176 Ë War and Dénouement
Fig. 7.1.The Caucasus on the eve of World War II.
Bammat and the Caucasus group found their own reasons for not working with
the Germans: on 23 August 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union signed a nonaggres-
sion pact (the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact), which among other stipulations obliged Ger-
many to ban all anti-Soviet émigré activity. This dramatic turn of events drawing to-
gether two mortal enemies surprised the entire world. It violated the Anti-Comintern
Pact (on the German side) as well as the mutual assistance pact with France (on the
Soviet side). The political impact was such that the cabinet of the Japanese govern-
ment, a party to the Anti-Comintern Pact, was forced to resign, declaring that the new
“anti-Anti-Comintern pact” between Berlin and Moscow was so bizarre as to be incom-
prehensible. The pact, moreover, left Japan alone in charge of anti-Soviet intelligence
in the Caucasus, an area of “mutual interest” to Germany and Japan as stipulated in
theOshima-Canaris agreement of May 1937. ̄ ³¹
31 For the transition to Japan of the hegemony among the anti-Soviet émigré groups in general at
this time, see Paul Leverkuehn,Der geheime Nachrichtendienst der deutschen Wehrmacht im Kriege
(Frankfurt a.M.: Bernard & Graefe, 1957), 132.