Black Earth(45)

The men to whom Stern spoke became Irgun officers who would lead the revolt against the British. When they returned to Palestine in May 1939, just as the British White Paper was published, and right after Poland accepted a British security guarantee, these Jewish radicals began to employ their Polish weapons and training in operations against Poland’s new ally. The British noticed the training and confiscated some of the weapons, but never made the connection to Warsaw.

—

Polish military intelligence officers excelled in the kinds of insurgency in which they trained Irgun, as they did in certain aspects of counterintelligence work. A special unit of military intelligence, for example, had broken the mechanized German code system known as “Enigma,” and built duplicates of the machine in order to decode messages. In July 1939, Polish cryptologists passed on their knowledge and these duplicates to their British and French allies. This work would be important for the British later in the war, providing the basis for the decryption station at Bletchley Park. In their estimations of just how the war would unfold, however, the men and women of Polish intelligence committed a major error.

After 1933, Polish military intelligence, the Second Department of the General Staff, regarded both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany as threats, with the Soviets seen as the more worrisome. The debate at the top of the Second Department was about whether a Soviet or a German invasion was more likely. Few if any officers recognized that Poland’s own decision not to ally with Nazi Germany would lead to a rapid German invasion of Poland. Once Britain and France had guaranteed Poland’s sovereignty, Germany faced encirclement from west and east. Hitler had lost, at least for the time being, any hope for the constellation he wanted: British indifference or support during a German war against the Soviet Union. Poland, which was not supposed to make a difference one way or the other, had altered the basic calculation of My Struggle. Logically, Germany’s only chance to avoid encirclement lay to the east of Poland: the Soviet Union itself. And this was the logic that Hitler indeed followed.

The Poles could be forgiven for not expecting this. They strongly suspected that Germany planned to invade the Soviet Union. Yet few people in Warsaw or elsewhere could anticipate Hitler’s rapid changes in tactics. Seeing only the final goal as important, he was capable of doing almost anything along the way. Thus after a whole career of anti-communism and after five years of recruiting Poland for a war against the Soviet Union, Hitler decided to ask the Soviet Union for a war against Poland. On August 20, 1939, he requested a meeting between his foreign minister, Ribbentrop, and the Soviet leadership. Stalin had been hoping for something like this. Berlin could offer what London and Paris could not: the remaking of eastern Europe. After German policy openly shifted against Poland in the spring, Stalin made a telling gesture towards Hitler. Knowing that Hitler had pledged never to make peace with Jewish communists, he fired his Jewish commissar for foreign affairs, Maxim Litvinov, a few weeks after the public break between Germany and Poland. Hitler told army commanders that “Litvinov’s dismissal was decisive.” When Ribbentrop arrived in Moscow he spoke with Viacheslav Molotov, a Russian.

The agreement signed by Ribbentrop and Molotov on August 23, 1939, was much more than a nonaggression pact. It included a secret protocol that divided Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland into Soviet and German spheres of influence. Poland was split between the two, with the obvious implication that the Soviets would join the Germans in invading the country and cooperate in the destruction of the state and political society. The precise contents of the secret protocol did not have to be known for the meaning of the accord to be clear to intelligent observers. Peace with the Soviet Union meant, at the very least, a free hand for Hitler.

By chance the World Zionist Congress was in session in Geneva when news of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was reported by the world’s press. The Jews gathered from Europe and the four corners of the world were shocked. The leader of the General Zionists, Chaim Weizmann, closed the congress with the words “Friends, I have only one wish: that we all remain alive.” There was no melodrama in this. The regions covered by the secret protocol of the Soviet-German agreement were a heartland of world Jewry, continuously settled by Jews for half a millennium. This heartland was about to become the most dangerous place for Jews in their entire history. A Holocaust would begin there twenty months later. Within three years, most of the millions of Jews who lived there would be dead.

—

For Stalin, the deal with Hitler was a great relief. He and many of his comrades had read Hitler’s writings and took them seriously. Stalin understood that Hitler aimed for the fertile farmland of Ukraine and said as much on a number of occasions. In agreeing to divide eastern Europe with Hitler, he hoped to divert the armed conflict to western Europe, where Britain and France would have to deal with the Germans. From a Soviet ideological perspective, this meant that the contradictions of capitalism were working themselves out on the battlefield, with the help of a nudge from Soviet diplomacy. From Stalin’s tactical perspective, the best way to fight a war was to allow others to bleed themselves white, and then move to take the spoils.