For months leading up to one of Germany's largest invasions, Poland, The Soviet Union had been in talks with the Allies, Britain and France. The Allies had pledged to defend Poland, should it ever be invaded, so long as The USSR forms a three-way alliance against the german force. However, the Soviets had already come to a deal with Hitler.
The deal that Stalin and Hitler came to was merely and economic one, but Hitler quickly came to realize that he would need Soviet aid in invading Poland. Hitler was able to send a representative to Moscow to work out a dela for Poland. In this discussion, Stalin came to question the ability of the allies as the Nazi's have been rampaging and conquering through Europe. As Stalin realized current political and geographic standings, he found a deal with Germany to be far more appealing than with the crumbling allies.
The deal was sorted out and officially called the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact but more well known as the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Both powers signed the nonaggression agreement, allowing for the German invasion of Poland in September of 1939.
When word broke loose about the deal, US president Roosevelt said, "it was as certain as that the night followed the day that as soon as Hitler had conquered France he would turn on Russia and it would be the Soviets’ turn next.” This proved to be true as Hitler broke off his agreement in 1941 and launched operation Barbarossa, the largest surprise attack ever, on the USSR.
http://www.history.com/news/the-secret-hitler-stalin-pact-75-years-ago
This is a good informational blog post and I like how you put a quote by Roosevelt in the post because it reinforces the information being told. It is also surprising to me that the two worst and most evil people in history could make a deal and agree.
ReplyDeleteDrew, I liked how you discussed the process of how Germany and Russia were able to come up with an agreement to partition Poland. However, I also noticed that you described that in Operation Barbarossa, Hitler broke this agreement and launched a surprise attack, so I decided to explore a little deeper. I found out that Operation Barbarossa was actually quite unsuccessful for the Germans since it forced them to fight on two-fronts against the Allies. On June 22nd, 1941, Hitler had launched an army of 3 million soldiers, 150 divisions, and 3,000 tanks to invade into Soviet territory. While Hitler was able to advance deep into Soviet territory, their plan became obvious (to try to take control of Moscow), and the Soviet attacks forced the German forces to retreat. As a result of Operation Barbarossa, the Germans were weakened significantly since they had to fight on two fronts of the war by arousing conflicts on the Russian front.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/operation-barbarossa