German–Soviet Axis talks

In early June 1940 as the Battle of France was still ongoing, Hitler reportedly told Lt. General Georg von Sodenstern that the victories against the Allies had “finally freed his hands for his important real task: the showdown with Bolshevism.

Hitler encouraged Molotov to look south to Iran and eventually India, to preserve German access to Finland's resources and to remove Soviet influence in the Balkans.

Soviet foreign policy calculations were predicated on the idea that the war would be a long-term struggle and so German claims that the United Kingdom would be defeated swiftly were treated with skepticism.

Regarding the counterproposal, Hitler remarked to his top military chiefs that Stalin "demands more and more", "he's a cold-blooded blackmailer" and "a German victory has become unbearable for Russia" so that "she must be brought to her knees as soon as possible.

[17][18] Four days later, the countries signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, which contained secret protocols dividing the states of Northern and Eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence.

[19] Just before the signing of the agreements, the parties had addressed past hostilities, with German Foreign Minister Joachim Ribbentrop telling Soviet diplomats that "there was no problem between the Baltic and the Black Sea that could not be solved between the two of us".

[27] The Soviet Comintern suspended all anti-Nazi and antifascist propaganda by explaining the war in Europe to be a matter of capitalist states attacking each other for imperialist purposes.

[28] When anti-German demonstrations erupted in Prague, Czechoslovakia, the Comintern ordered the Czech Communist Party to employ all of its strength to paralyze "chauvinist elements".

[17] In the first year, Germany received hundreds of thousands of tons of cereals, oil and other vital raw materials, which were transported through Soviet and occupied Polish territories.

[44] The secret protocols caused Hitler to be in the humiliating position of being forced to evacuate ethnic German families, the Volksdeutsche, in a hurry although they had lived in Finland and the Baltic countries for centuries, all the while to condone the invasions officially.

[45] No concrete plans had yet been made, but Hitler told one of his generals in June that the victories in Western Europe "finally freed his hands for his important real task: the showdown with Bolshevism".

[54] On September 27, 1940, Germany, Italy and Japan signed the Tripartite Pact, which divided the world into spheres of influence and was implicitly directed at the United States.

[54] Molotov, worried that the pact contained a secret codicil pertaining specifically to the Soviet Union, attempted to extract information from the Japanese ambassador in Moscow, Togo.

[56] On a home visit, the German military attaché to the Soviet Union, Ernst Köstring, stated on October 31 that "the impression is steadily growing in me that the Russians want to avoid any conflict with us".

[59] Köstring, von der Schulenburg and others drafted a memorandum on the dangers of a German invasion of the Soviet Union that included that Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic States would end up being only a further economic burden for Germany.

[60] German Foreign Office State Secretary Ernst von Weizsäcker argued that the Soviets in their current bureaucratic form were harmless, the occupation would not produce a gain for Germany and "why should it not stew next to us in its damp Bolshevism?

[61] Ribbentrop responded to Stalin in a letter that "in the opinion of the Führer... it appears to be the historical mission of the Four Powers — the Soviet Union, Italy, Japan and Germany — to adopt a long-range policy and to direct the future development of their peoples into the right channels by delimitation of their interests in a worldwide scale".

That resulted, after earlier press stories, in the ideas no longer seeming "fresh", which caused Ribbentrop to lash out at the personnel of German embassy in Moscow.

[67] On November 1, the head of the Army General Staff, Franz Halder, noted that Molotov would have accepted the invitation to Berlin, he believed this to be an attempt by Hitler to bring "Russia into an anti-British front".

[60] Molotov was greeted by Ribbentrop at the train station decorated with Soviet and German flags above a large basket of flowers, with an orchestra playing The Internationale in Germany for the first time since 1933.

[77][80] Hitler told Molotov that:[12] After the conquest of England, the British Empire would be apportioned as a gigantic world-wide estate in bankruptcy of forty million square kilometres.

Under these circumstances there arose world-wide perspectives.... All the countries which could possibly be interested in the bankrupt estate would have to stop all controversies among themselves and concern themselves exclusively with the partition of the British Empire.

[5] The public portion contained an agreement with a ten-year duration whereby the parties would respect each other's natural spheres of interest, and Germany, Italy and Japan would affirm their recognition of existing Soviet borders.

[87] Molotov stated that the Soviet Union was concerned with several European issues, such as Turkey and Bulgaria, but also the fates of Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia and Greece.

[84] The news that Molotov held talks in Berlin initially stunned world media, with the British press endeavouring to determine whether the Soviets were preparing to join the Axis pact.

[87] When Molotov returned, he noted that the meeting produced "nothing to boast about" and that Ribbentrop's projected trip to Moscow was no longer mentioned but that the German draft proposal led to a complacent rather than crisis approach of continuing negotiations through "diplomatic channels".

On the contrary, "Molotov's trip (to Berlin) is for me just further proof of an idea that I have long held namely, that the Soviet Union wants to have peace with us, since it cannot expect any advantage from a conflict with us....

[91] Stalin told the head of the Comintern, the Bulgarian Georgi Dimitrov, that Germany wanted Italy in the Balkans, but in the final analysis, it had no choice but to recognise Soviet interests in maintaining Black Sea access and to assure that the Bosporus would not be used against them.

[9] Hitler, however, saw the Soviet territorial ambitions in the Balkans as a challenge to German interests and saw the plan as effectively making Bulgaria into an adjunct of the Axis Pact.

[96] Regarding the counterproposal, Hitler remarked to his top military chiefs that Stalin "demands more and more", "he's a cold-blooded blackmailer" and "a German victory has become unbearable for Russia" so that "she must be brought to her knees as soon as possible".