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. Britain and America also tended to airbrush the Nazi-Soviet pact out of mainstream history, afraid that it would damage the popular narrative of the "Grand Alliance" that beat the Nazis.
The Soviet Union occupied and annexed the rest of Poland. Also according to the agreement, the Soviet Union annexed other territories in its sphere of influence. On November 30, , the Soviets attacked Finland. After a four-month war, they annexed Finnish territory along the Soviet border, particularly the area near Leningrad now St. In the summer of , the Soviets occupied and incorporated the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.
They also seized the Romanian provinces of Northern Bukovina and Bessarabia. Hitler regarded the German-Soviet non-aggression pact as a tactical and temporary maneuver. He never intended to uphold the terms of the agreement for ten years. His long-range plan had always been for German forces to attack the Soviet Union and establish Lebensraum living space for the Germans in the territories they seized. Before taking this step, however, Hitler intended to subdue Poland and defeat France and Great Britain.
The non-aggression pact allowed Germany to fight these intermediate wars without fear of a Soviet attack, thereby avoiding a two front war. German diplomats worked to secure Germany's flank in southeast Europe. During the spring of , Hitler initiated his European allies into plans to invade the Soviet Union. We would like to thank Crown Family Philanthropies and the Abe and Ida Cooper Foundation for supporting the ongoing work to create content and resources for the Holocaust Encyclopedia.
View the list of all donors. Trending keywords:. Featured Content. 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? Stalin said yes. He was soon inside the Kremlin, face-to-face with Stalin and Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov , who had been working with von Ribbentrop to negotiate an agreement. The Soviet minister is also the namesake for the incendiary device known as a Molotov cocktail. Ribbentrop carried a proposal from Hitler that both countries commit to a nonaggression pact that would last years.
Stalin replied that 10 years would be sufficient. The proposal also stipulated that neither country would aid any third party that attacked either signatory.
Finally, the proposal contained a secret protocol specifying the spheres of influence in Eastern Europe both parties would accept after Hitler conquered Poland.
During the Kremlin meeting, Ribbentrop several times telephoned Hitler, who was nervously awaiting news at his country estate in Bavaria. Finally, in the early hours of August 23, Ribbentrop called to say that everything had been settled. Hitler was incensed by this counterthrust but quickly cancelled his order for the invasion.
Then, in a wild gamble that France and Great Britain would not meet their treaty obligations to Poland, and knowing he had nothing to fear from the Soviet army, Hitler ordered his troops to strike east into Poland on September 1,
0コメント