had warded off all the Reich’s diplomatic gestures and still stood defiant; Japan was too busy in China to give Hitler’s European machinations too much thought, and while Italy did stand by the Reich it was clear to all in Berlin that Mussolini’s country would not join them if a war began too soon. With its strategy in tatters the Reich felt itself compelled to turn to its ideological nemesis for assistance: Stalin’s Soviet Union. Despite their historical animosity, differing ideologies and strategies, the Soviet Union and the Hitler’s Reich had begun softening their attitudes toward one another not long after the Munich Agreement. 167 From early 1939 the Reich Foreign Ministry began to notice a softening in Soviet rhetoric towards Germany; the Ambassador in Moscow, Count Von Der Schulenberg, sent a telegram to Berlin saying that in Stalin’s March speech to the Communist Party Congress ‘… it was noteworthy that Stalin’s irony and criticism were directed in considerably sharper degree against Britain, i.e., against the reactionary forces in power there, than against the so-called aggressor States, and in particular, Germany.’ 168 Stalin did, moreover, declare that he had decided ‘not to allow our country to be drawn into conflicts by warmongers who are accustomed to get others to pull the chestnuts out of the fire for them.’ 169 In this he was referring to the British and French, who at that moment were attempting to sound out Russia for a potential security pact against Germany. What was clear from this is that Stalin had little desire to involve himself in a war that 167 A. Rossi, The Russo-German Alliance: 1939-1941 , (London, Chapman & Hall, 1950), p. 5. 168 The Ambassador (Count Von Der Schulenberg) in the Soviet Union to the Foreign Ministry, Moscow, March 13, 1939, in Paul R. Sweet et al, (1956), p. 1. 169 Rossi, p. 8.
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