Posted on 08/23/2019 12:03:14 PM PDT by AdmSmith
The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was a document that became the "last prelude" before the outbreak of World War II. After 80 years, we’ll try again to look back into the past and remember how it all happened.
At the end of June 1939, negotiations on the normalization of relations between the Soviet Union and Germany began. In July, there was the talk of a trade agreement and a plan to improve relations between countries, which included political rapprochement. During a meeting with the military on August 14, Adolf Hitler announced his intention to start a war with Poland, since "UK and France will not enter the war if nothing forces them to do this."
August 15 was the first time when the question of the arrival of German Foreign Minister Joachim Ribbentrop to Moscow was raised. The Soviet Union put forward a response proposal - to conclude a full-fledged pact instead of a joint declaration on the non-use of force.
Two days later, on August 17, Germany accepted all the Soviet proposals and again proposed speeding up the negotiations by sending Ribbentrop to Moscow. A few days later, the Soviet Union transferred to Berlin a draft of a non-aggression pact and agreed to the arrival of Ribbentrop on August 26-27. This date did not suit Hitler (he was going to attack Poland and did not plan to delay this business), and he invited Stalin to accept Ribbentrop no later than August 23.
As a result, Stalin agreed on August 23. Ribbentrop flew to Moscow at noon on August 23. At the same time, his plane was mistakenly fired by Soviet anti-aircraft gunners.
Ribbentrop's meeting with Stalin and Molotov lasted three hours. Vladimir Pavlov, Stalin’s personal translator, who was present at the meeting, later recalled that at the beginning of the meeting, Stalin said the following: "Additional agreements are needed for this pact, but we will not publish anything about them." After that, he outlined the content of the future secret protocol.
The secret protocol
It described the division of territories of other countries. In particular, the Baltic states and Poland. Based on the protocol, Lithuania received Vilnius (at that time, it was Polish). Moreover, the question of Poland’s independence, according to the protocol, “could be finally clarified later”, by the parties agreement.
The Soviet Union also emphasized its interest in Bessarabia. Moscow has denied the very existence of this secret protocol for decades.
For example, at the Nuremberg trials in 1946, former state secretary of the German Foreign Ministry, Ernst von Weizsäcker, spoke about the existence of the protocol, but in the Soviets denied it.
Stalin’s NKVD and Hitler’s Gestapo Cooperated Closely Even Before Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
https://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/3719634/posts
The pact shocked the world.
Everyone expected war between the two socialist dictators.
The National Socialist and the International Socialist couldn’t get a long.
Communism and Fascism have always been the same shit with a different color flag.
The American way is Freedom, not the way of Sanders, Bush, Obama, Hitler or Stalin, all of whom oppose freedom
That needs repeating and repeating and repeating... (Well, you get the point.)
MSM will report it as: "Everyone expected war between the two right-wing NAZI dictators."
There must be a Hitler discovers video in there somewhere
No honor among thieves. The world went mad. Things are better today. Muslims and progressives truly respect o’e another. As do catholic bishops and democrat leaders, liberal catholics and LGBT groups. It’s all roses.
Eighty years after the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed a non-aggression treaty dividing Europe into spheres of influence, Russia has put the original Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and its secret protocol on public display.
Alongside the pact at the exhibition at Russia’s State Archives in Moscow are documents spanning from the 1938 Munich agreement and occupation of Czechoslovakia until the outbreak of war, which organisers say confirm Soviet fears that the west sought to redirect German aggression toward Moscow.
Now, Russia has sought to normalise the non-aggression pact, arguing that the treaty had been taken “out of context” of the vicious realpolitik of 1930s Europe.
That attempt, accompanied by a foreign ministry social media campaign trumpeting the “truth about WWII” has sparked an outcry from nearby countries in eastern Europe that were annexed and divided under the pact.
“We should ask ourselves why Russia does not condemn the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, and what kind of message Russia trying to send,” Debski said.
The governments of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Romania have released a statement saying the pact “doomed half of Europe to decades of misery”.
In a statement, they added: “This is why on this day proclaimed by the European parliament as a European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Totalitarian Regimes we remember all those whose deaths and broken lives were a consequence of the crimes perpetrated under the ideology of Nazism and Stalinism”.
