Prior to the invasion of Poland in September 1939, Nazi Germany signed a Nonaggression Pact with the Soviet Union. The August 1939 treaty included a Secret Additional Protocol which allowed the Soviet Union to occupy Eastern Poland and the Baltic states and add Bessarabia to its political sphere of interest. Already at war with Great Britain and France, the pact called for Germany to receive from Russia needed raw materials, food (thus avoiding the worst of the British blockade), and oil. In return, Nazi Germany sent industrial machinery to the Soviet Union, and allowed for Soviet expansion westward.
Moorhouse, a bestselling author of books about World War II, describes the perfidy of both regimes. Deportations, often associated with sending Jews to the death camps, was also the means by which Stalin sent his class enemies to the Siberian Gulags, where they were often worked to death. Between 1939 – 1941, for example, over a million Poles were deported to Siberia from the Soviet zone alone. The author also includes sections on the maltreatment of Jews in the aftermath of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Hailing the Germans as liberators from Soviet rule, Baltic “patriots” were encouraged by Einzatzgruppen, commanders to enact pogroms and the mass murder of Jews by associating them with the hated Communists.
The Devil’s Alliance is an authoritative account of the pact that precipitated the Holocaust and the murder of many millions of people under both Soviet and Nazi rule.
Related content:
