Free Republic

Saturday marks the 86th anniversary of the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, an agreement concluded between Moscow and Berlin that would effectively lead to the carve up of Poland and condemn the world to six years of war. In hindsight, it is abundantly clear that a major global conflict had long been brewing, however, it was the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that is now viewed as the final treachery that would lead to war. While, in essence, the pact was billed as a non-aggression agreement between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, it contained a secret annex that divided...

An Associated Press correction last week and reactions to it show that the question of whether the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were allies at the dawn of World War II remains a hot-button issue for many Russians and eastern Europeans. The correction was issued to an article about a Holocaust commemoration in the Ukrainian city of Lviv that originally called the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany “former allies.” The AP concluded that the pact reached on Aug. 23, 1939 by the German and Soviet foreign ministers Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov didn’t constitute a formal alliance, thus the...