A History of Modern Europe - From the Renaissance to the Present

The War in Europe Begins 1057

unprepared for war, and now tied by a formal alliance to Hitler, the Duce
had painted his country into a corner.

The Unholy Alliance

Stalin himself no longer had doubts about Hitler’s ultimate intentions
toward the Soviet Union. But the Russian army needed time to prepare for
war. Stalin had decimated the officer corps during the purges of the past
three years. In the short run, Hitler wished to avoid war with the Soviet
Union while he was fighting in Poland; in the longer run, anticipating war
with the Western powers, he sought, like Bismarck in different circum­
stances before him, to avoid fighting a war on two fronts. Stalin did not
trust the Western Allies to maintain their commitment to resist Hitler and
did not think that even a Soviet pact with Britain and France would prevent
Hitler from attacking Poland.
In one of the most astonishing diplomatic turnarounds in history, Hitler
announced on August 23, 1939, that Germany had signed the Molotov­
Ribbentrop Nonaggression Pact with the Soviet Union, which was named
for the two foreign ministers who negotiated it. The man Stalin had called
“the bloody assassin of the workers” signed an agreement with the Com­
munist leader Hitler had referred to as “the scum of the earth” and who
dominated a state that Hitler planned to conquer. Hitler believed that a
German pact with the Soviet Union would smash the will of Britain and
France to defend Poland.
Stalin had reasons not to trust Britain or France, which had not bothered
to consult the Soviet Union while appeasing at Munich. Hitler and Stalin
divided up eastern Central Europe into “spheres of influence.” The German
dictator assured Stalin that “in the event of a territorial and political
rearrangement,” the independent states of Latvia and Estonia, coveted by
Russia, as well as Finland and eastern Poland, would be fair game for the
Soviet Union. Stalin still assumed that the imperialist powers ultimately
would destroy each other in a protracted war.
In the meantime, most Germans seemed prepared to follow Hitler into a
new war. A popular German magazine in April 1939 had cheerfully run the
headline, “Gas Masks for German Children Now Ready.”

The War in Europe Begins

The war for which Hitler had prepared for so long began with a rapid, bru­

tal German attack on Poland. Stalin’s Soviet Union then occupied eastern

Poland. As Nazi troops overran Poland, the latter’s Western allies, Great

Britain and France, protested, but took no military action. Soviet troops

soon invaded Finland, and German forces occupied Denmark and then