Well, if you look at it that way, Stalin also would have been at least partially responsible for the US joining the war, since his non-aggression pact with Japan basically freed them up for their Pacific expansion and the attack on the US at Pearl Harbor. I don’t think Stalin would have lost much sleep over the war, had Hitler and the Germans not turned around and attacked the Soviet Union anyway (as they pretty much always intended)…he would have been fine digesting his part of Poland and the northern territories the treaty enabled Russia to grab. He certainly wasn’t miffed at the Japanese, since the USSR maintained the spirit of the non-aggression pact until 1945 when they suddenly attacked Japan in Manchuria.
Oh, I have no doubt that he is not leaving Stalin off the hook. I don’t make the following point because I was his student, but I agree that the motives for various historical actions are important for evaluating the actions themselves.
Compare Chamberlain’s “peace in our time” attempt to de-escalate tensions with Germany with Stalin’s pact. Although it turned out terribly, I have a lot of sympathy for Chamberlain’s diplomatic efforts in the sense that they were a last-ditch attempt to avoid a huge war. (I concede that this initiative came with a substantial cost, of course.)
Then look at basically everything Stalin ever did, which was basically motivated to increase his own power. “Peace” was not an end he sought, but just a temporary stopover to increase his own imperial and murderous ambitions. Damn straight Stalin should be judged poorly.
My angle:
Hitler was famous at blaming everyone else for everything bad that happened. He was really seriously bent in this regard.
Note that he was remarkably successful at first at getting what he wanted. He even got Memel from Lithuania merely by threats.
He got some of and then took all of Czechoslovakia prior to invading Poland.
So he was getting quite a bit without actually fighting for it. This reinforced the mentality he had of “Just give me everything I want and there’ll be no war.” Needless to say, eventually people said enough and the war started. But in his twisted mind it was their fault for not rolling over, not his fault for wanting everything and making threats.
Right down to the end he blamed others for the start of the war he (supposedly) didn’t want.
Those to blame? Firstly Jewish people because Hitler was somehow wired up this way to an astonishing extent. Secondly, the British.
His plan was to take over continental Europe and “let” Great Britain be the naval power of the world. So the British declaring war after the Polish invasion and then not giving up after France fell were to blame (!) for much of what followed.
But let’s not forget the “Jewish Question”. Over and over Hitler &Co referred to the USSR as the “Jewish Bolsheviks”. (He also blamed Jewish Capitalists for being behind the Western Allies. Never mind questions about how a people can be behind both Bolsheviks and Capitalists.)
So the war in the East was blamed on “International Jewry” and since that was the major field of combat, outside the brief war in France, until later, then that could be seen as a significant cause of the war.
I.e., saying the USSR started the war now can parallel this anti-semitic line of thinking. Be on your guard.
Slightly easier?
Now Germany did start the war, no doubt about that, but consider Hitler’s position if there was a good possibility of Soviet troops resisting his invasion of Poland instead of basically helping it. Would he have had the resources to invade France? (Remember he didn’t know in September 1939 how ineffectual the French would be.)
Hitler did not want a two front war, and the treaty prevented one until he was more or less done with Western Europe.
So the question would be, how would the War start without the treaty? Perhaps Hitler would continue to undermine small weak countries without treaty protection from France and England. (Denmark?) That’s the interesting question.
He could simply have gone ahead and invaded France and the Low Countries, and left the east exposed. That’s what the actually did. The only thing the pact with the USSR did was push the border away from Germany, but the Soviets could still have used that opportunity to attack.
Nazi Germany was going to continue finding reasons to start wars until they were destroyed. Violent conflict is the point of Nazism, and the prism though which Nazis perceive the world.
One piece where the Soviet Union made a significant contribution to German efforts and helped shape what was to come hasn’t been mentioned. It predated the control of Germany by the Nazi party. (Is there a converse to Godwin’s law? :p)
The Soviet Union assisted Germany in avoiding treaty of Versailles limitations on its military. Three secret schools were developed. One for armor, one for pilot training, and one for chemical warfare training. Along with training people that would be leaders and instructors as the Wehrmacht was created and expanded. They also provided testing and research grounds for arms manufacturers getting them valuable experience related to designing and building the weapons of war.
They were only open a couple years and closed in 1933 after the Nazi rise to power. The chance to develop the arms and doctrine used by the Blitzkrieg was invaluable though. Things like a delay in the start, avoidance because of other factors, or an “on time” start with Germany stumbling badly at the start are all more likely in an alternate history without Soviet help.
Of course, once the Soviets helped increase the readiness of the German military for Hitler to use, he was the one who used it.
:rolleyes:
You know, people can intelligently discuss what a evil bastard Stalin was, and how his secret treaty with Hitler possibly emboldened that other evil bastard into starting WW2 without being anti-semitic.
Stalin was pretty fucking anti-semitic also.
There’s a lot of hindsight in any such discussion, and far too little recognition that the various national leaders did not and could not know what was going to happen like we do now. They all made their best judgments on the information available to them at the time. Blaming other people for not fully understanding Hitler is just a bit unfair, when we still don’t either. We can damn him for antisemitism, but it was common worldwide, including in the US.
That said, while you can point to misjudgments by other leaders that permitted the war, there is no reasonable way to say it was caused by anybody other than Hitler.
I’ve heard this sort of thing from teenagers before: “Yes, I did something bad, but it’s your fault for not stopping me”. Certainly, Stalin could have done more to stop Hitler, but Hitler’s deeds were still Hitler’s fault.
Just as Stalin’s deeds were on him. I disagree that this was the case of ‘Stalin could have done more to stop Hitler’…he didn’t do anything to stop Hitler and in fact aided him and the Germans right up until Hitler et al turned on him and the Soviet Union. You could say that the other powers could have done more to stop Hitler, but Stalin et al? They should not have aided and assisted the Nazi’s and should have opposed them. But Poland and those juicy northern territories just looked so good…
(To be fair, it’s more complicated that this, because part of why Stalin and the Soviets did what they did is they thought the other western powers were just bending over for the Germans and didn’t want to be the sole power standing up to Hitler. But partly it was just because Stalin saw a main chance for him and the USSR and decided to go for it.)
Yeah, sure, the kid who breaks into the school and commits vandalism- it is his fault. But in this case the other kid gave him the spray cans, boosted him over the wall, egged him on, and told him he’d watch out for the cops.
It is absolutely the minority view.
Off the top of my head I can only think of one work which comes even close to making such a claim: Viktor Suvorov’s Icebreaker.
By this standard, the Allies were much more culpable than the Soviets, for not firmly responding to Nazi aggression from 1936 onwards.
Stalin does get his share of blame for enabling Hitler, both through the non-aggression let’s-carve-up-Poland pact, and for being incredibly blind to the military buildup to his west that preceded the Nazi invasion.