The Devils' Alliance
Hitler's Pact with Stalin, 1939-1941
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For nearly two years the two most infamous dictators in history actively collaborated with one another. The Nazi-Soviet Pact stunned the world when it was announced, the Second World War was launched under its auspices with the invasion and division of Poland, and its eventual collapse led to the war’s defining and deciding clash.
It is a chapter too often skimmed over by popular histories of the Second World War, and in The Devils’ Alliance Roger Moorhouse tells the full story of the pact between Hitler and Stalin for the first time, from the motivation for its inception to its dramatic and abrupt end in 1941 as Germany declared war against its former partner.
Using first-hand and eye-witness testimony, this is not just an account of the turbulent, febrile politics underlying the unlikely collaboration between these two totalitarian regimes, but of the human costs of the pact, as millions of eastern Europeans fell victim to the nefarious ambitions of Hitler and Stalin.
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Moorhouse (The Wolf's Lair) delivers a straightforward diplomatic history of the nonaggression pact signed between Hitler's Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union in August 1939, asserting that the concord was the key enabling event of the early years of WWII. Moorhouse describes why and how the pact came to be before highlighting the broad spectrum of its effects. Militarily, it permitted Hitler's early European conquests and set the conditions for the German attack on Russia. It also facilitated the Soviet annexation of the Baltic states and the invasion of Finland. Economically, the pact convinced Hitler that he could prosecute global war despite a lack of natural resources. Finally, the pact allowed for the Soviet and the Nazi policies of massive deportation, political murder, and genocide. An interesting and somewhat original assertion is that Soviet policy in 1939 was fundamentally aggressive and that the pact enabled expansion without combat. Moorhouse draws archival records to supply the main narrative, illustrating the human dimension of the period through memoirs, interviews, and unpublished diaries. The personal stories integrated throughout transforms a dry diplomatic history into riveting drama. Readers of military and diplomatic history as well as those interested in the Holocaust will find this book immensely interesting and informative. 30 b&w images.
