On 26 January 1934, 91 years ago, Hitler was four days away from his first year as Chancellor. The Enabling Act of 23 March 1933 had given him and his National Socialist party virtual dictatorial powers but he wouldn’t become Supreme Leader for another eight months. But you’d have to be pretty dull not to realise in January 1934 what was happening in Germany and who and what Hitler was. (It’s one of the most tedious books ever written but it had been out there for nearly a decade and the author, then an imprisoned nobody, has actually made it to the top of the power pyramid. So anybody within range of Germany should read it and take what it says seriously.)
That’s what we’re told today but, actually, the facts aren’t there. In my last few entries on this site I’ve mentioned Michael Jabara Carley’s research on Soviet efforts to form an anti-Hitler coalition, mentioned the ludicrously late and low-level British-French military mission to Moscow well past the eleventh hour on the countdown to war, the Anglo-German Naval Treaty of Hitler Year 2 and other things that have gone down the Memory Hole.
No, the truth is that Stalin was not the first guy to do a deal with Hitler. He was the last guy.
This is the first guy.
And, according to the standard Western narrative, the last one whom you’d expect.
Check it out on Wikipedia.
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My point is this. A lot of the foundation for explaining what’s going on today that we’re presented with is very selective. Those who don’t know the history are easily gulled into swallowing this syllogism: Hitler was a monster; no one would have anything to do with him except that other monster Stalin; Putin is Stalin’s successor; therefore he is a monster; we must resist Putin otherwise it’s 1939 all over again.
“Far from being a ‘liberator,’ the Soviet Union was a facilitator of Nazi Germany and a perpetrator of crimes of its own“; this five years ago to justify not inviting Russia to the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. “Aggression of 17 September 1939 ‒ the historical lie of the current policy of the Kremlin”. These are, of course, attempts by Warsaw to cover up what you have just learned because mentioning the Hitler-Poland Pact would spoil the story.
But not only Poles want to replace reality with a constructed narrative; here’s the BBC six years ago:
President Putin argued that Stalin had tried to forge an anti-Hitler alliance with Britain, France and Poland, but that the Munich Agreement in 1938 – dooming Czechoslovakia – had scuppered that plan. Stalin then had to reach a deal with Hitler, feeling betrayed by the West, he argued. However, Western historians point out that the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact meant Hitler did not have to fear a clash with the USSR if he invaded Poland, so giving him the assurance he needed.
While each statement is true, the second is not the answer to the first, as the writer is trying to pretend. Another (British) masterpiece of elision is this so-called “deep dive”:
The Rapallo Era ended nine months after Hitler assumed power in 1933 and, at his orders, the secret facilities closed one by one. While mistrust pervaded Soviet-German relations over the next six years, ties were never completely severed, Johnson writes. In spring 1939, both Stalin and Hitler proved open to renewing cooperation and in August, the country’s two foreign ministers signed a treaty of nonaggression, known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
Selective indeed: yes Germany and the USSR cooperated in the 1920s, yes that cooperation was a big help to the German military. But leave out the Soviet attempt to stop Hitler because it will spoil the story; just jump over six years as if they didn’t exist. And so we have the WSJ in 2020 accusing Putin of having “rewritten history for political ends” when it’s actually the other way round.
But Memory Holes are not as all-efficient as in Orwell’s novel and the Internet remembers a lot: “Stalin ‘planned to send a million troops to stop Hitler if Britain and France agreed pact‘”; “But the British and French side – briefed by their governments to talk, but not authorised to commit to binding deals – did not respond to the Soviet offer, made on August 15, 1939”. Very rare that, but it dates from 2008 well before MiniTrue took the present line on Russia. (There’s even a preserved video of the Anglo-French mission setting off. By ship!)
It’s history written backwards so that today these partial and selective narratives can be used to reinforce contemporary positions. Disinformation they call it.
Today is the anniversary of one of the things left out.
Did it make you doubt the received version, Dear Reader? What else is Memory Holed?
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How about this? Maybe Poland wasn’t the first foreign entity to think it could do a deal with Hitler. You’ll find this one, from 25 August 1933, even more surprising. Check it out on Wikipedia.
Real history, in contrast with carefully pruned afterwards “history”, shows that almost everybody tried to do a deal with Hitler.
Russia Observer 