Ribbentrop and entourage were whisked to the imperial box at the Bolshoi to catch an act of
The despot shook down Ribbentrop almost the same way he had the Balts, only affably and, in Ribbentrop’s case, not for his own homeland but for a third party’s territory. Finally, Hitler surfaced: Ribbentrop spoke to him on a line in Molotov’s office. The Führer assented to handing Stalin Lithuania as well as to Stalin’s language for the joint communiqué.312 Ribbentrop asked the despot about the British. Stalin said there would be talks with them about possible economic cooperation, but that “the Soviet government had no intention of entering into any ties with such states as England, America, and France. Chamberlain is a blabbermouth. Daladier is an even bigger blabbermouth.” Stalin further related how Daladier had called in Soviet ambassador Surits to inquire what was going on between Germany and the Soviet Union. “The French government,” Stalin noted, “was given to understand that the Soviet Union does not tolerate having its representatives subjected to interrogation.”313 (Unless that was done by the NKVD.) In voicing his dislike, distrust, and dismissiveness of England, Stalin also showed his respect for the United States and its economic prowess, and his glee at having killed so many Japanese in the border war. “This is the only language these Asiatics understand,” he told the German diplomats. “After all, I am an Asiatic, too, so I ought to know.”314
At around 5:00 a.m. on September 29, the state documents were signed (but dated the previous day). They included a full-color map of some three by five feet (scale: 1:1,000,000), which, unlike the Pact, was autographed by Stalin himself, in a ten-inch flourish of blue pencil. The readjusted border was moved 70 to 100 miles east of Warsaw, from the Vistula to the Bug River, placing nearly 5 million more people (Poles and Jews) on the German side and helping to provoke formation of a so-called General Gouvernement for those parts of Poland not directly annexed to the Reich. The Soviet Union, all told, had acquired nearly 13 million inhabitants: 7 million Ukrainian speakers and 3 million Belorussian, as well as just 1 million Poles and 1 million Jews.315 Ribbentrop, who had arranged for a Mercedes to be given to Molotov’s wife as a gift, had been goading Schulenburg into requesting that the Soviets “lease” him hunting grounds in what was now western Ukraine, which was rich in stag, but Molotov demurred. Still, the Nazis did retain a small area on the Polish-Lithuanian frontier, the Suwałki protrusion, which was said to contain prime hunting grounds. Stalin also had Beria extradite 4,000 German political refugees sought by the Nazis. Many were Jewish, and at least 1,000 were Communists. They and their family members would be handed over in ceremonies at the frontier bridge at Brest-Litovsk. Let Hitler expend the bullets.
As Ribbentrop boarded the Condor to depart, the Soviet honor guard raised their right arms in Nazi salute. “The Gauleiter of Danzig, who had accompanied me,” Ribbentrop later recalled, “told me on our return flight that at times he had almost imagined himself among old party comrades.”316 Hailed in