Stalin полностью

ON MAY 22 IN BERLIN, Italy and Germany formally signed their Pact of Steel, which contained an open declaration of cooperation and binding consultation, and a secret protocol of military and economic union, directed against Britain and France.³²⁴ Japan declined to sign but continued negotiating with Germany. To Molotov’s blunt maneuver with Schulenburg, Germany offered no immediate response. Some German officials indulged a guarded optimism. “It seems that there still remains fairly wide scope for action in Russo-German relations,” observed Weizsäcker, the number two in the foreign ministry, in a memorandum (May 25, 1939). He added, “It should be our aim to prevent Anglo-Franco-Russian relations from assuming a still more binding character.”³²⁵ But Schulenburg warned that Soviet-German negotiations could be a mere pretext to assist Moscow in the negotiations with London and Paris. Ribbentrop, unsure of Hitler’s thinking, accentuated this caution.³²⁶ For once, though, the Führer seemed ahead of his foreign minister. Secretly, on May 23, Hitler had gathered a small coterie of military men in the Chancellery to convey his resolve for war against Poland, as a step in a looming showdown with Britain. He stressed the imperative to meet the economic challenges of military requirements but indicated that German-Soviet economic relations would be possible only if political relations improved, an unacknowledged reference to Molotov’s ultimatum/invitation. Hitler hinted that Moscow would accede to Poland’s annihilation.³²⁷

In parallel, Hitler wanted to use Japan against the Western powers. The Japanese were insisting on firm mutual obligations for a war against the Soviet Union and only loose ones for a war against Britain and France, exactly the opposite of what the Germans sought.³²⁸ Ribbentrop had tried to force the issue by telling Lieutenant General Hiroshi Ōshima, now the Japanese ambassador in Berlin, that if he could not bring about a German-Japanese alliance, Germany would have to conclude a nonaggression pact with the USSR. Ōshima spoke fluent German and had been accorded private audiences with Hitler; he fantasized with Russian émigrés about Stalin’s assassination. But the diplomatically inexperienced ultranationalist, a staunch advocate for a German-Japanese military pact, would later claim he had not relayed Ribbentrop’s threat to Tokyo.³²⁹ Be that as it may, the Tokyo establishment was divided over whether to take up the German proposal.³³⁰ On May 27, Weizsäcker wrote to Schulenburg that “one link in the whole chain, namely a gradual conciliation between Moscow and Tokyo, was said by the Japanese to be extremely problematical. Rome was also somewhat hesitant, so that eventually the disadvantages of the far-reaching step envisaged were regarded as decisive.” He added, “With the approval of the Führer, an approach is nonetheless now to be made to the Russians, though a very much modified one.”³³¹

Ribbentrop, exasperated, wrote to the German ambassador in Tokyo, Eugen Ott (May 28, 1939), that “we can no longer understand what is actually happening in Tokyo and why the Japanese government, at this advanced stage of the negotiations, are still continuing to avoid making their decision clear.” The next day, German foreign ministry officials somehow discerned that the USSR inclined toward signing an accord with Britain.³³² Soviet military intelligence spies, meanwhile, delivered copies of Ribbentrop’s internal summary of a conversation with the Polish ambassador in Berlin, supplemented by reports of conversations of the German military attaché in Poland, who expected the Poles to capitulate rather than fight. Stalin’s agents supplied him with reports leaked by the British foreign office to the German ambassador in London regarding Soviet negotiations with Britain and France. These leaks contained accurate information and reconfirmed for Stalin where British preferences lay: Berlin, not Moscow.³³³