Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 полностью

Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator premiered in the United States on October 15, 1940, parodying Hitler (called Adenoid Hynkel) as a megalomaniacal buffoon whose dictatorship threatens a Jewish barber; Chaplin, who was neither German nor Jewish, played both roles. The reviewer in the New York Times enthused about “the feeble, affected hand salute, the inclination for striking ludicrous attitudes, the fabulous fits of rage and violent facial contortions,” adding of Chaplin’s pantomime: “He is at his best in a wild senseless burst of guttural oratory—a compound of German, Yiddish, and Katzenjammer double-talk, and he reaches positively exalted heights in a plaintive dance which he does with a large balloon representing the globe, bouncing it into the air, pirouetting beneath it—and then bursting into tears when the balloon finally pops.”²¹⁰ In one scene, Hynkel, the dictator of Tomania, meets and bargains with Benzino Napaloni, dictator of Bacteria.²¹¹

On October 17, Molotov’s deputy Vyshinsky received Cripps, who hinted at British movement in its position opposing Soviet incorporation of the Baltic states and claimed to have confidential government information for Molotov personally; when Vyshinsky insisted on a foretaste, according to the Soviet account, Cripps stated, “in connection with events over recent weeks in the Balkans, Near East, and Far East, that British relations with these parts of the world had changed, and accordingly, the relations between Britain and the Soviet Union should also change.” Cripps had convinced himself somehow that the USSR did not want Germany to win the war, and he urged de facto British recognition, until the end of the war, of the territories that the USSR had received to entice it to treat Britain and Germany with equal favor.²¹² That same day, Molotov bade farewell to the Japanese ambassador, who was returning home after two years in Moscow. Each expressed a desire for continued improved bilateral relations, although they had failed to agree to a neutrality pact. When the Japanese envoy inquired of German-Soviet relations, Molotov called them “solid” and predicted that “they would develop further.”²¹³

Ribbentrop had dispatched a nineteen-page letter to Stalin inviting Molotov to Berlin, and, also on October 17, Schulenburg managed to hand it to Molotov.²¹⁴ The text reviewed German-Soviet bilateral relations, justified German military moves in Eastern Europe, and proposed that four powers—Germany, Italy, and Japan, plus the Soviet Union—divide up the world, at British expense. Ribbentrop ingratiatingly pointed out that both the Soviet Union and Germany “were animated in the same degree by the same desire for a New Order in the world against the congealed plutocratic democracies.” What the Nazi foreign minister omitted to mention was that each power had its own “new order,” which clashed not just ideologically but physically over the same Eastern European territories. Stalin, angered over the unilateral German move into Romania, nonetheless agreed to send his top deputy to Berlin in the near future and to thank Ribbentrop for “the instructive analysis.”²¹⁵

Ribbentrop now felt confident enough to draft a German-Italian-Japanese-Soviet pact, and he mused with Hitler about confronting Britain with the most geographically expansive military coalition in history.²¹⁶ At the same time, Hitler was exploring other anti-British chess moves. Heinrich Himmler, the SS chief, was sent on a three-day visit to Spain, beginning on October 20, 1940. He was paraded through Madrid streets bedecked in Nazi swastikas, received by Franco at the Pardo Palace, and shown a special bullfight. Julio Martínez Santa-Olalla, a Spanish ethnoarchaeologist who had studied in Germany, regaled Himmler with tales of Spanish-German racial connections through the Visigoths.²¹⁷ But Himmler frowned upon Franco’s gratuitous post-civil-war massacres. To the SS chief, it made more sense to incorporate the workers into the new order, not annihilate them. (The German occupation of France had led to many Spanish political refugees being turned over to Franco.) Be that as it may, Himmler’s visit was mere preparation. Hitler himself, also on October 20, set out on what would be a journey of nearly 4,000 miles on his special train, Amerika, to persuade the French, Spaniards, and Italians to put aside their squabbles in the establishment of a continental bloc against Britain.²¹⁸