Explanation:On the night of August 20, 1939, German Chancellor Adolf Hitler reached out to a bitter foe with a desperate plea. Time was running short on preparations for his planned invasion of Poland on September 1, and Hitler needed the Soviet Union to stay out of his war. In a telegrammed letter rushed to Joseph Stalin, Hitler asked the Soviet dictator to arrange for a meeting between German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and his Soviet counterpart, Vyacheslav Molotov, as soon as possible. For months, the USSR had been in negotiations with Britain and France, who had pledged to defend Poland if Germany invaded, to form a three-way alliance against Nazi aggression. Germany and the USSR, however, had signed an economic agreement the day before. Now Hitler wanted a political pact as well, an idea Molotov said he “warmly welcomed.” With battle preparation plans on hold as the European powers considered forming a united front against Germany, Hitler could not hide his urgency. “The tension between Germany and Poland has become intolerable,” he warned Stalin. “A crisis may arise any day.”
Stalin’s response finally arrived 27 hours later: Send Ribbentrop to Moscow.
On August 23, 1939, Ribbentrop arrived with written orders in hand from Hitler to make the deal. Such a diplomatic foray would have been unthinkable only months before. The Nazis and Soviets had been mortal enemies on the opposite sides of the ideological spectrum who used hatred of one another to fuel their political purges and murderous regimes. Now, however, Realpolitik trumped ideology. After the Germans occupied Czechoslovakia earlier in the year in violation of the Munich Agreement, Stalin questioned the resolve of the British and French to fight the Nazis. The Soviets, meanwhile, found a peace deal with the Germans attractive given that they were already engaged in a fierce battle on their eastern front with the Japanese and the Red Army was still weakened from Stalin’s purge of its top commanders in 1937 and 1938.
