And in Yugoslavia, prior to his assassination, King Aleksandar I helped fight against the Soviets AND the Nazis, in the Little Entente. Unfortunately, he and another supporter, Louis Barthou, were killed in Marseilles in October of 1934.
Then, his cousin, the Regent Prince Paul, formed a non-aggression pact with Hitler-if only to buy time.
No one seemed to care about the little Slavic states. Which then, of course, were overrun by the Utasche fascists.
And they were the only major power, besides Italy, that actively participated in and collaborated on a German assault on a third nation.
Sua
eh?
It depends how you define “major” and “collaoration”. Japan was fighting a war against the Netherlands in South-East Asia at the same time Germany invaded them in Europe. There wasn’t any unified planning, though.
I don’t know if you’d call Poland major…it certainly wasn’t compared to Germany or Britain, but when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia, Poland, with German approval, also invaded and seized the Teschen region.
Very good!
Not to mention that Hitler needed a place to test out his new tanks and weapons, and needed Russian land to have a place where the other countries would not see his new weapons, and his new weapons being tested.
You can argue all day about whether he was left or right, but what he really was, was the exact very opposite of:
“Libertarian”,
whatever that is. Is there a name for the opposite of Libertarian?
By the way, Hitler wanted to invade Switzerland twice, but his general talked him out of it. Switzerland was prepared to blow up every tunnel, evey bridge, and every man in Switzerland was armed and prepared to fight. In Switzerland, no one has the power to surrender, there would be no blitzkrieg there. Switzerland would fight to the very last armed citizen, and they were quite good. Switzerland would make Finland look like a cake walk.
Susanann wrote:
Authoritarian.
Is everyone in agreement on what “left” and “right” mean?
Left in the US implies strict environmental laws, abortion rights, no death penalty, disorganized violence, welfare, sexual freedom, new religions/cults, not showering, frisbee.
Right implies well established organized religion, fewer social programs, high spending on military, gun rights, suits and ties, free market, golf.
Hitler liked blond guys, little moustaches, walking in lockstep, killing jews, winning battles, losing wars, suicide.
I’m going to say Hitler was off somewhere on his own.
“Poland”…
(italics mine)
Wrong. Yes, Germany was allowed to make military experiments in the USSR, but that was in the 20s. When Hitler came to power, he put an end to this collaboration.
Oh this is rich.
The Soviet Red Army invaded eastern Poland on September 17, 1939, and met up with German forces at Brest-Litovsk on September 18. This was pursuant to the secret protocol to the Nazi-Soviet Pact Captain Amazing so kindly posted.
From September 1 on, the Germans and Russians were engaged in negotiations to determine whether they should split up Poland completely between them, or leave a rump puppet state. On September 25, Stalin summoned the German Ambassador (Schulenburg) to the Kremlin and proposed that no residual state be allows, but instead that the Germans and Russians revise their secret protocol so that Russia got the province of Warsaw, and the Germans get Lithuania.
A treaty to this effect was signed by Ribbentrop and Molotov on September 29, 1939.
Yeah, the Japanese and Germans were pretty foolish that way.
Poland wasn’t considered one of the major powers.
And you forgot Hungary - with German connivance, they grabbed a piece of Czechoslovakia, too.
Sua
**
Yeah, but I get the impression that Japan and Germany just didn’t really like each other much and didn’t really talk about anything. The whole alliance thing was pretty much a joke.
“I told you an alliance between two countries that each think themselves a superior race wouldn’t work out” 
**
I figured that I was stretching it with Poland, and that Hungary, even smaller than Poland, couldn’t be considered a major nation at all.
Captain Amazing wrote,
I don’t think this is really true, unless you only count military aid and only count Eurasian governments.
The Soviets supported the Spanish Republic until mid-1938 ( http://history.acusd.edu/gen/WW2Timeline/Prelude07.html ). Fighting continued for almost a year after that but I don’t hear anyone (other than myself) calling Stalin a fairweather friend of the Spanish Republic.
http://libraryautomation.com/nymas/soviet_tank_operations_in_the_sp.htm says,
cucaracha.de Doesn’t give Stalin top awards:
Granted, military aid from the U.S. and British governments was about nil. I thought I read something about military aid from the Leon Blum government in France to the early Spanish Republic, but none of the on-line sources I have seen mentions any actual aid (some talk about how Blum supported the idea personally but gave in to British non-intervention moves). Roosevelt, too, supported the idea but gave into Secretary of State Hull. Naturally this doesn’t speak at all to the thousands of volunteers who from these countries who fought alongside the Spanish Loyalists.
I am having real trouble finding anything about the other kind of aid, non-military aid. There’s probably stuff on it somewhere on my bookshelf but I don’t have a search engine for that. 
I personally believe non-military aid was important to the Spanish Republic, but I might be the only one. I wonder if non-military aid has been downplayed by historians because of the “blood in the water” around the late-30s Western governments; everybody just knows that Blum was ineffectual, Chamberlain was a wimp, Daladier was a lapdog, and Roosevelt was an isolationist, so historical examples to the contrary sort of get pushed aside.
I am starting to be a little suspicious of the way foreign activities in the Spanish Civil War are reported. When Germany and Italy send aid to Franco, that is Hitler and Mussolini supporting the fascists - fair enough. When Mexico and the USSR send aid to the Republic, that is Stalin supporting the Republic - hmmm. When France, Britain, and the U.S. allow only humanitarian aid to the Republic, that is the governments of the West not aiding the Republic so in reality they helped the fascists - right, we should have directed all our non-aid to the Nationalists which would have ensure a Republican victory [sarcasm]. When thousands of U.S. volunteers join the Republican cause, and some powerful U.S. corporations support the Nationalist cause, that is America giving “unofficial” help to the fascists - oh, right, unofficial help is in quotes, so really it must have been official help.
Sorry, I don’t buy it. No major country in the world consistently opposed the Hitler and Mussolini in the run-up to the Second World War. Credit for steadfast opposition to fascism must lie with individuals (of a wide variety of political backgrounds, despite what some people would have you believe). The fact that the Soviet Union suffered more and fought harder in the Second World War than most countries is important in and of itself but irrelevant to the fact that Stalin’s strategy against Nazi Germany in the 1930s was sporadic, hypocritical, and ineffectual.
Allow me to add the Nazi-Vatican concordant of 1933 praises Hitler for his stand against communism.