COMPLICATING FACTORS
Stalin exacerbated but did not invent the hostility of his Eastern European neighbors. Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland preferred neutrality but, if forced to choose, would opt for Berlin over Moscow.85 Romania was openly pro-German. Poland, a nasty regime sandwiched directly between two nastier ones, sought a middle way. Some members of Polish ruling circles latched on to the idea of throwing in their lot with Hitler to deflect him farther eastward, even at the high cost of territorial concessions, and a few high-placed Poles fantasized about a joint Polish-Nazi attack on the USSR, an aggression in which they imagined Poland could wrest Ukraine from the Soviets, a delusion that Nazi officials cynically encouraged.86 But Polish foreign minister Beck, who spoke good German, had met several times with Hitler, trying to reach an accommodation without sacrificing Poland’s independence. In early 1939, Hitler summoned him to Berlin for one last effort to bully Poland into joining the Anti-Comintern Pact, which would have required that Poland allow the Wehrmacht to march across its territory and “return” to Germany the Free City of Danzig and the surrounding Polish Corridor (a chunk of territory that had belonged to Frederick the Great’s East Prussia but, thanks to the Versailles Treaty, now belonged to Poland and lay between German East Prussia and the rest of Germany). Poland would have become economically dependent on (nonexistent) Nazi goodwill.87
Soviet intelligence, thanks to its penetration of the German embassy in Poland, reported (February 10, 1939) that Hitler had allegedly told Beck there was no need to seize Ukraine, for “the Soviet Union in two to three years would perish of its own internal contradictions and clear the path for Germany and Poland to reach a friendly resolution of the Ukrainian question.” The Soviet report further observed that Hitler had bent over backward to ingratiate himself, which German diplomatic personnel in Poland interpreted as merely tactical, and that “Beck, it seems, had been left unsatisfied by the conversation and as before thinks the fundamental aim of German expansion remains the East, and in this connection Hitler does not plan on making any concessions to Poland.”88
Nonetheless, Soviet military intelligence reported to Moscow that the German ambassador in Warsaw, Hans-Adolf von Moltke, had boasted to a German journalist on February 13 that “the situation is utterly clear. We know that in the event of a German-Soviet conflict, Poland would take our side.”89 The Western powers, too, suspected illiberal Poland of being pro-German and territorially revisionist. But Beck had refused to make any firm commitments regarding Hitler’s entreaties. He knew Western support for Poland was fragile—as did everyone, after Munich—and he feared a
Poland’s best security guarantee was probably a full-scale war by Japan against the Soviet Union, and Polish military intelligence worked extremely closely with its Japanese counterpart, essentially conducting an extended tutorial on their common adversary. Japanese Manchukuo forces continued to engage Soviet and Mongolian troops in border clashes. The Soviet spy Sorge (codenamed “Ramsay”) relayed to Moscow (January 23, 1939) an analysis of infighting among three factions in Japan. One demanded a ramping up of the all-out war with China; a second, the Kwantung Army, demanded a peace settlement with China to shift to all-out war with the Soviet Union; a third, in a variant on the second, urged winding down operations in central and south China and holding on to only northern China and Manchuria, to use as a base of operations for attacking the USSR. Sorge included the prime and war ministers in the third group and added that the only way for Japan to corral domestic radicalism was to turn the radicals’ attention toward the USSR.90
Adding to the pressure on Moscow, anti-Soviet émigrés in Harbin, China, were using radio to debunk Soviet propaganda in broadcasts into eastern Soviet territories. Radio stations from German territory were also transmitting in Russian to the westernmost parts of the Soviet Union, whose equipment was not powerful enough to jam these foreign signals.91