Ambassador Ott, in Tokyo, had been instructed to inform Germany’s ally, as Sorge reported to Moscow, “that the German troops being sent to the eastern borders have no relation whatsoever to the USSR. They were sent there because there is no longer a need for them in France and the time for their dispersal has not arrived.”181 On September 6, Jodl issued a secret order explaining that the concentration of forces in the east would accelerate even more over the following weeks.182 In parallel, on September 6 and 18, Admiral Raeder submitted detailed plans on the peripheral strategy against Britain.183 Hitler’s Directive No. 18, concerning war in the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East, was drafted that month. Perhaps that was the reason for the massive troop concentrations not only in Nazi-occupied Poland but also in southeastern Europe?
Stalin was sitting on an analysis written in the aftermath of France’s fall by Jenő Varga, the director of the Institute of World Economy and International Relations, in Moscow, and a long-standing foreign policy adviser, who argued that the “contradictions” had disappeared between Britain and the United States, such that the latter would enter the war against the Axis. “Comrade Varga!” Stalin answered on September 12. “Your interpretation is completely correct. . . . Matters changed radically after Germany destroyed France and got its hands on all the resources of the European continent, and England lost France. Now the bloc of Germany, Italy, and Japan threatens not only England but also the U.S. In that light, a bloc between England and the U.S. is a natural result of such a turnabout in international affairs. With Communist greetings.”184
On September 23, 1940, Stalin held a meeting in the Little Corner, summoning, among others, the historian Arkady Yerusalimsky, who had been tasked by the foreign affairs commissariat with preparing the Russian-language reissue, in three volumes, of Otto von Bismarck’s
Stalin gave indications of the economic strain. After the thirty minutes devoted to Bismarck, he received Mikoyan and Khrushchev, followed by the aviation industry commissar (Shakhurin) and a deputy commissar (Vasily Balandin); the heavy machine building commissar (Vyacheslav Malyshev); and the first deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars (Nikolai Voznesensky). “When one gives a new task to our people’s commissars, they make obligatory the construction of new factories to fulfill it,” Stalin complained to them. “But the main thing is that one needs to look at what can be done at the old factories. This is the most reliable and shortest way. One can expand production at old factories more quickly than build new factories.”186
The tension in the Little Corner was heightened by the arrival at this time of Wehrmacht troops in Finland. Germany had provided no advance warning, in contravention of the consultation clause of the Pact, which, of course, had put Finland in the Soviet sphere.187 Stalin’s war there had brought about the very eventuality it had sought to forestall. His spies passed on details about 1.5 billion reichsmarks in secret military aid from Germany to Finland, deliveries that were supposed to go to the Soviet Union. Stalin suspended all long-term projects for export to Germany, diminishing further any German economic dependency on him.188 Nothing more starkly demonstrated the deterioration of the Soviet position than Finland, where the Soviet Union had expended so much blood, treasure, and reputation.
TRIPARTITE RELIEF
