realm of immediate realities, on the other hand, was the agreement that the Soviet Union would allow for all Reich- and ethnic Germans within their areas of interest to emigrate to Germany. This practically meant the end of Germanism in the Baltic States and was at the same time an ominous omen for the fate of the peripheral states, with which the Soviet Union initially only concluded “assistance pacts” that meant the stationing of Soviet troops at fixed points. Equally realistic were the economic agreements, which brought great advantages for both sides: raw materials would flow from the Soviet Union to Germany, and Germany would supply numerous high-quality machinery, including a great deal of war material. Just as the Soviet Union had made possible the beginning of the war, so it was now creating the basis for its continuation.

But far more characteristic than the public or secret arrangements was what was happening in the darkness of the two Polish zones of occupation, and to a considerable extent it was not even known to the Polish government-in-exile in London. On the two sides of the Bug [Bug, the river] the two revolutions that had written the annihilation of an enemy on their banners now worked in close proximity, the original one of 1917 and the reactive one of 1933.

East of the border, what had happened in 1917/18 and what Ribbentrop must have expected when he signed the Secret Additional Protocol was happening. The Red Army proclaimed the “liberation” of the hitherto oppressed Ukrainians and Belarusians, the large estates were confiscated and, it was said, handed over to the peasants;  a hunt quickly developed, against the landowners, the officers and the intelligentsia, who were almost exclusively Poles and together made up a numerically significant and culturally leading part of the population. Landowners and officers were often killed on the spot, not infrequently with the help of the local population, and the Polish as well as the Jewish bourgeoisie of the cities, who had initially remained untouched, found themselves exposed to the same measures as the Russian ones after incorporation into the Ukrainian and Belarusian Soviet Republics Bourgeoisie after 1917: expropriations and deportations. A total of one and a half million people are said to have been deported to the interior of the Soviet Union; how many of them perished in the process has never been clarified. All officers who could be found were taken to internment camps, and of the many thousands whose last signs of life escaped to the outside world in the spring of 1940, only about 5,000 were found, but as corpses, shot in the neck by the NKVD, when the German troops discovered the mass graves near Katyn in 1943. Thus the small town near Smolensk became a symbol of those acts of extermination that resulted consistently from the concept of the “class enemy” and could easily be extended to foreign national “enemies of the people.”

But underlying these acts of extermination was a social reality. In the German sphere and in German representations, references to this only appeared very marginally. After the Polish campaign, for example, the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung published a drawing depicting the splendid interior of a Polish magnate’s castle  invaded by marauding peasants. In the foreground, however, was the inexorable national struggle against Polishness as such. In the vast areas of the “Warthegau,” which were annexed to the Reich, countless small farms were confiscated, and the former owners were assigned to large estates as farm laborers or taken to Germany as “leaderless workers.” In the "General Government” the General Governor Frank, who resided at the Wawel in Krakow, expressly made the extermination of the Polish intelligentsia a program item, and “Einsatzgruppen: of the SS carried out “volks-political tasks,” many of which consisted of indiscriminate shootings and abominable tortures of Poles and Jews. None other than the Commander-in-Chief East, Colonel General Blaskowitz, repeatedly raised sharp protests against the “excessive brutalization and moral depravity” underlying the slaughter of “some 10,000 Jews and Poles,” but he only got severe reproaches from Hitler because of his “childish attitude” to the questions of the national struggle [Volkstumskampf] in the East. Apparently Hitler did not take account the General's observation that the large number of smallholders, who could be won over to the German cause or kept neutral, were being driven into the enemy’s camp. For him, the old antagonisms of the national struggle from the time of the Eastern Marches Society (Ostmarkenvereins), namely “Germans” and “Poles,” were the actual reality, although he would soon speak of “Aryans” and until recently had spoken of “Bolsheviks.”

