Each beginning of May in the past couple of decades, the whole of Russia falls into what people of other countries call the Victory Frenzy. There are usual slogans “Our grandfathers waged the war” and “We can repeat” with fists towards Berlin and the West. “Russia this”, “Russia that”, “Russians won the war”, “Whole world is obliged to Russia”, etc. But the truth is that without Russia’s help, there would not have been any Hitler possible. Without Moscow’s feeding the beast, there would not have been the deadliest war in the history of Mankind and tens of millions of lives would not have perished. Millions of Ukrainians would have been alive. Dr. Ian Johnson of Yale University whose dissertation was entitled “The Faustian Pact: Secret Soviet-German Military Cooperation in the Interwar Period,” wrote:
“After World War I, the Treaty of Versailles limited the German Army number to 100 thousand men and forbade Germany from producing or purchasing airplanes, armored vehicles, and submarines. By these restrictions, Entente intended to keep Germany’s hopes for military revenge under control. On its side, German Higher Command started looking for ways to secretly revive its military might or even increase it.
Within a year, they found another country that was also dissatisfied with the WW I outcome and was open to military cooperation with Germany – the Soviet Union. During secret talks in Moscow in 1920, Trotsky indicated that they would even consent to recognize the German borders of 1914 which meant partitioning of Poland. The roots, the initial scheming of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Act of dividing Poland in 1939 must be traced to that year of 1914.
After World War I, Bolshevik Russia needed technologies, the military ones in the first place, for further “wars of working-class liberation”, and Germany needed the places to test and, if possible, to produce the military equipment. Thus the secret cooperation started.
Already in 1926 the West was shocked to discover the huge JUNKERS aircraft production plant situated right on the Moscow outskirt. To test the planes and to teach pilots to fly these machines, a Flying School was created not far from Moscow in the city of Lipetsk. German and Russian pilots lived, flew, and studied together there. Several hundred pilots and aircraft mechanics who went through that school would become the core of the German Luftwaffe during WW II.
Farther to the east of Moscow, in the city of Kazan, an Armored Vehicle School was opened as well. The future commanders of German tank divisions such as Guderian not only attended the Kazan School but even taught there. The German tank prototypes were tested in the area too. Major German corporations such as Krupp, Daimler, and M.A.N. sent their engineering teams to Kazan for the field-testing of future WW II German tank prototypes.
In two cities – Podosinki near Moscow, and Tomka near Samara – two chemical facilities functioned where two sides worked on creating chemical weapons.
“While Soviet-German military cooperation between 1922 and 1933 is often forgotten, it had a decisive impact on the origins and outbreak of World War II. Germany rebuilt its shattered military at four secret bases hidden in Russia. In exchange, the Reichswehr sent men to teach and train the young Soviet officer corps. However, the most important aspect of Soviet-German cooperation was its technological component. Together, the two states built a network of laboratories, workshops, and testing grounds in which they developed what became the major weapons systems of World War II. Without the technical results of this cooperation, Hitler would have been unable to launch his wars of conquest.” [Full Story “Sowing the Wind: The First Soviet-German Military Pact and the Origins of World War II“]
How did Moscow help Hitler come to power and why? Professor Robert C. Tucker provides the answers to the questions. In his Stalin biography, Stalin in Power: The Revolution From Above: 1928-1941, he reminds that according to Leninist theory, the tendencies that could lead toward the outbreak of new inter-imperialist war needed to be strengthened – “It was this new war, if properly exploited, could lead revolutionary advance. “To prepare the way for moving into neighboring countries destined to constitute parts of the needed “socialist encirclement,” Moscow’s best bet from Stalin’s point of view, was the diplomacy of accord with Germany.”
The results of the November 1932 election were a disappointment for the Nazis – they had a majority of seats but were unable to form a government coalition in the Reichstag parliament. German Communists (KPD) and Social Democrats (SPD) received close to 40 percent of the Reichstag seats and constituted together a potentially powerful force for the preservation of the constitutional order.
According to Dr. Tucker, Trotsky forewarned that a Nazi victory would mean an inevitable war against the USSR, but Stalin had different ideas – a year before the elections, in the summer of 1931 the Communists, on orders from Moscow, joined in a Nazi-organized plebiscite against the SPD state government in Prussia.
Ernst Thaelmann, the Communist Party leader, rebelled at first against the instruction to participate in the anti-SPD Prussian plebiscite, but then he, Hermann Remmele, and Heinz Neumann “were called to Moscow to learn at first hand that this instruction had been issued to the Communist International by Stalin personally.”
An SPD leader, Friedrich Stampfer, also had several interviews with a Soviet Embassy attaché Vinogradov, who finally said it straight: “Moscow is convinced that the road to Soviet Germany leads through Hitler.”
