Stalin полностью

But on September 19–20, 1939, approaching Lwów/Lemberg/Lvov—not far from where the Germans had imposed the diktat of Brest-Litovsk on Soviet Russia in 1918—advancing Red Army troops were greeted by German artillery. Both the Red Army and the Wehrmacht took casualties.²⁶⁴ Had the Germans mistaken the approaching Soviets for Poles, as some would claim? Or were the attacks deliberate? We shall never know. But the speed and depth of the Soviet military advance into eastern Poland had surprised the condescending German brass.²⁶⁵

Hitler, in “liberated” Danzig on September 19, had been soaking in the jubilation. “It was a state built on force and governed by truncheons of the police and the military,” the Führer said of Poland, with no hint of irony.²⁶⁶ The streets of the predominantly ethnic German city—like those of Vienna the year before—were festooned with swastikas, flowers, and admirers. Precisely when, and under what circumstances, the Führer learned of the armed clashes taking place near Lvov is unclear.²⁶⁷ Ribbentrop instructed Köstring over the phone to attempt to have the accepted demarcation line modified so that Germany could keep this area, Borisław-Drohobycz, and its oil fields. Köstring phoned the Soviet defense commissariat several times on September 20. “East of Lvov Soviet tanks clashed with German troops,” he stated over the phone. “There is a disagreement about who should take Lvov. Our troops cannot withdraw until we have destroyed Polish forces.” Köstring proposed, on orders from Berlin, that the Germans and the Soviets storm Lvov together, after which the Germans could hand the city over.²⁶⁸ The Soviets refused. Schulenburg also conveyed Ribbentrop’s request to retain the seized oil fields to Molotov, who rejected it—as well as Schulenburg’s fallback position of a temporary German military occupation, pending a final political adjudication.²⁶⁹

Somebody would have to back down. On September 20, Köstring got an order directly from Hitler to help negotiate an immediate German withdrawal from Lvov, which was to be abandoned to the Soviets. Voroshilov received Köstring and asked what had caused the military clashes. The German attaché answered that it had been just a small local incident. He joked that Warlimont, who had shown the Soviets the map in Berlin, was an oilman and perhaps had been seduced by the oil fields. Köstring took out his own map, which showed, in black, the line of German advance and, in blue, the agreed-to territorial division, and he again vowed that the German army would withdraw.²⁷⁰ But even while abandoning the advanced positions in eastern Poland, the Wehrmacht continued to fire on the Red Army.

On September 22, Hitler flew from Sopot to the outskirts of Warsaw to take in the devastation he had wrought.²⁷¹ As of that day, after its defenders capitulated, Lvov was in Soviet hands, and by the next day the Red Army had established full operational control over Polish territory up to the Narew, Vistula, and San rivers, a five-day romp facilitated partly by the fact that the Polish command had issued orders not to engage Soviet forces unnecessarily and instead to prepare for evacuation to Hungary or Romania.²⁷² On the afternoon of September 23, a ceremonial joint military parade was held in Brest-Litovsk to mark the German handover of the town that morning to the Soviets. Presiding over the event, on an improvised low platform, were the respective tank commanders Heinz Guderian, who had been born just 300 miles away in Chełmno (Kulm), and Semyon Krivoshein. The two shook hands. But the Luftwaffe flew aggressively low passes, and the two sides tussled over the city’s war booty.²⁷³ Guderian privately observed that relinquishing Brest was “disadvantageous.”²⁷⁴ Germany’s commanders had suffered many casualties to seize these Galician territories—needing that oil—and they remained deeply unhappy about the pullback. (Stalin also managed to hold on to the Volhynian grain fields.) Halder, the man who had planned the Polish campaign, confided in his diary, “A day of disgrace for the German political leadership!”²⁷⁵

Hitler, perhaps for the first time, had kept his word in an international agreement. But Stalin gained the impression—fatefully, it would turn out—that German “militarists” wanted war against the Soviets, and that Hitler was the restraining influence.

STALIN’S SUDETENLAND