rise-and-fall-of-the-third-reich-william-shirer-pdf

THE NAZI-SOVIET PACT 487aggression. Now he had made himself an accessory to it. The Kremlin couldargue, as it did, that the Soviet Union had only done what Britain and Francehad done the year before at Munich: bought peace and the time to rearmagainst Germany at the expense of a small state. If Chamberlain was right andhonorable in appeasing Hitler in September 1938 by sacrificing Czechoslovakia,was Stalin wrong and dishonorable in appeasing the Fuehrer a year later at theexpense of Poland, which had shunned Soviet help anyway?Stalin’s cynical and secret deal with Hitler to divide up Poland and to obtaina free hand to gobble up Latvia, Estonia, Finland and Bessarabia was not knownoutside Berlin and Moscow, but it would soon become evident from Soviet acts,and it would shock most of the world even at this late date. The Russians mightsay, as they did, that they were only repossessing territories which had beentaken away from them at the end of the First World War. But the peoples ofthese lands were not Russian and had shown no desire to return to Russia. Onlyforce, which the Soviets had’ eschewed in the heyday of Litvinov, could makethem return. Since joining the League of Nations the Soviet Union had builtup a certain moral force as the champion of peace and the leading opponent offascist aggression. Now that moral capital had been utterly dissipated. Aboveall, by assenting to a shoddy deal with Nazi Germany, Stalin had given thesignal for the commencement of a war that almost certainly would develop intoa world conflict. This he certainly knew. ∗ As things turned out, it was thegreatest blunder of his life.∗ Years before. Hitler had written prophetically in Mein Kampf : ”The very fact of theconclusion of an alliance with Russia embodies a plan for the next war. Its outcome would bethe end of Germany.” (See p. 660 of the Houghton Mifflin edition, 1943.)