A world slipping ever closer toward war awoke on the morning of August 24, 1939 to the shocking news that Adolf Hitler's Germany and Josef Stalin's Soviet Union had signed a nonaggression pact.
Hitler was beaming when his foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, returned from Moscow with the agreements in hand.
"The name of party comrade von Ribbentrop, as [German] Reich foreign minister, will be forever associated with the political rise of the Germans and the German nation," he declared.
The pact, named colloquially for von Ribbentrop and Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, was intended to give Hitler a free hand to deal with "the Polish problem" and, if necessary, fight Poland's Western allies -- Britain and France -- without the threat of Soviet intervention and a war on two fronts.
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