Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact
Reading

A Pact with the Soviet Union

Learn about the non-aggression pact forged by Hitler and Stalin in 1939, the pact’s secret clauses, and the role of propaganda.
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At a Glance

Reading

Language

English — US

Subject

  • History
  • The Holocaust
  • Propaganda

A Sinister Alliance: Soviet-German Relations 1939–1941

Joshua Rubenstein, author and associate at Harvard's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian studies, details the relationship between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in the decade before World War II.

By the summer of 1939, war in Europe seemed inevitable. As people braced themselves, many wondered how the Soviet Union would respond. For years, Hitler had targeted the Soviet Union and the Communist Party as Germany’s primary enemy. Joseph Stalin held similar views of Germany and the Nazi Party. 

To the surprise of almost everyone, the two dictators announced a nonaggression pact on August 23, 1939. The two men agreed that their countries would not to attack each other, either independently or along with other nations. They also vowed to consult each other in order to provide information or raise questions concerning their common interests and also to resolve any differences through negotiation or arbitration. The pact would be in effect for ten years, with an automatic extension for another five years unless either party gave notice to end it. 1

The treaty startled people everywhere. Both Stalin and Hitler knew that their internal propaganda machines would have to work hard to change current public opinion within their nations and also to change the negative perceptions that each country had been cultivating about the other. According to historian Roger Moorhouse:

[T]he tone of public and cultural life in the Soviet Union shifted after the signing of the pact. From one day to the next, the newspapers stopped criticizing Nazi Germany and instead began lauding German achievements. As Kravencho (a factory director) noted . . . “The Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries instantly discovered the wonders of German Kultur. Visiting Moscow on business, I learned that several exhibits of Nazi art, Nazi economic achievements and Nazi military glory were on view or in the process of organization. In fact, everything Germanic was in vogue.” 2

In Germany, people were equally surprised. As in the Soviet Union, official propaganda reversed itself quickly after its years of attacks on Soviet communism. According to Moorhouse:

Public discourse was uniformly positive about the pact, with German newspapers immediately altering the tone with which they reported Soviet current affairs or Russian culture. Where reporters and editors had once been unable to resist inserting—at the very least—a derogatory adjective or a critical aside, they now reported events with scrupulous evenhandedness. On the morning of the pact's announcement, the newspapers seemed desperate to make the case for the new arrangement. Every title carried almost verbatim reports and commentaries, scripted under Goebbels’s supervision, rejoicing at the restoration of the “traditional friendship between the Russian and the German peoples.” In the Nazi Party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, [German Foreign Minister] Ribbentrop congratulated himself by lauding his achievement as “one of the most important turning points in the history of our two peoples.” Even the in-house newspaper of the SS, Das Schwarze Korps, toed the optimistic line, reminding its readers, in a gallop through Russian and Soviet history, that the empire of the tsars had originally been a Germanic state, that it had twice “saved” Prussia, and that it had “paid dearly” for its enmity with Germany in World War I. Echoing Ribbentrop, the newspaper concluded that the two countries had always flourished when they were friends and so looked forward to a new era of collaboration. 3

At the time, only a handful of diplomats from both countries knew that the treaty contained a set of secret clauses in which Germany and the Soviet Union divided Poland and other parts of eastern Europe between them. The clauses were not made public until much later.

Connection Questions

  1. Why did the Soviet Union and Germany enter into a nonaggression pact? What was in the secret clauses that might have convinced them to sign the pact?
  2. What changes in propaganda did German leaders have to make after the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact? What changes were also necessary in the Soviet Union?
  3. Historian Gerhard Weinberg has argued that for Hitler, the primary objective of treaties was “either the immediate gain of space by the partitioning of third countries or the postponement of troubles considered dangerous at the moment until they could be faced with safety. In either case, treaties were temporary instruments to be broken as soon as they were no longer useful.” 4 How does this reading support that argument? 
  • 1Treaty of Nonaggression Between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,” The Avalon Project (Yale Law School), last modified 2008, accessed April 26, 2016.
  • 2Roger Moorhouse, The Devils' Alliance: Hitler's Pact with Stalin, 1939–1941 (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 119.
  • 3Roger Moorhouse, The Devils' Alliance: Hitler's Pact with Stalin, 1939–1941 (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 125–126.
  • 4Gerhard L. Weinberg, Germany, Hitler, and World War II: Essays in Modern German and World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 37.

How to Cite This Reading

Facing History & Ourselves, "A Pact with the Soviet Union," last updated August 2, 2016.

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