It is confoundingly hard to remember that the second world war began with an alliance between Hitler and Stalin. In August 1939, Berlin and Moscow signed a non-aggression pact, including a secret protocol in which they divided the lands between Germany and the USSR into spheres of influence. The next month, the Wehrmacht and the Red Army both invaded Poland, met at a demarcation line, and arranged a joint victory parade. Seventy-one years ago today, on 28 September 1939, the Polish campaign complete, the two powers signed a treaty on borders and friendship, finalising their division of Poland and providing for future economic cooperation.
We cannot, of course, know what would have happened had Stalin refused Hitler's overtures and declined to enable Hitler's empire in summer 1939. What we do know is that the worst war in history, with its battles and atrocities, with its starvation and its Holocaust, began this way and not another.
In summer 1939, Hitler wanted a war, and Stalin wanted a truce. Stalin's great fear in the 1930s was encirclement by a coalition of Germany, Poland, and Japan. This led him to have more than 100,000 Soviet citizens, most of them members of the Polish national minority, shot on false charges of espionage for Poland in 1937 and 1938. This was the greatest campaign of ethnic executions in the Europe of the 1930s.
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