Over the last decade, the Kremlin has sought to combat criticism of its wartime record, by revising textbooks, expanding celebrations for Victory Day, and partnering with historians, reviving the tsarist-era Russian Military Historical Society in 2012 under the leadership of Sergei Naryshkin, a senior official later appointed as Russia’s spy chief.
The Baltic states, Poland and Romania have called on Europe’s governments to stand against totalitarian regimes, 80 years after the signing of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.
The Nazi-Soviet non-aggression agreement included a secret protocol that redrew the map of Europe.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-49446735
Joint Statement by Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Romania on the occasion of 80 years since the signing of Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
https://www.gov.pl/web/diplomacy/joint-statement-by-estonia-latvia-lithuania-poland-and-romania-on-the-occasion-of-80-years-since-the-signing-of-molotov-ribbentrop-pact
I love to remind the ANTIFA defenders of this. They only hated fascists AFTER Hitler betrayed them.
Thanks AdmSmith.
Discussion of the secret protocols — which open up the issue of the Soviet invasion and occupation of Poland, just days after Germany's invasion from the west — are a taboo topic.
Russia has largely adopted the Soviet narrative: World War II began not with the widely held start date of September 1, 1939, when Nazi forces attacked Poland, but in 1941, when Hitler unleashed his forces on the Soviet Union.
“There's not much to be gained for Moscow in talking about 1939. Any focus on the pact contradicts the myth of the ‘Great Patriotic War’, which portrays the U.S.S.R. as a victim and lets the war begin in 1941,” explained Jan Claas Behrends, a historian at the Center for Contemporary History in Potsdam, near Berlin. “If you put the spotlight on 1939 it deconstructs this essential narrative.”
Glorifying elements of the Soviet past and blurring the lines over Stalin's brutal legacy, critics say, has become a political tool for Putin, who has exploited nationalism to prop up his rule, now entering its third decade.
Efforts to whitewash Stalin's crimes have apparently also influenced Russians’ views of the dictator, who was responsible for killing millions of Soviet citizens: a recent survey showed a record number felt he played a positive role in the country's history.
https://www.rferl.org/a/molotov-ribbentrop-what-do-russians-know-of-key-wwii-pact/30123950.html
Moscow denied the existence of the secret protocol until 1989, when Mikhail Gorbachev condemned it. But Vladimir Putin has gone back to defending the pact with Hitler. While he criticised it as ‘immoral’ when visiting Poland in 2009, more recently he’s asked ‘what’s bad about it?’. At the same time Moscow furiously denies, against all evidence, that there was ever a Soviet-Nazi alliance.
The enthusiasm of Soviet support for its Nazi ally undermines claims that Stalin concluded his pact with Hitler reluctantly. After the German attack, Moscow initiated military intelligence cooperation with Berlin. And when sixteen days later the Soviets invaded eastern Poland, the two sides agreed to coordinate in the crushing of Polish resistance. In the Soviets’ case, this included deporting up to 1.5 million Poles and murdering about 65,000 military, ‘class enemies’ and ‘counter-revolutionaries’ – including 22,000 in the infamous Katyn Massacre. Joint Soviet-German victory parades were held in Lviv and Brest-Litovsk. Stalin and Hitler exchanged warm Christmas greetings.
After the Nazi-Soviet invasion, Molotov told the Supreme Soviet ‘one swift blow to Poland, first by the German army and then by the Red Army, and nothing was left of this ugly offspring of the Versailles Treaty.’ There followed Stalin’s attack on Finland, and the invasions of the Baltic states and northern areas of Romania.
In 1940, Molotov underlined to Hitler that Russian supplies had ‘not been without influence upon the great German victories’.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2019/08/molotovs-poisonous-cocktail/
A Polish soldier encounters a German and a Russian soldier, which does he shoot first?
The German, of course. Business before pleasure.
I was reading about this very thing last night in The Black Book of Communism.
Aside from the exposition of by the numbers deaths in Russia, this relationship was news to me, so ot eas interesting.
The only treaty the Soviet Union didn’t break — only because Hitler broke it first.
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