Admittedly, Himmler’s ideas of robbing the children of “good-bred” Polish families and sending them to the Reich for “Germanization” meant a new quality. This was the only kind of “liberation” he knew, and so the Germans in Poland did not have a slogan like the Red Army had, and the SS measures, as shootings and expropriations, were in substance copies of Soviet methods, but copies lacked any kind of appeal and persuasiveness, because they only knew how to set nation against nation and even aroused bitterness among their own countrymen, who even exclaimed like the then Lieutenant Colonel Helmut Stiff: “I am ashamed to be a German.” What had once been consternation and demanded an answer, was now in the process of seeking an outlet in a distorted copy. But the original relation always remained clear, even if when Himmler was thinking about the “treatment of foreign nationals in the East” in the summer of 1940, in which he wanted to reduce the Poles to the status of illiterates and described the Ukrainians and the Gorals as “splinter people,” he still believed he was justified in rejecting “the Bolshevik method of physically exterminating a people from inner conviction as un-Germanic and impossible.” But of the two horrors that had befallen the unfortunate country, wasn’t the older more consistent in itself and more promising in a world where propaganda and disinformation, not the spread of illiteracy was the order of the day?

In any case, one thing could not be denied in view of the events in eastern Poland: that Bolshevism had remained the same in its actions and that it still made sense to speak of “Bolshevization.” Adolf Hitler, however, in his appeal to the NSDAP on January 1, 1940, turned his anger exclusively against the “plutocratic powers” and the “Jewish-capitalist world enemy” which was in the process of decline, while the future belonged to the “young nations and systems.” This could not be understood in any other way than that he also counted the Soviet Union among the “young systems.” And indeed, the most positive statements he made about the Soviet Union, and for the first time in his intimate correspondence, came over the next few months. On March 8, 1940, he wrote to Mussolini that, since Stalin’s final victory, Russia had undoubtedly been experiencing a transformation of the Bolshevik principle in the direction of a national Russian way of life, and that in view of this epochal turning point, of which the Reich Foreign Minister was able to tell from his own experience, there was, no doubt, neither interest nor cause for a fight, especially since the two economic areas complemented each other in an extraordinary way. It was Mussolini who now played the role of a radical fascist and implored Hitler not to give up “the anti-Semitic and anti-Bolshevik banner” and to continue striving for the destruction of Bolshevism, which would also bring him the solution to his living space problem. But what chances could he expect from his intervention if the Reich Foreign Minister assured him that on his second visit to Moscow he, like Gauleiter Forster, had had the same impression as if he had spoken “with old party comrades.”

In the meantime, one of the unforeseeable contingencies of the war had caused the first of the great alternatives to emerge, namely, the alternative of a genuine alliance, indeed, even a common destiny between Germany and the Soviet Union. The cause was the first of the imitations with which Stalin, in the course of little more than half a year, repeated Hitler’s methods and successes in his own way and, by invoking defense necessities, historical or geographical circumstances or to the right of self-determination, incorporated more countries and peoples into his empire without a major war then Hitler had been able to do by August 1939. The demands made of Finland in October did not differ very much from those to which the three Baltic States had had to agree, but they involved the cession of Finnish territory on the Karelian Isthmus, for which territorial compensation was offered. Compared with the alleged “threat to Leningrad,” German claims about Czechoslovakia as a Soviet aircraft carrier had been understandable and rational, and the Finns had no weaker sense of honor than the Poles. So the Soviet Union used the self-created Mainila Incident—a sort of bigger and more genuine “Gleiwitz”—to open the attack on Finland in late November without declaring war. Stalin, however, was able to do one thing that Hitler could not or would not do: he had a “people’s government” formed, close to the border in the little village of Terijoki, under the leadership of a prominent member of the Comintern, the Finn Otto Kuusinen, , so that the fighting was supposedly not directed against the “Finnish people.” However, almost without exception, the men and women of Finland sided with their bourgeois and reactionary government, and the Red Army suffered heavy defeats at first. Nevertheless, it may be assumed that sincere hopes were placed in Moscow in the left-socialists and that Kuusinen and his people were not merely using propaganda formulas when they called “bourgeois” Finland a “White Guard hell for the working class”: In 1917/18 the Bolsheviks had indeed been very strong in Finland, and it was only with the help of the Germans that the Whites under General Mannerheim had succeeded in crushing the red troops and asserting rule by methods that were at first very brutal—and in 1939 the same Mannerheim, “Baltic landowner” who had commanded the “White Guards” in 1917/18, stood at the head of the Finnish army as marshal. In Moscow, too, below the level of diplomatic language and the current problems, the basic emotions of 1917/18 were apparently no less alive than in Berlin. But the situation had become quite different. Germany kept to the Secret Additional Protocol and gave the Soviet Union a free hand in its sphere of influence, but in Sweden and Norway, in England and France and last but not least in America the indignation over this “attack” by a great power on a “small, brave nation” was immense. Here, for the first time, National Socialist Germany and Bolshevik Russia were contrasted as “totalitarian” and rapacious states with the peace-loving democracies, not only in individual scholarly studies, but in a wave of emotions, and in many places the demand for armed intervention was in favor Finland’s was raised. Of course, the same difficulties quickly arose as they had a few months before with Poland: Sweden and Norway, despite their sympathy for Finland, did not want to give the Allied troops the right of passage. But the Allied general staffs envisaged a violation of neutrality without much scruple, especially since it harmonized with a much more far-reaching plan: the plan to destroy the Soviet oil fields near Baku by air raids and thereby deprive Germany of that de facto allied supply area without which it could not have continued the war. If these plans had been realized, Germany and the Soviet Union would have been locked together for better or for worse, and the war would have taken an entirely different course. Nothing is more improbable than that it would have ended with a rapid collapse of the two totalitarian states, as was imagined in London and Paris. But after the Soviet Union had thrown enormous numbers of troops into the fray, the war found a happier ending for them in March. The peace treaty of March 12 placed the new frontier at a considerably greater distance from Leningrad, but Kuusinen had to be dropped, and the inglorious course of the war confirmed that underestimation of the Red Army on both the Allied and German sides which was to determine the subsequent history of World War II to a great extent.

At the same time as the alternative in the north, an alternative in the west had also emerged. In autumn Hitler urged a rapid attack on France, violating the neutrality of Belgium and Holland, and strong opposition to this developed among the generals, which was mainly based on the memory of World War I and the high esteem in which the French army was held. A clear awareness of the shortcomings that the hasty rearmament had brought with it, and above all the lack of “deep armament” gave additional weight to the arguments of high commanders such as Colonel General von Leeb and von Rundstedt.

But for part of the opposition, it was precisely the new friendship with the Soviet Union was the strongest argument of all. Never before had Germany been so far from its best traditions and so close to Bolshevism as it was after six years of Hitler’s regime, according to a memorandum written by Hasso von Etzdorf, the Foreign Office’s liaison to the Army High Command. This regime had succeeded in handing over 20 million people over to Bolshevism, and it had seriously endangered the promising possibilities of a German policy of revision with the nonsensical and superfluous “march on the Hradschin.” Only after the fall of Hitler’s regime was it possible to achieve “moderation in success” along the lines of Bismarck, which alone could secure Germany within its ethnographic borders and its legitimate influence in Central Europe, and at the same time correspond to the most elementary interests of the western powers, namely the interest in a prevent further expansion of Bolshevism in Europe. Contacts were indeed made with the English government which looked promising, and for a time it looked as if Colonel General von Brauchitsch, the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, would put himself at the head of a conspiracy. Next to the alternative of the war alliance of the “young systems” against the worn-out peoples of the West came the other alternative of the great agreement between the civilized states of Europe after the successful conclusion of the revision of Versailles in the sense of the right to self-determination, an alternative within which Hitler and his party advocated would have been a temporarily useful tool. And even the Soviet Union need not have feared such an agreement as much as a possible peace agreement between Hitler and the Western powers, which it seemed to promote through its own statements.

But had not Bismarck also had to fight the battle against Austria before he could show moderation at Nikolsburg? Was Hitler only a politician among other politicians who could be overthrown without his party revolting? Were England and France really only fighting against a hubris that wanted to “conquer the world by force,” or were they not fighting against Germany as the hegemonic power of Central Europe, as von Etzdorf drew it? It was hardly mere coincidences that prevented the second and peaceful alternative from coming about.

Hitler was probably right when he said in his speech to the commanders-in-chief on November 23, 1939 that the chances of victory over France were much better today than at the beginning of the Ludendorff offensive of 1918, and that the whole thing does not mean a single action, but the end of the world war. If one recalls the innumerable predictions made by various quarters in 1918 and 1919, including Rosa Luxemburg, that a violent peace—be it against Russia or against Germany—would only be an armistice and would bring about a new war as certain as the germ takes root in a plant, then the audience really had to ask themselves whether Hitler, in his irrepressible will to win, was not really the embodiment of the will of history and the spirit of the German nation, however great the longing for peace among the Germans and even more so among the French had always been. At the same time, however, the generals must have been horrified by this embodiment of the spirit of the people and this will of history when they heard Hitler say: “They will accuse me of fighting and fighting again. I see in the fight the fate of all beings… It is an eternal problem to bring the number of Germans in proportion to the soil… No cleverness helps here, solution only with the sword… Today we can speak of a race struggle. Today we fight for oil fields, rubber, mineral resources, etc… I want to destroy the enemy… I will stand or fall in this struggle. I would not survive the defeat of my people. No surrender on the outside, no revolution on the inside.” Here was a man willing to risk everything and who seemed to know nothing but total victory or total annihilation. How could one expect moderation in victory from him?

