Economic cooperation between the German Reich and the Soviet Union 1939–1941

by Heinrich Schwendemann1

The signing of a German-Soviet trade and credit agreement on 19 August 1939 signalled to the world a sensational turnaround in the relations between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, which had been extremely tense for years. Four days later, the German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop travelled to Moscow and signed a non-aggression pact in the Kremlin, which covered the Reich’s back during the imminent attack on Poland. Almost two years later, when the Wehrmacht was ready to strike at the German-Soviet demarcation line in the early hours of 22 June 1941, trains carrying grain from the Soviet Union were still arriving at the border stations. This fact, which is hardly comprehensible in view of the obvious German preparations for an attack, also marked the end of a misguided calculation by Joseph Stalin that brought the Soviet Union to the brink of catastrophe.

Between the signing of the non-aggression pact on August 23, 1939 and June 22, 1941, economic relations between the two states experienced an extraordinary upswing. On the basis of the credit agreement of August 1939 and the two economic agreements of February 1940 and January 1941, the German-Soviet trade volume, which had amounted to just 60 million RM in 1939, rose to over 600 million RM in 1940 and reached a record level of 440 million RM in the first half of 1941. In 1940/41, the Soviet Union placed orders in Germany for 1.6 billion RM, of which orders for 600 million RM were in production at the start of the attack. In 1940/41, German industry delivered mainly industrial equipment and machinery, including 6,500 machine tools for Soviet armaments production, as well as prototype weapons, such as the German Air Force’s series aircraft and a half-finished warship. The Soviet Union, in turn, had become the Reich’s most important supplier of raw materials since the summer of 1940: In addition to deliveries of cotton, manganese and chrome ores, asbestos, wood, phosphates, etc., 1.7 million tons of grain and 1 million tons of fuel improved German supplies. In addition, in 1940/41 the Reich was able to obtain almost half a million tons of raw materials from the Middle and Far East via the Trans-Siberian Railway, mainly soybeans for the German fat supply, but also around 15,000 tons of rubber.2

In my opinion, the economic cooperation between the German Reich and the Soviet Union between 1939 and 1941 can provide an explanation for why the otherwise so mistrustful Soviet dictator Stalin misjudged Adolf Hitler’s intentions until June 22, 1941, when he refused to expect a German attack despite all warnings.

I.

Historians have argued for decades about who actually took the initiative to conclude the German-Soviet non-aggression pact.3 In fact, it was a mutual approach, caused by coincidence, with neither side being able to calculate the other’s actions in advance. The history of the so-called Hitler-Stalin Pact began with a coincidence: In October 1938, Berlin ministerial bureaucrats led by the Foreign Office decided to make a loan offer to the Soviet Union. There were no political, but purely economic intentions behind this. Since the raw materials crisis in the Reich had once again escalated, the responsible departments wanted to try to win the Soviet Union back as a raw materials supplier. At this point, trade relations had reached a historic low.4 Things had been different a few years earlier: German-Soviet economic cooperation, the second cornerstone of Rapallo policy alongside military cooperation, had reached its peak during the global economic crisis, when the Soviet Union imported the capital goods required to implement the first five-year plan almost exclusively from Germany. The fact that German large-scale industry was able to maintain its capacity through “Russian orders” was an essential prerequisite for German rearmament to begin so quickly in 1933.5

However, Hitler had already ended the Rapallo policy in 1933 against the will of his conservative allies, as it was diametrically opposed to his ideologically fixed goals towards the Soviet Union. In view of the rapid deterioration of political relations, only the trade relations continued, albeit on a considerably reduced scale. The conservative elites who had been the backers of the Rapallo policy in the Weimar era – the Foreign Office, the ministerial bureaucracy (Hjalmar Schacht), the large-scale industry represented in the Russia Committee of the German Economy – but also the Four-Year Plan Authority under Hermann Göring, repeatedly tried to include the Soviet Union in the bilateralized German foreign trade system. These initiatives always met with a response in Moscow and were used by Stalin on several occasions, such as during the Kandelaki mission from 1935 to 1937, to sound out the way for an improvement in political relations.6 When the German loan offer was made to the Soviet embassy in Berlin in December 1938, the Kremlin reacted immediately: a German delegation was invited to Moscow for economic negotiations and the Politburo compiled a list for future purchases in Germany: capital goods and, above all, armaments.7 Against the background of the increasing tensions between the Western powers and Germany, Stalin had obviously understood the German loan offer as a political signal, not knowing that Hitler had nothing to do with this internal trade policy initiative.

In the following months, a new trade agreement was negotiated via the Soviet embassy in Berlin and the German embassy in Moscow. Stalin used this channel – as he had done before – for political exploration. His representative in Berlin, Counsellor Georgij Astachov, and his two close colleagues, Anastas Mikoyan, the Foreign Trade Commissar, and Vjačeslav Molotov, Maksim Litvinov’s successor as Foreign Commissar since May 1939, repeatedly signalled to the German diplomats their interest in a political understanding. The Soviet explorations intensified when the Western powers offered the Soviet Union negotiations on an alliance against Nazi Germany in the spring of 1939. These advances found resonance in the “Rapallo” faction of German diplomacy, which, since the spring of 1939, with the approval of Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop, had been secretly devising an alternative strategy, the core of which, an understanding with the Soviet Union, was intended to isolate Poland and, in the event of a declaration of war by the Western powers, prevent a two-front war. However, Stalin was unaware that Hitler had repeatedly wanted to break off contact and only agreed to Ribbentrop’s urging to play the Russian card at the end of July 1939, when all other attempts to isolate Poland had failed.8

The trade and credit agreement, which was signed on August 19, 1939, was the prerequisite for the Soviet leadership to conclude a political agreement. It was in fact the “most advantageous economic agreement” – according to Molotov – that the Soviet Union had ever concluded. The agreement provided for German deliveries of 380 million RM within two years, of which 200 million RM were to be on extremely favorable credit terms. For the German side, the agreement represented anything but the economic basis for the coming war – as is repeatedly claimed – but rather a burden, since Soviet raw materials worth only 180 million RM were in prospect within two years.9

II.

After the declaration of war by the Western powers on September 3, 1939 and the immediate beginning of the British blockade, the German Foreign Office and the Berlin economic departments, supported by Ribbentrop and Göring, planned the future expansion of economic relations. The German authorities’ overriding interest in the Soviet Union as a trading partner was in obtaining a maximum of raw materials in the short term – especially grain and mineral oil. In addition, it was hoped that non-ferrous metals and rubber could be imported from East Asia via the Soviet Union. The Foreign Office became the control center of German-Soviet economic relations, and was able to conduct its own foreign policy in this sector until 1941, as Hitler refrained from pursuing a policy of cooperation with the Soviet Union.10 This was incompatible with his ideological dogma and – as internal statements repeatedly show – represented for him from the outset only a temporary, tactical interim solution.11

Stalin, on the other hand, believed that he was in the advantageous position of the third party who could reap territorial gains through the alliance with Hitler. In addition, the political option for the German Reich was inseparably linked to the economic option from the outset: when the USA and England distanced themselves from Moscow in economic terms after the conclusion of the pact, the German Reich was forced to step in as a supplier of capital goods and armaments technology. Since the 3rd Five-Year Plan was all about rearmament, the focus of Soviet import interests was in this area.

Ribbentrop’s proposal during his second visit to Moscow on September 27/28, 193912 to expand economic relations on a large scale, or his request to Stalin for “economic assistance” in the war, seemed to open up favorable prospects for the Soviet Union: The German Reich, which was considered economically weaker than England and France in the long term, was to be supported with raw material supplies in the long-term military struggle expected by all sides, while the Soviet Union would primarily continue its rearmament with German support. The extent to which economic factors played a role in Stalin’s assessment of the “imperialist war” is shown in this context by a statement to Georgi Dimitrov on September 7, 1939: “The war is being fought between two groups of capitalist countries (poor and rich in terms of colonies, raw materials, etc.) for the redivision of the world, for world domination. We have nothing against them hitting each other hard and weakening each other. It would be a good thing if Germany could destabilize the situation of the richest capitalist countries (especially England). […] We can maneuver, turn one side against the other, so that they start fighting each other even harder.”13

However, an absolute prerequisite for the transfer of Soviet raw material surpluses to the Reich was Germany’s willingness to supply the Soviet Union with armaments technology and thus return to the military cooperation of the Weimar era. For this reason, a 65-member commission of Soviet armaments experts inspected almost all of Germany’s armaments production throughout the autumn of 1939. In this context, the willingness of the German military to comply with the wishes of its former junior partner from the Weimar era is astonishing: in principle, they were prepared to accept most of the Soviet import program. However, because of domestic needs, German arms deliveries were to be made over the longer term – in some cases only after years.114

Since the Soviet side insisted on short-term deliveries, the economic negotiations were only successfully concluded with the signing of a contract on February 11, 1940 because Stalin personally took over the negotiation, accommodated the German side with regard to delivery times for Soviet orders and even declared himself willing to provide the Germans with non-ferrous metals for the production of Soviet orders. Stalin openly admitted that the Soviet Union wanted to learn from Germany in terms of naval and air force armaments. Since the Soviet Union had tried in vain to purchase the relevant technology from the USA, the planned construction of a Red Fleet was now to take place with German help.15 A half-finished cruiser, naval artillery turrets and plans for battleships were to be delivered. Model aircraft from the German Air Force were to serve as comparison material for Soviet air armament. Other focal points were machine tools for armament production and industrial equipment.16

As the German side wanted to obtain the raw materials promised in the economic agreement – above all a million tons of grain and 900,000 tons of mineral oil – as quickly and as cheaply as possible, it even became customary in the subsequent negotiations on the individual raw material supply contracts for the Berlin economic departments to submit their demands directly to the Kremlin leadership, Molotov or Mikoyan, via the German diplomats in Moscow, Friedrich-Werner Graf von der Schulenburg
and Gustav Hilger, which were then often decided on in detail by Stalin.17 Stalin’s overwhelming interest in German-Soviet economic cooperation, which is also expressed in German diplomatic documents, shows that this was also a central factor in his foreign policy. This became clear, for example:

  1. in the restrained Soviet delivery policy in the spring of 1940, when the Allied intervention plans against the Soviet oil fields in the Caucasus as a reaction to the German-Soviet economic cooperation that was just beginning, and in northern Scandinavia because of the Soviet attack on Finland, had become known in Moscow.18
  2. in the massive increase in Soviet raw material deliveries after the start of the German attack on France in May 1940 as part of an economic appeasement policy that was to last throughout the summer of 1940 and reflected the uncertainty of the Soviet leadership about the German increase in power in continental Europe, but at the same time was also intended to shield the Soviet annexation policy in the Baltic states and in Romania (Bessarabia).19

At this point, Hitler had already set the course He focused on the war for living space against the Soviet Union, primarily for ideological reasons, although he initially argued to the military in terms of power politics that England had to be defeated via a military defeat of the Soviet Union. German policy towards the Soviet Union was therefore two-pronged from July 1940:

  1. On the one hand, the war against the Soviet Union was prepared in the utmost secrecy, initially limited to the level of the highest military officials. At the same time, Hitler allowed German influence to be continuously expanded in Finland and in Southeastern Europe without taking Soviet interests into account, until in the spring of 1941 the strategic frontier facing the Soviet Union was finally completely under German control.20
  2. On the other hand, independently of this and until the spring of 1941, ignorant of Hitler’s plans for the war in the East, the departments involved in trade with Russia and German major industry under the leadership of the Foreign Office pursued a further intensification of economic relations.21 This also corresponded to Ribbentrop’s global political strategy, which wanted to integrate the Soviet Union into a continental bloc of Eurasian powers in order to break up the British Empire. Hitler granted this concept a certain amount of leeway in the autumn of 1940, but only to put pressure on England. The high point was the signing of the Tripartite Pact between Germany, Italy and Japan on September 27, 1940. At Ribbentrop’s insistence, Molotov was invited to Berlin for talks in the autumn of 1940. There, on September 12/13, Stalin had a meeting held. On 11 November, as a condition for Soviet accession to a “quadruple pact”, Hitler had to present demands that amounted to a new division of the two sides’ spheres of interest in northern and southeastern Europe – in doing so, he de facto provided Hitler with further arguments with which he subsequently tried to make his war plans plausible to his paladins. On 18 December 1940, Hitler finally signed the “Barbarossa” directive.22

While political relations between Berlin and Moscow were now largely silent, as Hitler did not respond to all signals from the other side to continue the political talks, economic relations developed in a diametrically opposite manner. During the economic negotiations in autumn 1940, Stalin largely complied with German demands, especially for the delivery of 2.5 million tons of grain. Economic concessions were intended to support the political demands put forward by Molotov in Berlin. The economic agreement of January 10, 1941, which provided for a further expansion of the exchange of goods until 1942, was intended to signal to Hitler that the Soviet Union would remain a reliable ally in the next phase of the war.23

From February 1941, however, the German build-up against the Soviet Union became increasingly clear. One division after another was driven into the assembly areas in front of the Soviet western border; a flood of rumors about German intentions to attack circulated. When the Wehrmacht conquered Yugoslavia and Greece in a blitzkrieg, Stalin’s spectacular appeasement policy towards Hitler began in April 1941: diplomatic signals and a consistently distant attitude towards the USA and England were intended to signal the Soviet willingness to reach an understanding.24

The most important pillar of Stalin’s appeasement policy was once again the economic sector. As early as March 1941, Soviet deliveries had increased exponentially, as rumors of German war intentions grew. Trains carrying grain, fuel and non-ferrous metals were backed up at border stations because the German side could no longer cope with the reloading. From April to June 1941, the Soviet Union delivered over half a million tons of grain, and in May 1941 transported 5,000 tons of rubber from East Asia on special trains via the Trans-Siberian Railway, thus eliminating the German bottleneck in tire production for Operation Barbarossa at the last minute. The last grain train crossed the German-Soviet demarcation line in Poland on the night of June 21-22, 1941.25

III.

Why did Stalin, even though everything seemed to point to a German attack, ignore all warnings and hope until the very end that Hitler would wage a war of nerves in order to negotiate from a position of strength?

I think that Stalin’s misjudgment was ultimately due to the phenomenon that two different dictatorships were facing each other in terms of the system of rule. On the Soviet side, the power structures were centrally aligned with Stalin.26 Since the relationship with Berlin had become the overriding point of orientation for Soviet foreign policy since 1939, Germany policy was determined by Stalin personally. A deviation from the prescribed course was not possible, since all actors, from Stalin’s employees down to the lower levels of the Soviet foreign trade offices – with the purges and terror of the 1930s in mind – adhered to the guidelines given from above for fear of reprisals. Molotov and Mikoyan’s behavior towards the German diplomats in particular repeatedly showed that in the sensitive area of ​​relations with the previous main ideological opponent, National Socialist Germany, they preferred to seek reassurance from Stalin rather than make a possibly wrong decision.

On the German side, however, the power structure was completely different. Contrary to the impression that the Nazi dictatorship gave to the outside world, there were no clear decision-making structures in the “Führer state”. Although Hitler made the fundamental decisions himself, he often left areas of foreign and foreign economic policy to others, who were sometimes even able to act largely autonomously, as long as this did not directly conflict with his plans. This was precisely what had happened in the relationship with the Soviet Union since autumn 1939: The “pro-Russian” faction within German diplomacy – supported by parts of the ministerial bureaucracy and the military as well as by leading figures such as von Ribbentrop, Göring and Erich Raeder – were able to design and implement the cooperation policy with Moscow largely independently of Hitler. Hitler, for whom the “alliance” with the USSR was limited in time from the outset, stayed away from the cooperation policy. In the winter of 1939/40 he had agreed to the export of arms to the Soviet Union, albeit reluctantly, and he had already stated at the time that he hoped to “get around it if the war situation developed favorably.”27 When he was asked in January 1941 how the new economic agreement with the Soviet Union should be handled, he declared – for camouflage reasons – that it should be fulfilled. “The ministries should sort this out among themselves,” said Hitler.28

Now the ruling systems of both dictators met via the Foreign Office – German Embassy in Moscow – Molotov/Mikoyan channel, through which all questions of German-Soviet relations had been clarified since the summer of 1939. In Moscow, the German side had direct access to the inner circle of power at all times, namely through the most prominent representative of German-Soviet cooperation within German diplomacy, Ambassador Werner von der Schulenburg, who enjoyed an absolutely privileged position with Molotov and, unlike representatives of other states, was received at any time of day or night.29

The consequences were serious, because the Kremlin believed that Hitler also determined the guidelines of German “Russia policy” and that economic policy demands ultimately had to be traced back to Hitler. When the German ambassador spoke on behalf of the “Reich government”, it was not Hitler who was behind it, but the Foreign Office, individual departments or committees of departmental representatives. This was the real reason why Stalin had been wrong in his judgment of Hitler’s intentions since 1939. One dictator, Stalin, projected his own ruling practices onto his Berlin opponent and judged his policies based on what the German diplomats in Moscow presented. Since the focus of German demands since September 1939 had clearly been on Moscow’s economic support for the war against the Western powers, the Kremlin inevitably concluded that Hitler had an overriding interest in the USSR as an economic partner.

Given the concentration of German troops, the Kremlin leadership had to grapple with the question of what advantages the German Reich could gain from an attack on the Soviet Union since March 1941. In such a case, the Wehrmacht would be fighting on two fronts and the loss of Soviet raw materials and transit supplies would be unavoidable. In Moscow, where Hitler’s policy was judged in terms of power politics and not in its ideological dimension, it was therefore obvious to conclude that the German policy of pressure was aimed at increasing material support, an assessment of the situation that was also reached by the experts in London and Washington and the diplomats accredited in Moscow. Under the impression of a German threat, Stalin therefore saw the best protection in the spring of 1941 in a consistent policy of economic and political concessions: He was convinced that Hitler would not attack a state from which he could receive the maximum amount of support under peaceful conditions. It was no coincidence that on June 22, 1941, he said to Dimitrov: “You attacked us without making any demands, without asking for any negotiations, you attacked us vilely, like robbers.”30

The Soviet leadership had failed to notice that the consensus that had emerged in Berlin in the autumn of 1939 to expand cooperation with Moscow against the Western powers in connection with the Rapallo policy had crumbled after the defeat of France and Hitler set the course for war against the Soviet Union, initially on the military side, and by spring 1941 had ceased to exist. In the meantime, the German leadership had committed itself to Hitler’s plans to wage a racial war of annihilation with the planned murder of millions of people. Only diplomats from the Foreign Office, who had played a key role in shaping the previous policy towards the Eastern superpower, took a distanced stance on this. This finally broke the continuity of a successful cooperation between the traditional elites of the German Reich and the rulers of the Soviet Union, which had been renewed on August 23, 1939.

Stalin’s misjudgment was probably reinforced by the fact that German exports to the Soviet Union had increased exponentially in the spring of 1941. A paradox: While on the one hand the war against the Soviet Union was being prepared, on the other the Soviet Union was given preferential treatment over all other remaining trading partners, with the economic steering apparatus under the leadership of the Foreign Office and German industry handling exports to the Soviet Union in accordance with the contract until the attack began. A third of German exports to Russia in 1940/41, 150 million RM out of a total of 450 million RM, were handled in the last quarter before the attack began, the most important item since January 1941 being 4,500 machine tools worth 65 million RM.31

The fact that the Soviet contributions to the German war economy are higher than the other way around is already evident from the German clearing debt to the Soviet Union of over 200 million RM. Since the vast majority of Soviet raw material and transit deliveries from the summer of 1940 were handled as part of Stalin’s economic appeasement policy, he ultimately improved German supplies for the war against the Soviet Union. Without the fuel deliveries from the Soviet Union – around a million tons – the Wehrmacht would not have been able to advance as far as Moscow in 1941.

  1. The article is based on the larger study: Heinrich Schwendemann: The economic cooperation between the German Reich and the Soviet Union from 1939 to 1941. Alternative to Hitler’s Eastern program? Berlin 1993. Detailed sources and literature references can be found there. ↩︎
  2. Schwendemann, Economic Cooperation, Tables 15 to 20, pp. 378–380.. ↩︎
  3. On the current state of research, see the contributions in: Manfred Sapper (ed.): The Hitler-Stalin Pact. The war and European memory. Berlin 2009 [= Eastern Europe 7-8/2009]; Sergej Slutsch: Stalin and Hitler 1933–1941: The Kremlin’s calculations and miscalculations. In: Jürgen Zarusky (ed.): Stalin and the Germans. New contributions to research. Munich 2006, pp. 59–88; also: Jan Lipinsky: The secret additional protocol to the German-Soviet non-aggression pact of August 23, 1939 and its history of creation and reception from 1939 to 1999. Frankfurt/M. et al. 2004; Lew Besymenski: Stalin and Hitler. The poker game of the dictators. Berlin 2002; Ingeborg Fleischhauer: The Pact. Hitler, Stalin and the Initiative of German Diplomacy 1938–1939. Berlin et al. 1990; Geoffrey Roberts: The unholy alliance. Stalin’s pact with Hitler. London 1989; Boris Chavkin: On the history of the publication of the Soviet texts of the German-Soviet secret documents from 1939–1941. In: Forum for Eastern European Ideas and Contemporary History 10 (2006), pp. 167–192. ↩︎
  4. Schwendemann, Economic Cooperation, p. 30. ↩︎
  5. Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann: Large-scale industry and Rapallo politics. German-Soviet trade relations in the Weimar Republic. In: Historische Zeitschrift 222 (1976), pp. 265–341; Manfred Zeidler: Reichswehr and Red Army 1920–1933. Paths and stages of an unusual collaboration. Munich 1993; Jurij L. D’jakov, Tat’jana S. Bušueva: The fascist sword was forged in the Soviet Union. The secret collaboration of the Red Army with the Reichswehr 1922–1933. Unknown documents. Russia in people, documents, diary entries. Klitzschen 2000; Friedrich P. Kahlenberg (ed.): Reichswehr and Red Army. Documents from the military archives of Germany and Russia 1925–1931. Koblenz 1995. ↩︎
  6. Schwendemann, Economic Cooperation, pp. 23–31; Lev Besymenski: Secret mission on Stalin’s orders? David Kandelaki and Soviet-German relations in the mid-1930s. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 40 (1992), pp. 339–357. ↩︎
  7. Schwendemann, Economic Cooperation, pp. 34–39; Lev Besymenski: The Soviet-German Treaties of 1939: New Documents. In: Forum for East European Ideas and Contemporary History 2 (1998), pp. 77–108. ↩︎
  8. Schwendemann, Economic Cooperation, pp. 33–57. On Ribbentrop’s foreign policy strategy: Wolfgang Michalka: Ribbentrop and German world politics 1933–1940. Foreign policy concepts and decision-making processes in the Third Reich. Munich 1980; also: Stefan Kley: Hitler, Ribbentrop and the unleashing of the Second World War. Paderborn et al. 1996, pp. 261ff. ↩︎
  9. Schwendemann, Economic Cooperation, pp. 61-72 ↩︎
  10. Ibid., pp. 73–88. ↩︎
  11. Franz Halder, Colonel General: War diary. Daily notes of the Chief of the Army General Staff 1939–1942. Edited by Hans-Adolf Jacobsen. Vol. I. Stuttgart 1962, p. 38 (entry from 28 August 1939). ↩︎
  12. Schwendemann, Economic Cooperation, pp. 83–85; Ingeborg Fleischhauer: The German-Soviet border and friendship treaty of September 28, 1939. The German records of the negotiations between Stalin, Molotov and Ribbentrop in Moscow. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 39 (1991), pp. 447–470. ↩︎
  13. Georgi Dimitrov: Diaries 1933–1943. Edited by Bernhard H. Bayerlein. Berlin 2000. Vol. 1, p. 273. ↩︎
  14. Schwendemann, Economic Cooperation, pp. 100–120. ↩︎
  15. Milan L. Hauner: Stalin’s Big-Fleet Program. In: Naval War College Review. Vol. LVII. 2004, pp. 87–120. ↩︎
  16. Schwendemann, Economic Cooperation, pp. 135-149 ↩︎
  17. Ibid., pp. 97–100, also the diagram in the appendix: The communication structures of German-Soviet economic relations 1939–1941. ↩︎
  18. Ibid., pp. 151–158. ↩︎
  19. Ibid., pp. 159-194. ↩︎
  20. Still fundamental: Andreas Hillgruber: Hitler’s strategy. Politics and warfare 1940–1941. Frankfurt/M. 1965; Jürgen Förster: Hitler’s decision for war against the Soviet Union. In: Military History Research Office (ed.): The German Reich and the Second World War. Volume 4: The attack on the Soviet Union. Stuttgart 1983, p. 3ff.; also: Gerd R. Ueberschär (ed.): The German attack on the Soviet Union. “Operation Barbarossa” 1941. Frankfurt/M. 2011 (expanded new edition); Bianka Pietrow-Ennker (ed.): Preventive war? The German attack on the Soviet Union. Frankfurt/M. 2000; Rolf-Dieter Müller: The last German war. Stuttgart 2005, p. 76ff. ↩︎
  21. Schwendemann, Economic Cooperation, p. 203ff. ↩︎
  22. Besymenski, Stalin and Hitler, pp. 314–340; Schwendemann, Economic Cooperation, pp. 224–234. ↩︎
  23. Schwendemann, Economic Cooperation, pp. 229–263. ↩︎
  24. Literature: Sergei A. Gorlov: Warnings about “Operation Barbarossa”. From the files of the Soviet representation in Berlin 1940–1941. In: Osteuropa 41 (1991), pp. 545–561; Andrej Fesjun, Boris Chavkin: New documents on the “Sorge” case. In: Forum for East European Ideas and Contemporary History 4 (2000), pp. 91–125; Lev Besymenski: On the question of the “Zhukov Plan” of May 15, 1941. In: Forum for East European Ideas and Contemporary History 4 (2000), pp. 127–1444; Geoffrey Roberts: Stalin’s Wars. From the Second World War to the Cold War. Düsseldorf 2008, pp. 79–100. ↩︎
  25. Schwendemann, Economic Cooperation, p. 315ff. ↩︎
  26. See also the comparative double biography by: Alan Bullock: Hitler and Stalin. Parallel Lives. Berlin 1991; E. A. Rees (ed.): The Nature of Stalin’s Dictatorship. The Politburo, 1924–1953. Basingstoke 2003.  ↩︎
  27. Schwendemann, Economic Cooperation, p. 134 ↩︎
  28. Ibid., p. 307 ↩︎
  29. Ingeborg Fleischhauer: Diplomatic resistance to “Operation Barbarossa”. The peace efforts of the German Embassy in Moscow 1939–1941. Berlin et al. 1991; Boris Chavkin: The German resistance and Count von der Schulenburg. In: Forum for East European Ideas and Contemporary History 14 (2010), pp. 11–29. ↩︎
  30. Dimitrov, Diaries 1933–1943, Vol. 1, p. 392. ↩︎
  31. Schwendemann, Economic Cooperation, pp. 317–352. ↩︎