The Hitler-Stalin Pact: Two Years of Infamy

Henry Srebrnik , [Toronto] Jewish-Tribune

Welcome to 2009. This is a year in which Jews will remember many days of sadness, since it will be the 70th anniversary of, among other events, Hitler’s occupation of the remains of Czechoslovakia, on March 15, 1939; the British “White Paper,” which effectively ended Jewish immigration into the Palestine Mandate, issued on May 17; and, of course, the German invasion of Poland, on Sept. 1.

We’ve all heard, on old newsreels, US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s speech following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, referring to Dec. 7, 1941 as “a day of infamy.” All of these 1939 dates were also “days of infamy.”

And that label might just as easily be applied to another date from 70 years ago: Aug. 23, 1939, the day the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Soviet Union, better known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop or Hitler-Stalin Pact, was signed. It created the conditions for the “perfect storm” that led, one week later, to the Second World War and the Holocaust.

The pact destroyed Jewish faith in the pro-Soviet left, including the Communist Parties and their various front groups in North America. From Sept. 3, 1939, when Great Britain and France declared war on Germany, until June 22, 1941, when Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union, Communists directed much of their venom, not at Hitler’s Germany, but at Britain and France.

This caused special consternation among Jewish Communists. Those who supported the change in Moscow’s line were now forced to rationalize their defence of the treaty. Shloime Almazov, the head of the ICOR, a Communist front group, published Der Sovyetish-daytsher opmakh: vos meynt er? (The Soviet-German Pact: What Does it Mean?) immediately following the announcement of the pact.

The enemies of the USSR were displeased that the Soviet Union had thwarted a German attack against it, something its foes devoutly desired, he remarked. The Soviet-German pact was not a danger to the progressive movement, he concluded; rather, it was motivated by the Soviet desire to live in peace with its neighbours and to guard with all its strength the peace of the world.

The Soviets had already saved some two million Jews when they “liberated” eastern Poland in mid-September 1939, declared Almazov. (A secret protocol to the pact had allowed the two dictators to partition Poland.)

And the prospect for European Jews improved even more dramatically, according to the Communists, when in June, 1940, the Soviet Union occupied Romanian Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, and the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

Added to the total within the pre-1939 Soviet borders, by 1941 perhaps as many as 6.5 million Jews lived under the protection of “Soviet power” – about two-thirds of European Jewry.

Moishe Katz, a writer for the New York Communist daily Morgn Frayhayt, was so certain that “a new and bright day” had dawned that in August 1940, he wrote an article entitled Der oyflebung fun dem mizrakh-europayishn yidntum (The Rejuvenation of East European Jewry).

Most Jews, however, were simply not buying the party line. And they were, unfortunately, proven correct. The Nazi attack on Russia in 1941, and the subsequent mass murder of the majority of east European and Soviet Jews, punctured the fantasy of a 6.5-million-strong Jewish community living safely and productively in a peaceful USSR, a country that had been spared the horrors of war thanks to Stalin’s wise decision to sign the pact with Hitler.

In the wake of the rationales to which they had been subjected between 1939 and 1941, even pro-Soviet Jews realized that they had been lulled into a false sense of security. Those who remained in the movement were never again as certain as they had been before 1941 that they could trust Russia to protect Jews.

The lesson most other Jews – including the many former Communists who abandoned the movement in 1939 – learned was that we needed a sovereign state of our own in the old homeland, Eretz Yisroel.