A Beautiful Friendship Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin

The 60th anniversary of one of the most fateful events in world history went unremarked this week. On Aug. 23, 1939 Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin agreed to what became known as the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact. With that, Stalin made World War II possible. Assured that he was protected from Soviet counter-aggression in the East, Hitler invaded Poland a week later, Sept. 1. The signal that something was up between the two totalitarian powers had come some four months earlier but European chancelleries overlooked it. For on May 3, 1939 came the startling news that the Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov had resigned at his own request. Litvinov, of Jewish origin and strongly anti-Nazi, had been replaced by Vyacheslav Molotov. His†¦show more content†¦Thus the anti-Nazi parties were rebuffed, on Stalins orders, when in 1932 they appealed to the German Communist Party to form a united front against the Nazis. In other words, Stalin wanted the Nazis in power because in a few years, so he believed, they would be ousted and Germany would eventually fall into his lap. Revisionist historians have been trying to sell a fairy-tale that Communist Party members wanted nothing but good for the working-class. Their demurrer: only a handful were spies for Stalin. But these mainstream historians ignore the ignominious role the Communist Party played during those crucial months of the Nazi-Soviet Pact when France fell in 1940 and Britain stood alone. French Communist Party members sent anonymous letters to soldiers on the Maginot Line detailing the fictitious amours of supposedly adulterous wives. In America the communists fought conscription; communist-controlled CIO unions called strikes against aircraft factories to prevent shipment to France or England of warplanes they had paid for. The Daily Worker called it the Second Imperialist War, the Soviet dismemberment of Poland an action taken in the cause of world peace. Earl Browder, Communist Party leader, called FDR an unlimited military dictator who had adopted the techniques of Adolf Hitler. Congress wa s called the Hitler Reichstag. And then overnight the Second Imperialist War became a Peoples War, when on June 22, 1941, Hitler invaded the USSR -Show MoreRelatedOne Significant Change That Has Occurred in the World Between 1900 and 2005. Explain the Impact This Change Has Made on Our Lives and Why It Is an Important Change.163893 Words   |  656 Pagescollectivist over the religious, the commercial, and the individualist. They annihilated cathedrals, abbeys, fortifications, and ceremonial gates and towers and did their utmost to erect idols to themselves and their creed (1995, 3–4). In 1928, as Stalin introduced the first of his five-year plans for Russian economic development, primarily through industrialization, and began to do away with private farms by collectivizing agriculture in the 1930s, rural people fled the countryside and migrated