And did not the will for such a victory in itself mean a defeat against Marxism? Hitler spoke exactly as the capitalist states acted, according to Marxist thesis, in their struggles for the treasures of the world. And didn’t he nonetheless reveal himself as a semi-Marxist when he attacked especially frequently the “Judeo-capitalist world,” the money magnates, the “Jewish and non-Jewish international bank barons” during these months? Was not his better socialism, the “social people’s community of Germany” with its social welfare and its elimination of class differences, to be based, in his own words, simply on that conquest of living space, since every crowding together of masses in narrow and export-oriented industrial areas must produce communism? Was not his “reasonable solution” which he recommended to the English, because otherwise sooner or later the “solution of madness” would appear, namely Bolshevism (as one undoubtedly had to understand), even unreasonable to a particularly high degree?

And so Hitler showed himself to be only apparently reasonable and moderate when he brought the planned Norway operation of the English to failure, which was supposed to cut him off from indispensable raw materials, by his own enterprise of almost unbelievable audacity and then forced France to surrender in an unprecedented victory run between May 10th and June 23rd. The “peace offer” that he made to the English in his Reichstag speech of July 19 was so vague and framed so much by triumphalism on the one hand and the most violent polemics on the other that it would probably have been accepted only by Oswald Mosley, whom many had believed to be the future Prime Minister of England before his fascist days, but who was now in prison. However, at the head of England was not even Lord Lothian, who might have initiated negotiations, but Winston Churchill, and therein lay one of the strangest paradoxes of this war. Churchill had not only been the most resolute of all anti-Bolsheviks in England, but in his peculiar relationship to the war he was also the most comparable of all Englishmen to Hitler. But now he wanted to deliver the world of “Hitler’s dark curse” with the same persuasiveness as he had once wanted to free it of Bolshevism, and now spoke of the Gestapo in similar terms as he had earlier spoken of the Cheka. Not only had he gone from anti-Bolshevism to anti-totalitarianism, but he also embraced the old English concept of equilibrium and fought the Germans as hard as he did the Nazis. How hard he could fight became clear immediately after the armistice, when he did not hesitate to have the main part of the French fleet, which had just been allied, destroyed at Mersel-Kebir because their possible defection to the Germans would have been a “mortal danger” and thus, one may add, would have presented another alternative in the vicissitudes of this war. But if on May 13th, for three days the Prime Minister, he had meant that without victory there would be no survival for the British Empire, then, as it turned out, he was in the wrong vis-à-vis Hitler, who predicted to him on July 19 that if his offer of peace was rejected, a great empire would be destroyed. And the strangest paradox of this war was that Hitler, presumably out of love for the English world empire, had given Churchill the chance of a successful defense of the island when, at the end of May, he ordered the armored troops to stop at Dunkirk, thus saving the English expeditionary force from annihilation. The question is therefore whether the RAF fighter pilots or the weather or, rather, Anglophile Hitler saved England. But when “Operation Sea Lion” had to be postponed indefinitely in September, Hitler found himself in an extremely difficult situation, despite his great victory, and the Soviet Union was primarily responsible for this.

For if it had continued to imitate Hitler, and no longer met with serious censure from England for this, but rather with a desperate effort to improve relations and bring about entry into the war against Germany. After ultimatums, the Soviet Union militarily occupied the Baltic states in June and annexed them after the usual Sovietization; in July it forced Romania to cede Bessarabia by threatening to attack and—beyond the wording of the Secret Additional Protocol—Northern Bukovina. This brought it very close to the Ploesti oil field, which was absolutely essential for the German war economy. Various signs indicated that further demands would be made of Finland, which would also entail annexation. Above all, experience had shown that the Soviet Union reduced, interrupted or increased its supplies of raw materials, depending on the circumstances. The suspicion had to arise that while they wanted to keep Hitler in the war, they were trying with all their might to prevent his definitive victory.

