On August 23, —shortly before World War II broke out in Europe—enemies Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union surprised the world by signing the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, in which the two countries agreed to take no military action against each other for the next 10 years. With Europe on the brink of another major war, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin viewed the pact as a way to keep his nation on peaceful terms with Germany, while giving him time to build up the Soviet military.
German chancellor Adolf Hitler used the pact to make sure Germany was able to invade Poland unopposed.
The pact also contained a secret agreement in which the Soviets and Germans agreed how they would later divide up Eastern Europe. The invasion jolted British and French leaders and convinced them that Adolf Hitler , the German chancellor, could not be trusted to honor his agreements and was likely to keep committing aggressions until stopped by force or a massive deterrent. In the previous year, Hitler had annexed Austria and had taken the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia; in March , his tanks rolled into the rest of Czechoslovakia.
It appeared that he was determined to undo the international order set up by the Treaty of Versailles , the peace settlement that ended World War I The treaty, which required Germany to make numerous concessions and reparations, was highly unpopular with Hitler and his Nazi Party. It also seemed that Hitler was planning to strike next against its neighbor Poland. The British and French also stepped up diplomatic engagement with the Soviet Union , trying to draw it closer by trade and other agreements to make Hitler see he would also have to face Joseph Stalin if he invaded Poland.
But Hitler already knew the Soviets would not stand by if he tried to occupy Poland—an act that would extend the border of Germany right up to the Soviet Union. It was clear during the tense spring and summer of that little, if anything, could be taken for granted. Through the spring and summer of , Hitler stepped up his demands on the Polish government in Warsaw, and pushed for allowing Germany to reclaim the port city of Danzig a former German city internationalized by the Treaty of Versailles.
Hitler also wanted to put a stop to the alleged mistreatment of Germans living in the western regions of Poland. At the same time, he advanced his plans for attacking Poland in August if his demands were not met. To avoid such a scenario, Hitler had cautiously begun exploring the possibility of a thaw in relations with Stalin. Several brief diplomatic exchanges in May fizzled by the next month. If Hitler sent his foreign minister to Moscow for a vitally important discussion, would Stalin receive him?
Terms of the pact included the provision that if Germany attacked Poland , the Soviet Union would not come to its aid.
Thus, if Germany went to war against the West especially France and Great Britain over Poland, the Soviets were guaranteeing that they would not enter the war. This would block the opening of a second front for Germany. In addition to the agreement, Ribbentrop and Molotov added a secret protocol to the pact—a secret addendum whose existence was denied by the Soviets until The secret protocol held an agreement between the Nazis and the Soviets that greatly affected Eastern Europe.
In exchange for the Soviets pledging to decline engagement in the imminent war, Germany gave the Soviets the Baltic States Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania , leaving Poland to be divided between the two along the Narew, Vistula, and San rivers.
The territory restructuring provided the Soviet Union a level of protection from a Western invasion via an inland buffer. It would need that buffer in When the Nazis attacked Poland on the morning of September 1, , the Soviets stood by and watched. Soviets rolled into eastern Poland on September 17 to occupy their "sphere of influence" as designated in the secret protocol. In this manner, the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact effectively barred the Soviet Union from joining the fight against Germany, thus affording Germany success in its attempt to safeguard its borders from a two-front war.
The Nazis and the Soviets kept the terms of the pact and the protocol until Germany's surprise attack and invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, In a radio broadcast on July 3, Stalin told the Russian people of his dissolution of the non-aggression pact and declaration of war with Germany, and on July 12, the Anglo-Soviet mutual assistance pact was signed into force.
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Measure ad performance. Select basic ads. Create a personalised ads profile. Soviet raw materials allowed the Germans to mitigate the worst effects of the British naval blockade, while the Soviets benefitted from German tools and finished goods. But the Nazi-Soviet pact didn't last. In late , the Soviets also tried to invade Finland. The Finns refused to roll over. Despite being tremendously outnumbered and outgunned, they improvised a defense and made the best of the terrain and the ferocious winter weather.
One innovation of that campaign was the gasoline bomb, designed for use against the air intake ducts on Soviet tanks. Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister, had called the Russian invasion a "humanitarian" move; Soviet propaganda even claimed that bombs dropped by Soviet planes were food aid. In a sarcastic tribute, the Finns christened their homemade weapons "Molotov cocktails," joking that they should have drinks along with the Soviet-provided "meals.
The Germans were astonished at how badly the Soviets performed in the Winter War, a performance that made them believe they could turn on Stalin before finishing off the stubborn Brits in the west. In June , Hitler attacked. Moorhouse and other historians say that Stalin was stunned by the invasion and refused to accept that the news was true, leading to disastrous losses by the Red Army in the early days of the war. Once the Soviet Union recovered and defeated the Nazis, Moscow re-wrote history.
The Nazi-Soviet Pact morphed from a delusion to a clever way to buy time, which allowed the Soviet Union to re-arm.
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