style="font-size:15px;"> An American sequel to the German-Japanese secret pact came to my attention when I was already in the United States. In January, 1939, Hitler appointed his personal aide, Capt. Fritz Wiedemann, consul general at San Francisco. Fritz Wiedemann had been Private Hitler’s commanding officer in the World War and is one of the Fuehrer’s most intimate and trusted collaborators. The appointment of such a figure to a seemingly minor post on the Pacific suggests the significance of the German-Japanese secret agreement. Hitler included in his plans even the possibility of joint maneuvers with Japan in the Pacific.
Lieutenant General Oshima was elevated from military attaché to Japanese ambassador to Germany in October, 1938, and presented his credentials to Hitler on November twenty-second, last.
Now, what was the effect of the Berlin-Tokyo pact upon the Kremlin’s foreign policy? How did Stalin react to Hitler’s enveloping operation against the Soviet Union?
Stalin continued his two simultaneous courses of action. The series of maneuvers he executed on the surface is a matter of open record. He strengthened his association with France by a special treaty and pressed for an alliance. He entered into a mutual-assistance pact with Czechoslovakia. He launched the united-front campaign throughout the anti-Fascist world. He had Litvinov inaugurate the crusade for collective security, designed to align all the great and small powers in the defense of the Soviet Union from German-Japanese aggression. He intervened in Spain in order to forge a closer link with Paris and London.
But all these surface moves were designed only to impress Hitler, and bring success to his undercover maneuvers which had but one aim: a close accord with Germany. No sooner was the German-Japanese pact signed than Stalin directed the Soviet trade envoy in Berlin, his personal emissary, David Kandelaki, to go outside the ordinary diplomatic channels and at whatever cost arrive at a deal with Hitler. At a meeting of the Politbureau held at this time, Stalin definitely informed his lieutenants: “In the very near future we shall consummate an agreement with Germany.”
In December, 1936, I received orders to throttle down our work in Germany. The first months of 1937 were passed in expectancy of a favorable outcome of Kandelaki’s secret negotiations. I was in Moscow when he arrived from Berlin, in April, accompanied by the Ogpu representative in Germany. Kandelaki brought with him the draft of an agreement with the Nazi government. He was received in private audiences by Stalin, who believed that he had at last achieved the goal of all his maneuvers.
At this time I had occasion for a long conference with Yezhov, then head of the Ogpu. Yezhov had just reported to Stalin on certain operations of mine. Yezhov had been a metal worker in his youth, raised in the Stalin school. This dreaded marshal of the great purge had a simple mind. Any question of policy he took up with Stalin at once, and whatever the big boss said, he repeated word for word, and then translated into action.
Yezhov and I discussed various reports in our possession as to discontent in Germany, and possible opposition to Hitler from the old monarchist groups. Yezhov had discussed the same subject that very day in his conference with Stalin. His words were practically a phonographic record of the boss himself:
“What’s all this drivel about discontent with Hitler in the German army?” he exclaimed. “What does it take to content an army? Ample rations? Hitler furnishes them. Good arms and equipment? Hitler supplies them. Prestige and honor? Hitler provides it. A sense of power and victory? Hitler gives that, too. The talk about army unrest in Germany is all nonsense.
“As for the capitalists, what do they need a Kaiser for? They wanted to put the workers back in the factories. Hitler has done it for them. They wanted to get rid of the Communists. Hitler has them in jails and concentration camps. They were fed up with labor unions and strikes. Hitler has put labor under state control and outlawed strikes. Why should the industrialists be discontented?”
Yezhov continued in the same vein: Germany is strong. She is now the strongest power in the world. Hitler has made her so. Who can doubt it? How can anyone in his senses fail to reckon with it? For Soviet Russia there is but one course. And here he quoted Stalin: “We must come to terms with a superior power like Nazi Germany.”
Hitler, however, again rebuffed Stalin’s advances. By the end of 1937, with the collapse of the Stalin plans in Spain and the Japanese successes in China, the international isolation of the Soviet Union became extreme. Stalin then took, on the surface, a position of neutrality between the two major groups of powers. On November 27, 1937, speaking in Leningrad, Foreign Commissar Litvinov poked fun at the democratic nations for their handling of the Fascist nations. But Stalin’s underlying purpose remained the same.
In March, 1938, Stalin staged his ten-day super-trial of the Rykov-Bukharin-Krestinsky group of Bolsheviks, who had been Lenin’s closest associates and who were among the fathers of the Soviet Revolution. These Bolshevik leaders—hateful to Hitler—were shot by Stalin on March third. On March twelfth, with no protest from Russia, Hitler annexed Austria. Moscow’s only reply was a proposal to call a parley of the democratic nations. Again, when Hitler annexed the Sudeten areas in September, 1938 Litvinov proposed concerted aid to Prague, but made it conditional upon action by the League of Nations. Stalin himself remained silent during the whole eventful year of 1938. But signs have not been wanting since Munich of his continued wooing of Hitler.
On January 12, 1939, there took place before the entire diplomatic corps in Berlin the cordial and demonstrative chat of Hitler with the new Soviet ambassador. A week later an item appeared in the London News Chronicle reporting a coming rapprochement between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. And this item was immediately and prominently reprinted, without comment and without refutation, in Stalin’s mouthpiece, the Moscow Pravda.
On January twenty-fifth, W. N. Ewer, foreign editor of the London Daily Herald, leading British Labor paper, reported that the Nazi government was “now almost convinced that in the event of a European war the Soviet Union would adopt a policy of neutrality and non-intervention” and that a German trade delegation whose “objects are political rather than commercial” was on the way to Moscow.
Early in February it was disclosed that Moscow had made a deal to sell its oil only to Italy and Germany and nations friendly to the Rome-Berlin axis. For the first time in its history the Soviet government had stopped the sale of oil to private foreign corporations. This new policy would provide supplies vital to Italy and Germany in case of war with Great Britain and France.
Then, on Friday, March 10, 1939, Stalin at last spoke up. It was his first word since the annexation of Austria and the Sudeten lands by Germany, and he displayed such remarkable good humor toward Hitler that it came as a shock to world opinion. He excoriated the democracies for plotting to “poison the atmosphere and provoke a conflict” between Germany and Soviet Russia, for which, he said, there were “no visible grounds.”
Three days after Stalin’s speech, Hitler dismembered Czechoslovakia. Two days later, he extinguished Czechoslovakia altogether. Of course, this was the result of Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement. The world did not then realize that it was also the result of Stalin’s policy of appeasement. Secretly Stalin had been playing the Rome-Berlin axis against the London-Paris axis all along. He does not believe in the strength of the democratic states.
To Stalin it was clear that Hitler had undertaken to solve the entire problem of Central and Southeastern Europe, to bring the peoples and resources in those areas under his political and economic domination, and to extend there his military base for future operations.
Stalin has seen Hitler in recent years reach out and get a foothold for a leap in almost every direction. He has dropped an anchor in the Pacific, and put his hand in South America. He is coming within striking distance of the British Empire in the Near East. And he has, with the aid of Mussolini, driven a stake in colonial Africa.
