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From The Militant, Vol. XII No. 5, 2 February 1948, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Next to their violation of the Stalin-Hitler “peace” pact and invasion of the Soviet Union, the dirtiest trick the Nazis pulled on their Kremlin partners was to leave some two million documents lying around for the U.S.-British armies to pick up in Germany.
After concealing the contents of these documents for nearly three years, the U.S. State Department saw fit to make public on Jan. 21 the text of 260 papers of the German Foreign Office, carefully-selected and edited. The texts are contained in the recently issued 357-page book, Nazi-Soviet Relations, 1939–41.
These contain the Secret Protocols of the Stalin-Hitler Pact and other indisputable documentary confirmation of the sordid deal between the Kremlin and the Nazis to carve up Poland and Eastern Europe and to give Hitler a free hand for war against his imperialist rivals in the West.
Publication of these extremely damaging documents at this time is part of American imperialism’s propaganda preparations for war against Russia. They are also intended to divert attention from Wall Street’s own world-grabbing designs by focusing the spotlight on the Kremlin bureaucracy’s criminal alliance with Hitler.
What the documents confirm in detail are:
The Stalin-Hitler pact was initiated by the Kremlin. A memorandum by the State Secretary Weizsäcker in the German Foreign Office, dated Berlin, April 17, 1939, reports his conversation with the Russian Ambassador who said “there exists for Russia no reason why she should not live with us on a normal footing. And from normal, the relations might become better and better.”
Conversations and negotiations proceeded in an atmosphere of growing cordiality. On August 18, 1939, Reich Foreign Minister Von Ribbentrop wired the German Ambassador in the Soviet Union to conclude a pact speedily as “German-Polish relations were becoming more acute from day to day.”
The next day, the German Ambassador wired back the text of the proposed “non-aggression pact” to “strengthen the cause of peace among the nations.”
On Aug. 23, 1939, Ribbentrop in Moscow wired his Fuehrer that the remaining hitch was “the demand of the Russians that we recognize the ports of Libau and Windau as within their sphere of influence ... The signing of a secret protocol on delimitation of mutual spheres of influence in the whole eastern area is contemplated, for which I declared myself ready in principle."
A detailed memorandum describes the jovial get-together of Ribbentrop, Stalin and Molotov to celebrate the final agreement on Aug. 23, 1939.
“In the course of the conversation Herr Stalin spontaneously proposed a toast to the Fuehrer, as follows: 'I know how much the German nation loves its Fuehrer; I should therefore like to drink to his health.’”
Hitler’s armies invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939. On the 9th, Molotov telephoned the German Ambassador Schulenberg to “please convey my congratulations and greetings to the German Reich Government, on the entry of German troops into Warsaw.”
The next day Schulenberg reported that the rapid advance of the German armies had taken the Kremlin “completely by surprise” and the Red Army “required possibly two to three weeks more for their preparations ... I explained to Molotov how crucial speedy action of the Red Army was at this junction.”
Molotov came “to the political side of the matter and stated that the Soviet Government had intended to take the occasion of the further advance of German troops to declare that Poland was falling apart and that it was necessary for the Soviet Union, in consequence, to come to the aid of the Ukrainians and the White Russians ‘threatened’ by Germany. This argument was to make the intervention of the Soviet Union plausible to the masses.
After objections from the German Ambassador. “Stalin with the utmost readiness so altered the text that the note now seems satisfactory to us.”
On Sept. 25, 1939, Stalin and Molotov called Schulenberg to the Kremlin. Stalin stated “he considered it wrong to leave an independent Polish rump state.” He asked the Germans to waive their claim to Lithuania. A Secret Supplementary Protocol was signed on Sept. 28, 1939, recognizing that “Lithuania falls to the sphere of the U.S.S.R.”
The same day Ribbentrop and Molotov signed the German-Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty, which declared that the two governments “consider it as exclusively their task, after the collapse of the former Polish state, to re-establish peace and order in these territories ...”
Another Secret Supplementary Protocol said that “both parties will tolerate in their territories no Polish agitation which affects the territories of the other party. They will suppress in their territories all beginnings of such agitation land inform each other concerning suitable measures for this purpose."
Stalin, according to the records, supplied large amounts of food and raw material for the German military machine, including wheat, oil, copper, tin and nickel.
One document reveals that the Nazis used Russian naval bases.
On July 13, 1940, Schulenberg received from Molotov the memorandum of the latter’s discussion with the British Ambassador Cripps.
“The British Government was of the opinion that unifications and leadership of the Balkan countries for the purpose of maintaining the status quo was rightly the task of the Soviet Union ... Cripps was of the opinion that the interests of the Soviet Union in the Straits (Dardanelles) must be safeguarded.”
Thus hard-pressed Britain was prepared in 1940 to grant Russia far more of other people’s countries than even Hitler. In addition to hegemony over the Balkans, Cripps w|is prepared to throw in the Dardanelles!
At this writing, the Kremlin has made no reply on the publication of these documents. L’Humanité, organ of the French Communist Party, evades an answer by calling these documents “forgeries.” However, the Jan. 23 Daily Worker, organ of the American Communist Party, admits the authenticity of the documents.
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