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World War II Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, the Nazis and the West Hardcover – Bargain Price, April 28, 2009
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Drawing on material available only since opening of archives in Eastern Europe and Russia, Rees reexamines the key choices made by Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt during the war. And as the truth about Stalin’s earlier friendly relationship with the Nazis is laid bare, a devastating and surprising picture of the Soviet leader emerges.
The emotional core of the book is the amazing new testimony obtained from nearly a hundred separate witnesses from the period—former Soviet secret policemen, Allied seamen who braved Arctic convoys and Red Army veterans who engaged Germans in hand-to-hand fighting on the Eastern Front. Their dramatic personal experiences make clear in a compelling and fresh way the reasons why the people of Poland, the Baltic states and other European countries simply swapped the rule of one tyrant for another.
Rees’ ability to weave high politics—the meeting of the Allied leaders at Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam—with the dramatic personal experiences of those on the ground who bore the consequences of their decisions is eye opening. World War II Behind Closed Doors will change the way we think about the Second World War.
- Print length448 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPantheon
- Publication dateApril 28, 2009
- Dimensions6.4 x 1.4 x 9.55 inches
- ISBN-10030737730X
- ISBN-13978-0307377302
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“Rees is vastly well informed about the second world war. His judgments can seldom be faulted...there are many surprises here, and much good detail....The relationship between Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill makes an ugly story, and Rees tells it extraordinarily well.” —Sir Max Hastings, author of Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944-1945
“A thoughtful and thought-provoking introduction to many of the shadier deals of the Second World War...The real virtue of this book lies in its ability to blend the experience of ordinary people into the narrative of public events...memorable in the extreme.”–Richard Overy, Literary Review
"Readers of this book… are in for a shock…This book illuminates many shady corners of Britain's and America's dealings with Stalin and each other. The famous trust between Churchill and Roosevelt is shown to be far from perfect.”–Peter Lewis, Daily Mail
“This splendid book centres on the question of how personality affects historical change. The answer is plain: when all account is taken of structural determinants in history, key individuals played roles that were unique and indispensable.”–Ian Kershaw, author of Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution
“Fascinating and engaging...highly readable.” –Jewish Book World
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
When do you think the Second World War ended? In August 1945 after the surrender of the Japanese?
Well, it depends how you look at it. If you believe that the end of the war was supposed to have brought ‘freedom’ to the countries that had suffered under Nazi occupation, then for millions of people the war did not really end until the fall of Communism less than twenty years ago. In the summer of 1945 the people of Poland, of the Baltic states and a number of other countries in eastern Europe simply swapped the rule of one tyrant for that of another. It was in order to demonstrate this unpleasant reality that the presidents of both Estonia and Lithuania refused to visit Moscow in 2005 to participate in ‘celebrations’ marking the sixtieth anniversary of the ‘end of the war’ in Europe.
How did this injustice happen? That is one of the crucial questions this book attempts to answer. And it is a history that it has only been possible to tell since the fall of Communism. Not just because the hundred or so eye witnesses I met in the former Soviet Union and eastern Europe would never have been able to speak frankly under Communist rule, but also because key archival material that successive Soviet governments did all they could to hide has been made available only recently. The existence of these documents has allowed a true ‘behind-the-scenes’ history of the West’s dealings with Stalin to be attempted. All of which means, I hope, that this book contains much that is new.
I have been lucky that the collapse of the Eastern Bloc has permitted this work. It was certainly something I could never have predicted would happen when I was taught the history of the Second World War at school back in the early 1970s. Then my history teacher got round the moral and political complexities of the Soviet Union’s1 participation in the war by the simple expedient of largely ignoring it. At the time, in the depths of the Cold War, that was how most people dealt with the awkward legacy of the West’s relationship with Stalin. The focus was on the heroism of the Western Allies – on Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain and D-Day. None of which, of course, must be forgotten. But it is not the whole story.
Before the fall of Communism the role of the Soviet Union in the Second World War was, to a large extent, denied a proper place in our culture because it was easier than facing up to a variety of unpalatable truths. Did we, for example, really contribute to the terrible fate that in 1945 befell Poland, the very country we went to war to protect? Especially when we were taught that this was a war about confronting tyranny? And if, as we should, we do start asking ourselves these difficult questions, then we also have to pose some of the most uncomfortable of all. Was anyone in the West to blame in any way for what happened at the end of the war? What about the great heroes of British and American history, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt?
Paradoxically, the best way to attempt an answer to all this is by focusing on someone else entirely – Joseph Stalin. Whilst this is a book that is fundamentally about relationships, it is Stalin who dominates the work. And a real insight into the Soviet leader’s attitude to the war is gained by examining his behaviour immediately before his alliance with the West. This period, of the Nazi–Soviet pact between 1939 and 1941, has been largely ignored in the popular consciousness. It was certainly ignored in the post-war Soviet Union. I remember asking one Russian after the fall of the Berlin Wall: ‘How was the Nazi–Soviet pact taught when you were in school during the Soviet era? Wasn’t it a tricky piece of history to explain away?’ He smiled in response. ‘Oh, no’, he said, ‘not tricky at all. You see, I didn’t learn there had ever been a Nazi– Soviet pact until after 1990 and the collapse of the Soviet Union’.
Stalin’s relationship with the Nazis is a vital insight into the kind of person he was; because, at least in the early days of the relationship, he got on perfectly well with them. The Soviet Communists and the German Nazis had a lot in common – not ideologically, of course, but in practical terms. Each of them respected the importance of raw power. And each of them despised the values that a man like Franklin Roosevelt held most dear, such as freedom of speech and the rule of law. As a consequence, we see Stalin at his most relaxed in one of the first encounters in the book, carving up Europe with Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Nazi Foreign Minister. The Soviet leader was never to attain such a moment of mutual interest and understanding at any point in his relationship with Churchill and Roosevelt.
It is also important to understand the way in which the Soviets ran their occupation of eastern Poland between 1939 and 1941. That is because many of the injustices that were to occur in parts of occupied eastern Europe at the end of the war were broadly similar to those the Soviets had previously committed in eastern Poland – the torture, the arbitrary arrests, the deportations, the sham elections and the murders. What the earlier Soviet occupation of eastern Poland demonstrates is that the fundamental nature of Stalinism was obvious from the start.
So it isn’t that Churchill and Roosevelt were unaware in the beginning of the kind of regime they were dealing with. Neither of them was initially enthusiastic about the forced alliance with Stalin following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Churchill considered it akin to a pact with ‘the Devil’, and Roosevelt, even though the United States was still officially neutral in the summer of 1941, was careful in his first statement after the Nazi invasion to condemn the Soviets for their previous abuses.
How the British and Americans moved from that moment of justified scepticism about Stalin to the point immediately after the Yalta Conference in February 1945 when they stated, with apparent sincerity, that Stalin ‘meant well to the world’ and was ‘reasonable and sensible’, is the meat of this book. And the answer to why Churchill and Roosevelt publicly altered their position about Stalin and the Soviet Union doesn’t lie just in understanding the massive geo-political issues that were at stake in the war – and crucially the effect on the West of the successful Soviet fight-back against the Nazis – but also takes us into the realm of personal emotions. Both Churchill and Roosevelt had gigantic egos and both of them liked to dominate the room. And both of them liked the sound of their own voices. Stalin wasn’t like that at all. He was a watcher – an aggressive listener.
It was no accident that it took two highly intelligent functionaries on the British side – Sir Alexander Cadogan, Permanent Under Secretary at the Foreign Office, and Lord Alanbrooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff – to spot Stalin’s gifts most accurately. They saw him not as a politician playing to the crowd and awash with his own rhetoric, but more like a bureaucrat – a practical man who got things done. As Cadogan confided in his diary at Yalta: ‘I must say I think Uncle Joe [Stalin] much the most impressive of the three men. He is very quiet and restrained…. The President flapped about and the PM boomed, but Joe just sat taking it all in and being rather amused. When he did chip in, he never used a superfluous word and spoke very much to the point’.
Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke ‘formed a very high idea of his [Stalin’s] ability, force of character and shrewdness’.3In particular, Alanbrooke was impressed that Stalin ‘displayed an astounding knowledge of technical railway details’. No one would ever accuse Churchill or Roosevelt – those biggest of ‘big picture’ men – of having ‘an astounding knowledge of technical railway details’. And it was Alanbrooke who spotted early on what was to be the crux of the final problem between Stalin and Churchill: ‘Stalin is a realist if ever there was one’, he wrote in his diary, ‘facts only count with him…[Churchill] appealed to sentiments in Stalin which I do not think exist there’.
As one historian has put it, the Western leaders at the end of the war ‘were not dealing with a normal, everyday, run-of-themill, statesmanlike head of government. They confronted instead a psychologically disturbed but fully functional and highly intelligent dictator who had projected his own personality not only onto those around him but onto an entire nation and had thereby with catastrophic results, remade it in his image’.
One of the problems was that Stalin in person was very different from the image of Stalin the tyrant. Anthony Eden, one of the first Western politicians to spend time with Stalin in Moscow during the war, remarked on his return that he had tried hard to imagine the Soviet leader ‘dripping with the blood of his opponents and rivals, but somehow the picture wouldn’t fit’.
But Roosevelt and Churchill were sophisticated politicians and it is wrong to suppose that they were simply duped by Stalin. No, something altogether more interesting – and more complicated – takes place in this history. Roosevelt and Churchill wanted to win the war at the least possible cost to their own respective countries – in both human and financial terms. Keeping Stalin ‘on side’, particularly during the years before D-Day when the Soviets believed they were fighting the war almost on their own, was a difficult business and required, as Roosevelt would have put it, ‘careful handling’. As a result, behind closed doors the Western leaders felt it necessary to make hard political compromises. One of them was to promote propaganda that painted...
Product details
- ASIN : B005M50F26
- Publisher : Pantheon; First Edition (April 28, 2009)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 448 pages
- ISBN-10 : 030737730X
- ISBN-13 : 978-0307377302
- Item Weight : 1.7 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.4 x 1.4 x 9.55 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #6,375,077 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #12,735 in Russian History (Books)
- #14,616 in Deals in Books
- #14,801 in European Politics Books
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-the significance of Stalin's earlier partnership with Hitler over dividing Poland
-the ballet the Allies did with Stalin over the opening of the Second Front
-Stalin's shrewd and brutal lack of interest in words as opposed to material realities - like the fact that the Soviet army was all over Eastern Europe
-the amazing tragedy that Britain went to war to save Poland from one imperialist police state, only to surrender Poland to another
The one thing that I think is missing from the book, or at least is downplayed to the point where I don't remember it, and it is important, is this: what was Poland before WWII? To read the book, one might think Poland was a democracy on the order of Britain or France. I don't mean to belittle the profound feelings of the Poles on the outcome of the war, but the absence of treatment of this question is itself a kind of myth-making.
For example, between the wars Poland broke a treaty and annexed a chunk of Lithuania. Poland also made an agreement with Hitler to take a small chunk of Czechoslovakia. There was also, needless to say, a lot of serious anti-Semitism in Poland, even up to and I think throughout the German invasion. My understanding is that things could also be difficult if you were ethnically Ukrainian.
Nevertheless, it seems to be a very revealing book and just what I needed. I recommend it but suggest reading more about the various eastern European countries at that time.
A good start might be a particular collection of essays. It's called In the Shadow of Hitler: Personalities of the Right in Central and Eastern Europe, edited by Rebecca Haynes. Very interesting reading, a quick way to learn about the political landscape of the region.
I came away with many questions answered, but several things came out clear. These are perennial "age old" lessons still relevant for today's world:
1. Never trust a treaty; it is too often used (or later transmogrified) by an adversary to hide something or to deceive..
2, Never let your military decay or weaken even in times of apparent relative peace.
3. Even in the West, never trust political leaders to always make decisions that benefit the country; re-election is paramount in their minds, WW II shows that political leaders in democratic countries made decisions suspiciously aimed at winning elections, sometimes at the expense of the country. Telling half-truths, cover-ups, or withholding information is part of their toolbox.
4. The complete truths about historical events do not often surface until accountable people have died, especially if they were powerful.
This is a good read for history buffs, political scientist, and anyone interested in this subject.
Rich
More importantly it covers on details the horrors of Soviet invasion of Poland. All true. Yet two paragraphs on the German occupation. The German war crimes were at least as horrific if not more.
The fact that the Germans like the Russians executed a great deal of Polish intellectuals and leaders is never mentioned.
I also found the absence of information on the treatment of Jews in Poland from1939-1941 outrageous. Unlike the Soviets Jews were deprived of businesses and propert and herrded into ghettos to die of disease and poverty. This is ignored.
Moreover, as bad as the Doviets were thousands of Jews migrated from the German to the Soviet zone to escape the Naxos. No word of this either
This is a nice book for beginners but for informed readers of this periods this work is inferior to many impressive others
The book is a must read for anyone, especially for those who have read other works, but want to know or confirm the truth - thus broaden their understanding.
Top reviews from other countries
I was surprised when reading some of the early chapters that the scandalous invasion of Poland from the Soviet side was more or less allowed to happen and despite the heartfelt pleas from the Polish ambassador the mass killing and deportation of civilians was permitted to go on freely. 'We have no quarrel with the Soviets' the British Government said whilst murder was blatantly being perpetrated. Behind the scenes though,a tit for tat conspiracy was being carried out between Hitler and Stalin which left the unfortunate Poles compromised completely. Despite the huge Polish loss of life and their heroic fight for freedom they were betrayed by what they thought were their allies. I found the 4000 brave Polish men killed at Montecasino particularly moving, when you realise they were sacrificed and unappreciated for their efforts.
A complex political situation continued right through until the end of the war when it seems that Stalin had to be compensated for losing 27 million troops (27 million compared with only 400 000 each for UK and US) Not that the mad and vindictive Stalin cared for his people, he happily murdered or transported millions for a whim. Additionally Russia was by the end of the war occupying much of Eastern Europe, too bad for those millions and millions of tragic people who had to suffer another 50 years of dictatorial communist rule! Churchill and Roosavelt do not come out of this that well though their positions were completely untenable, they more or less had no option but to agree with the psycopathic Stalin who had helped them out.
Watching the BBC production alongside reading the book adds to the interest and in particular I was pretty horrified at Churchill and Roosevelt quaffing champagne in the relative peace of Canada whilst Europe was almost completely flattened. Also seeing how duped Roosevelt was to take advice from what turned out to be a Soviet spy. Politicians!!!
I was however quite impressed by President De Gaulle who refused to recognise the puppet government of Poland at the end of the war and even the ever devious Stalin respected De Gaulles
suspicions. Stalin noted the French leaders insight, but told the interpreter at the meeting that he would be sent to Siberia for knowing too much!
There is lots to interest in this new book with some fantastic details, first hand witness reports and new information that makes this book a really good historical read. Well worth the price at Amazon in particular.
(By the way the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) now admits that, in breach of the spirit of the Public Records Act of 1958, it has been sitting on 1.2 million files that should long ago have been transferred to the National Archives. The files, kept secret at the Lord Chancellor's discretion go back to the 1856 Treaty of Paris (?). The implication of this subterfuge are huge, wrote The Guardian recently: it destroys any trust we still had that documents sent to the archives represent a full and accurate records of Britain's foreign affairs).
The picture is not a pretty one. Churchill looks like a fool and he comes out of the book as a pathetic liar and a short-sighted politician. Maybe too much whisky to combat the enormous stress of a giant poker game. Franklin Roosevelt is everything except a democrat. He is also a pathetic liar. Maybe too much opium, because he was sick, because he was arrogant but also because he was American. His target was not the liberation of the world, the end of the Nazi regime - at some point it is clear that he might have been to bed with Hitler rather than Stalin.
His target was the end of the British Empire. Churchill missed the point entirely. As for Stalin, the evil communist, he had every reason to despise Churchill, Roosevelt or Hitler. They all wanted him dead from the very start. To stall the inevitable attack, he goes to bed with Hitler - to buy time, to prepare for the cataclysm and the fact that both Churchill and Roosevelt would be too happy to see German troops in Moscow.
Both Churchill and Roosevelt use all tactics to stall any serious help to the embattled Soviet Army. The price in life is enormous, but who care, they are all communists. Yet the betrayed russians endure and the poker game ends with an unexpected outcome: Stalin survives the on slow, the Red Army does what no one did on the ground - resists and then goes on the move. The result is panic, and Yalta. Roosevelt wants to deal with Stalin without Churchill. Stalin knows he is the winner. He fixes the rules of the outcome of the war. Churchill abandons his Polish friends as well as the white Russians. the British smell something is not right and he is booted out of government. the dying Roosevelt get the bits and pieces he wanted from the British Empire while the US army keeps bombing civilians in Germany and Italian churches and monasteries. What he really wants is to be the master of the universe and Europe should be obliterated. How De Gaulle, a virtual prisoner in London survives all the lies and the loss of North Africa (betrayed by Churchill) without becoming an alcoholic is a mystery, but Free France was really pain. Churchill wanted France dead as much as Roosevelt wanted the British Empire dead, so de Gaulle surveyed playing one against the other. (The aftermath was that once the British Empire was gone, the Americans went after French Indochina!)
Rudolf Hess, the nº2 of the Nazi government in 1941, was confined to Spandau until 1987. He was not allowed to write a memo to his children. Hew was not allowed to write his memoirs (yet we have Speer's ones and they must be read). We were told he was a mad man when he flew over to Scotland in 1941, but after reading this book I think he was the fall guy. Clearly everyone was obsessed by Stalin and Hitler had good reason to believe that Churchill would line up under pressure with whoever was anti-Staline. With the help of a bottle of scotch, of course. So Rudolf Hess was the go-between, but what he got was a one way ticket when a spy passed the information to Staline. Hess was not allowed to go free and to speak to historians, even in the 1980s. So much for our democracy and freedom of speech.
This book must be read - as well as Speer's memoir (Speer was the minister of industry that kept the German army supplied until 1944, in spite of a near total embargo from outside.
The two western leaders were so desperate for the alliance to continue with Stalin that they had to overlook the awful consequences of their collaboration with him while the war was in play. And Stalin played along, seeming reasonably while acting atrociously. Roosevelt called him Uncle Joe. And, says Rees, "Stalin did not seem a bloodthirsty tyrant at all. It was only if you discarded the surface appearances and listened carefully to what Stalin said that a darker picture emerged."
GB and the US also ignored strong evidence that emerged about the Russians having massacred some 14,000 Polish army officers in and around Katyn. The Soviets, when they took over the area, played with the evidence and threatened eye witnesses in order to make it seem that the Nazis had killed the men and left them in mass graves. A British diplomat, Owen O'Malley, was asked to investigate and - doing much better than a gullible press - he pinned the act on the Soviets, although he had to leave some ambiguity in his report to Churchill. This ambiguity made it easier for Britain to pass on Poland to the Russians in the end-of -war deals.
But the US and GB could have done more to protect Poland. The author says that 'the Americans never used their considerable economic power to try to pressurize the Soviets to be more accommodating'.
Modern negotiators could learn all sorts of points from this book. Even something as obvious as the location of meeting places between parties can be crucial - giving that 'home game' advantage to leaders such as Stalin who never traveled 'to a meeting that his own security forces did not oversee'. And Stalin had this advantage too: 'One of the keys to Stalin's ability to function was his lack of genuine attachment to others.'
The irony here is Churchill was not in control at all, he was played, I think he knew he was played, he had no choice as Roosevelt’s political machinations were double edged,l Roosevelt had Britain financially screwed & was determined to break any colonial remnants post WWII and Stalin would help. Roosevelt succeeded but the costs of that continues to play out today and not in a good way.
It’s a must read book, it leaves you wondering what else could Churchill have done? There was only one alternative, unpalatable thoughts they maybe, but would a deal with the Nazis been any less costly in human life. Stalin and Hitler had a lot in common, it was just the target of their brutality that was different. Ultimately you conclude the decisions of the time were correct, but not without deep flaw.