Dr. Robert C. Tucker: “Stalin’s decisive personal role in the KPD policies that abetted the Nazi revolution is beyond doubt.
Despite their shrill ideological anti-Bolshevism and anti-Slav racism (along with anti-Semitism, which would not grieve Stalin), the Nazis were no Westlers. Their movement was stridently nationalistic, revanchist, illiberal, anti-democratic, anti-pacifist and anti-Versailles. They were plainly a bellicose force. Their accession to power might, then, be a harbinger of great tension, if not a new war, between Germany and the West. We have direct testimony that this was what Stalin thought. In a conversation with Heinz Neumann at the end of 1931, he said: “Don’t you believe, Neumann, that if the Nationalists seize power in Germany they will be so completely preoccupied with the West that we’ll be able to build up socialism in peace?”
“On 23 March 1933, the Fuhrer declared the Reich ready to cultivate friendly and mutually profitable relations with the Soviet Union. “It is above all the government of the National Revolution who feel themselves in a position to adopt such policy with regard to Soviet Russia.” He said that the common interests of Germany and Soviet Russia were both economic and political because the two countries had the same difficulties and the same enemies. The two countries could complement one another and render mutual services. “Stalin must have read this with keen interest.”
Hitler also indicated that one common interest, hence the potential basis of cooperation between his Germany and Stalin’s Russia were their respective revisionist claims upon different portions of Poland.
“Sedately, with no show of anxiety or alarm, Stalin signaled his interest in doing business with Berlin. Having reciprocated Hitler’s action in ratifying the protocol on an extension of the 1926 treaty, the Soviet government published an Izvestia editorial on 5 May 1933, which reaffirmed the Rapallo tradition… Not long afterward Stalin began to communicate with Berlin via special channels, bypassing the Foreign Commissariat.”
“Stalin did not forsake his earlier orientation on a new and greater Brest – a divisive diplomacy leading to a new European war in which Moscow would remain neutral until a time of its choosing and then carve out his envisaged “socialist borderland… He knew that for this war to be advantageous for Moscow, it must be protracted, and for that, both sides must be formidably strong.”
“By his collective-security diplomacy, in combination with his popular-front tactics in the Comintern, Stalin was assisting events to take their course toward a European war… To make sure that the European war would be protracted, he wanted Britain and France to be militarily strong enough to withstand the onslaught that Germany under Hitler was becoming strong enough to launch against them. This explains his moves to encourage ruling elements in both these major states to rearm with dispatch, and his orders to the French Communists to support the French military buildup.”
“As a Bolshevism of the radical right, Stalin’s Russian national Bolshevism was akin to Hitler’s German National Socialism. Kinship is not an identity. There were differences… but the likenesses were many and deep. Both regimes… were anti-Communist. Both were chauvinist and idealized elements of the national past. Both were statist and imperialist. Both were enemy-obsessed. Both were terroristic and practiced torture in their prisons. Both were regimes of personal dictatorship with a leader cult.”
“Stalin in his party congress speech set in motion talks leading to an alignment with Berlin… which raised the possibility of a negotiated neutrality that would ensure Hitler against what he had feared the most: a two-front war. This, Stalin could calculate, would enable Hitler to unleash aggression and him, while remaining neutral, to take over territories in Eastern Europe on an agreed-upon basis… Five days after Stalin addressed the party congress on 10 March, Hitler seized the remainder of Czechoslovakia…”
In a conversation after World War II, Voroshilov said: “We in spite of it all thought that if Germany attacked Britain and France, it would bog down there for a long time. Who could have known that France would collapse in two weeks?”
“Talks begun in October 1939 led to a conclusion on 11 February 1940 of a barter agreement under which very large numbers of Soviet strategic raw materials, including feed grains, oil, iron ore, scrap and pig iron, manganese, and platinum. Were exchanges for German industrial products, machinery, and armaments.”
In 1940 year alone, Moscow delivered to Germany 2 thousand aviation bombs with weight from 500 to 1000 kilograms for bombing England.
Goebbels wrote in his diary: “Russians deliver us more than we ever wanted. Stalin does everything for us to like him.” Quote from the same diary as of April 14, 1941: “Stalin embraces the German Military Attaché and declares that Russia and Germany will march together to their goal. This is marvelous and for the moment extremely useful. We shall bring it to the notice of English with all appropriate force.”
And May 10, 1941: “Moscow has declared that it no longer recognizes Belgium and Norway as sovereign states. Handed their ambassadors their marching-orders. So things have reached that stage. O Nightingale, I hear you twitter. But it will not do Stalin much good now.”
Stalin also granted the German Navy permission to use a secret naval base near Murmansk to follow British shipping and make the German invasion of Norway easier.”
Here is how the Nazi and Soviets celebrated their partition of Poland in 1939:
