The Devils' Alliance

August 11, 2014
Moorhouse (The Wolf’s Lair) delivers a straightforward diplomatic history of the nonaggression pact signed between Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union in August 1939, asserting that the concord was the key enabling event of the early years of WWII. Moorhouse describes why and how the pact came to be before highlighting the broad spectrum of its effects. Militarily, it permitted Hitler’s early European conquests and set the conditions for the German attack on Russia. It also facilitated the Soviet annexation of the Baltic states and the invasion of Finland. Economically, the pact convinced Hitler that he could prosecute global war despite a lack of natural resources. Finally, the pact allowed for the Soviet and the Nazi policies of massive deportation, political murder, and genocide. An interesting and somewhat original assertion is that Soviet policy in 1939 was fundamentally aggressive and that the pact enabled expansion without combat. Moorhouse draws archival records to supply the main narrative, illustrating the human dimension of the period through memoirs, interviews, and unpublished diaries. The personal stories integrated throughout transforms a dry diplomatic history into riveting drama. Readers of military and diplomatic history as well as those interested in the Holocaust will find this book immensely interesting and informative. 30 b&w images.

Starred review from September 1, 2014
Placing the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact squarely at the center of Soviet-German belligerence before the outbreak of World War II. English historian Moorhouse (Berlin at War, 2010, etc.) finds that the Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact of August 1939-with its "secret protocol" to carve up Poland and the Baltic states-is not well-understood in the West and is still rationalized by "communist apologists" today. The pact, which lasted less than two years and ended with Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, indeed "turned the political world upside down," as it created bedfellows between two sworn enemies who had long denounced the other as attempting world domination. Hitler had gained power by railing against the "Jewish Bolshevist plague," while Stalin had decried German expansionism in the East since the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918. Moorhouse nimbly shows how this cynical alliance came about: Hitler needed to guard his eastern flank in his expansion into Czechoslovakia (Bohemia and Moravia were rich in minerals and industry), and intractable Poland could not be brought around without force; moreover, an alliance with the resources-rich Soviet Union would feed Hitler's war. The author attempts to clarify Stalin's rationale in pushing for this pact as not simply being a defensive move or a way of buying time until the Soviets were prepared for war. Rather, it was a "passive-aggressive" grab at territory and power, a chance to "set world-historical forces in motion" and thumb his nose at Western imperialist powers. The impact was huge, as 75 million people were affected by the newly designated borders, causing massive deportations and purges and creating parallel (and collaborative) systems of terror and repression by the NKVD and the Nazi SS. Moorhouse offers a thorough delineation of the characters involved, as well as the extraordinary contortions each side exercised in order to justify the malevolent agreement. A well-researched work offering new understanding of the pact's pertinence to this day.

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Starred review from October 1, 2014

Outside of Poland and the Baltic States, Hitler's pact with Stalin during the early days of World War II is one of the more obscure events of the war. It allowed for the partitioning of Poland and the Soviet invasion and subsequent annexation of the Baltic States and Finland, as well as the Nazi occupation and invasion of Scandinavia, the Low Countries, and France. Moorhouse (Berlin at War) seeks to address this oversight by returning the Nazi-Soviet Pact to the more central place it deserves as a precursor to the outbreak of World War II. In this well-researched and well-written book, the author details how two of history's most notorious dictators collaborated in secrecy for a common cause--domination. This work is especially welcome, as there is virtually no research on the pact and what evidence exists is either fairly outdated or stems from writing about related subjects in which the pact is only a footnote. VERDICT Moorhouse's accessible prose and clear explication make this a great story for history readers, and his extensive research and documentation help create a critical text for academics focusing on World War II, German history, and Soviet history.--John Sandstrom, New Mexico State Univ. Lib., Las Cruces

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