Setting aside the specific premises, conditions, and circumstances, and refraining from moral judgement, the situation of the autumn of 1940 was neither accidental nor unnatural. It meant that the Versailles system had definitely come to an end, and that the two largest peoples of the continent, Germans and Russians, together with their client states or dependent territories, now played the pre-eminent role which by their very nature they deserved far more than France after 1919. The sentence that Stalin formulated in 1949 could have been said even now, namely that these two peoples “possessed the greatest potential in Europe for carrying out major actions of world importance.” But there had never been a comparable situation, not even in the Napoleonic era, because other great powers had always existed on the continent, and this was the only way England’s “balance policy” was possible, which helped the weaker powers to assert themselves against the stronger ones.

In principle, the German-Russian system could have been as stable as the 19th century pentarchy had been, provided that the terms of the treaty were observed and neither power intruded, even through propaganda, in the sphere of the other. But one of the two powers was at war, at war against an island on the edge of Europe that was still in possession of a world empire and which was backed by an apparently neutral but in fact already partially belligerent great power. Many Englishmen might think they were fighting for the old balance, but in fact, supported by the United States, they were fighting for the survival of a political-ideological system that had been common to Europe and now seemed to have been eliminated all throughout Europe.

But even if this had not perished in Germany and had prevailed in Russia, since the supremacy of the two powers victorious in 1919 had only come about through a normal, albeit warlike, development, the responsible leadership of the German Reich could have acted no than Hitler did now: it would have had contingency plans drawn up by its high command for a war against Russia, and at the same time it would have been working towards a reliable arrangement. The situation in which the neutral state could at any time cut off the basic sources of life of the belligerent state was intolerable. Such sources of life were above all Romanian oil, but also Finnish nickel and the “calmness in the Baltic Sea” in general. At the same time, the Soviet Union, for its part, was undoubtedly entitled to complain about encroachments in its sphere of interest. After the cession of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina to the Soviet Union and large parts of Transylvania to Hungary, Romania, one of the main winners within the Versailles system, was reduced to its narrowest ethnographic boundaries and the Axis powers, without consultation with the Soviet Union, gave it a guarantee that Moscow was apparently perceived as a breach of contract and an affront. Moreover, German “training troops” were sent into the country. Equally serious was the fact that German troops were also in Finland, albeit supposedly only temporarily and in transit to northern Norway. Other problems were the Straits question and Bulgaria, old targets of Russian politics.

Hitler commissioned his General Staff to work out the military contingency plans for the “elimination” of Russia as early as the end of July 1940, when apparently “Sea Lion” operation was being prepared with all forces; the general arrangement, which after all cannot be ruled out, was on the program of Molotov’s visit to Berlin from November 12 to 14. It provided for the Soviet Union’s accession to the Tripartite Pact signed on September 27 between Germany, Japan and Italy, which was a defensive alliance against the United States and contained no territorial provisions, but which was to be revised in such a way to grant each of the four powers vast space as a sphere of influence and secured a share in the “bankrupt estate” of the British Empire. It was thus a plan for the “redivision of the world” among new and emerging great powers, of which there was so much talk in Marxist theory, and to the Soviet Union was allotted the most valuable, yet most remote, part of the loot, namely India. Molotov’s attitude was by no means hostile, but he brought the conversation with great emphasis to the problems at hand, and he was honest enough to answer a question from Hitler that he envisaged the “purge” of Finland “to the same extent as in Bessarabia and in the peripheral states.” Fourteen days later, the Soviet Union also declared in writing and officially that it was ready to join the four-power pact, but it repeated its demands for Finland, Bulgaria and a military base on the Straits, and in addition it demanded the modification that the center of gravity of its aspirations be recognized as the area south of Batum and Baku in the general direction of the Persian Gulf, i.e., it demanded dominion over the petroleum regions of the Near East. Hitler did not dignify this letter with a reply, and he finally had the operational plan “Barbarossa” drawn up, which envisaged crushing the Soviet Union in a rapid campaign. It is difficult to see why Stalin and Molotov did not regard the absence a of reply for what it was, namely the announcement of the military alternative, but they were engaged in a tremendous effort of preparation for war anyway, and they expected, apparently, that Hitler would eventually make them an ultimate offer of negotiation.

If Hitler’s decision had been merely of a power politics nature, one might certainly have expected a final attempt of this kind. But Hitler was like a plant with roots of different lengths. The mere calculation of power politics, which any other statesman could have taken his place in, went just as little deep into the earth as the motive of the revision policy. Deeper layers reached the roots that made him say to Mussolini that he wanted to settle the South Tyroleans in a beautiful area that he did not yet have but would certainly get, while at the same time portraying Stalin as an “absolute autocrat” (and thus a reliable partner).

Most characteristic of him, however, was that towards the end of 1940 he rediscovered Bolshevism and even “Jewish Bolshevism” i.e., as it were from the depths into which he had pushed him back into clear consciousness. Thus, on November 20, 1940, he said to the Hungarian Prime Minister, Count Teleki, that Russia would be either Bolshevik or national-Russian, depending on the situation. And on December 3, in a conversation with the Bulgarian envoy Draganoff, the author of “Mein Kampf” was again clearly recognizable. He did not want Romania and Bulgaria to become a “Bolshevized desert” like the Baltic States today, where the intelligentsia and the middle class have been wiped out and incompetent commissars put in their place. “He described in a strong way the terrorist conditions, the transportations of intelligentsia that never arrived, being shot in the trains. The conditions there, he said, were simply horrific by European standards. It was the same in Galicia… In Bessarabia, too, while our people were still there, landowners and other members of the leading classes were slaughtered by their own incited people led by the Jews, and the same was flourishing in the Balkans.” Even in the Straits question, the Russians are not just concerned with the bases, they want “to carry out their Bolshevization from the bases.”

Thus by the end of 1940 it was clear that, in view of the continuing war with England, the new European system would not be in the German-Russian system, but that after a decisive struggle either only the Germans or only the Russians would be the supreme power, unless they eventually reached a compromise peace, or the Anglo-Saxons revitalized democracy and an analogue of the Versailles system in part of Europe. But given Hitler’s different motives and the strong traditions on which they were each based, this said nothing about the nature of the warfare. A decisive power politics struggle would look different from an anti-Bolshevik crusade, and a war under the banner of liberation would have to be essentially different from a campaign to win living space. The planning of the last months already gave significant information, but only the events in the second half of 1941 made a final judgment possible.

First, however, some of the strangest coincidences of this war changed the initial situation. At the end of October 1940, just out of an ill ambition, Mussolini attacked Greece without consulting Hitler and suffered an unexpected defeat in the border area of Albania. At the same time, as Italian troops failed to hold their own in North Africa, English confidence rose considerably and German intervention became inevitable. It was now obvious that Italy was no longer the smaller Axis partner, but one of Germany’s auxiliary and satellite states. In early April, a small number of officers staged a coup in Yugoslavia against the Cvetkovié government, which, like Bulgaria before it, had joined the Tripartite Pact, and the Soviet Union immediately backed the new Simovic government by signing a non-aggression and friendship pact. Against this, the German Wehrmacht embarked on one of its triumphant lightning campaigns, and within a few weeks the whole of the Balkans and even Crete were in Hitler’s hands. But he had to use some of the forces that were intended for “Barbarossa” and the scheduled date could not be met.

The European prelude to the Second World War was now coming to an end, even though quite a few on the German side were waiting until the last moment for the start of decisive talks which, according to all human standards, would have led to major concessions and promises by the Soviet Union. If one abstracted from the circumstances, one might say that not only was the character of this war not settled, but neither fixed was the conduct of the English, nor especially of the Americans. It could not be ruled out a priori that Germany would ally itself with the anti-Bolshevik or anti-Russian forces likely to persist in the Soviet Union, and it was even less unlikely that in America Lenin’s thesis of the “robbers getting into each other’s hair” would have come to prevail in a paradoxical reversal of meaning.

But it was not Germany and Russia that went to war on June 22, but Bolshevik Russia and National Socialist Germany, which—in very different ways—were both a nightmare and a role model for each other. It is therefore time, before describing the main features of the war and after describing the history since 1918 and the interactions since 1933, to make some of the structures of the systems a comparative subject. The Soviet Union, as the older of the two systems, will always have to come first, and the supranational appeal that is inherent in every ideology and calls for civil war will have to be emphasized just as much as the national peculiarities, which no ideology can completely eliminate.