The Devils' Alliance: Hitler's Pact with Stalin, 1939-1941

The Devils' Alliance: Hitler's Pact with Stalin, 1939-1941 By Roger Moorhouse Basic Books: New York, NY 2014 372 pages $29.99 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 23, 1939 is one of the most notorious diplomatic arrangements of all time. With this deal on economic cooperation and spheres of influence between the Third Reich and the Soviet Union, Hitler and Stalin crushed Poland, divided up central and Eastern Europe between them and heralded the coming of the Second World War. During the Cold War, historians could only consult the German records of the negotiations leading to the non-aggression pact and the brief period of Nazi-Soviet collaboration, but since the collapse of the Soviet Union our knowledge of the Soviet side of the episode has benefited enormously from the opening up of Russian archives. In The Devils' Alliance, Roger Moorhouse draws on the latest research and sources to offer readers a vivid retelling of the making and breaking of the deal. He carefully reconstructs the game of political hardball played play by the German foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and his Soviet counterpart, Vyacheslav Molotov. The absorbing story of the diplomatic bargaining over frontiers and trade is set against the wider context of the implementation of the pact. The twenty-two months of Nazi-Soviet collaboration enabled the two regimes to experiment in the brutal imposition of their ideological visions on the peoples of Eastern Europe. Behind the German armies, advancing into Poland came special police units to murder Jews and others deemed enemies of the Third Reich; the advance of the Red Army permitted Moscow step by step to Sovietize its share of eastern Poland and the Baltic states and to murder or exile its political foes. With great skill, Moorhouse conveys the human tragedy of these events with telling details from individual experiences. Through these individual tragedies multiplied thousands of times over, Moorhouse reminds us why the collective memories of the period of Nazi-Soviet collaboration overshadow the politics of Eastern Europe to this day. Moorhouse underscores the basis of the deal was strategic, not ideological. Although the two regimes are often lumped together under the "totalitarian" rubric, there was no red-brown political affinity drawing them together. Ribbentrop may have dreamed about a grand alliance between the Axis states and the Soviet Union to confront Anglo-American powers, but he was alone in this respect. …