Anti-Hitler coalition
The anti-Hitler coalition ( English Anti-Hitler coalition or Grand Alliance , Russian Антигитлеровская коалиция ) is the name given to the military alliance made up of the three main allied powers, the Soviet Union , Great Britain and later the USA with other states, which was established by the Axis powers in the Second World War German Empire (under the leadership of Adolf Hitler ), the fascist kingdom of Italy and the empire of Greater Japan started military conflicts arose.
prehistory
Collective security
Before the Second World War, the western European democracies had already made several attempts to include the Soviet Union in a system of collective security . This was made possible by the accession of the USSR to the League of Nations in 1934, largely thanks to Franklin D. Roosevelt's policies . When Roosevelt came to power in 1933, an extremely pro-Soviet phase in American foreign policy had begun. One of Roosevelt's first acts of government was diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union, which paved the way for the Soviet Union to join the League of Nations. Previous US governments had always rejected this because of the systemic contradiction and the brutality with which the communist leadership cadre exercised their power.
This was followed on May 2, 1935 by the conclusion of an assistance pact between France and the Soviet Union, which was directed against German revanchism. During the Sudeten crisis in 1938 and the crisis around Danzig in 1939, which culminated in World War II, there had been talks between the Soviet Union and the Western European powers about military cooperation against National Socialist Germany . There are different views as to the seriousness with which both sides pursued these talks. After the failure of the talks due to the refusal of the Polish government to allow Soviet troops to march over Polish territory, Josef Stalin made a change in foreign policy in August 1939 and decided to join forces with his worst ideological opponent, the National Socialists .
Hitler-Stalin Pact
In 1939/40, the conclusion of the Hitler-Stalin Pact and the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland , as well as the Soviet aggression against Finland and the annexation of the Baltic states in Western Europe, caused confusion and a strong anti-Soviet mood in the United Kingdom . In December 1939 the Soviet Union was excluded from the League of Nations because of the war against Finland - the only state in the history of this organization. In the meantime, military action was even considered, such as air strikes on oil depots in the Caucasus ( Operation Pike ), since the USSR was perceived as an ally of Germany.
The Soviet regime, on the other hand, shifted responsibility for the start and expansion of the war to the United Kingdom, declaring it a "criminal stupidity" to declare war on Germany. The United States of America has been accused of fueling the flame of war in Europe by means of "hypocritical neutrality" and of having become an arms supplier for Great Britain and France .
Winston Churchill , Prime Minister of Great Britain from May 1940, was an avowed opponent of communism from the start , which he illustrated in his book After the War, which was published in 1930, with reference to the people who perished in Soviet Russia and the Soviet Union since 1917 .
development
However, all resentments faded into the background with the German attack on the Soviet Union . In the interests of fighting the now common enemy, the differences had to be put on hold. In a spontaneous speech on June 22, 1941, Churchill declared that his previous anti-communist statements had faded before the events in Eastern Europe , and that Britain was now on the side of the USSR and would give it all help.
On October 1, 1941, a joint conference on the military and economic support of the Soviet Union took place in Moscow , at which the delivery of war goods was decided according to the lending and leasing law . In the course of the war it was to receive enormous deliveries of material, whereby primarily not so much the arms deliveries, but the delivery of means of transport - essential for modern warfare - such as 427,284 trucks, 1,966 locomotives and 11,000 wagons were decisive. However, the food deliveries, which included 4.5 million tonnes of canned meat, were probably of the greatest importance.
After the USA entered the war in December 1941, at the Arcadia Conference in Washington on January 1, 1942, a declaration by 26 warring states against the Tripartite Pact came about, which at that time was the " Declaration of the United Nations ". The creation of the anti-Hitler coalition was concluded with an agreement signed after five months of negotiations on an "alliance in the war against Hitler Germany and its allies" for the next 20 years on May 26, 1942 between the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union and on May 11. June between the USA and the Soviet Union.
In the course of forming a coalition, the Soviet government was forced to reverse certain steps it had taken in the interests of partnership with Germany. Diplomatic relations were resumed with the governments-in-exile of Czechoslovakia , Norway , Belgium , France , Greece and Yugoslavia , all of which, with the exception of Greece, held office in Great Britain. The Comintern was also dissolved in 1943.
opposites
Despite the coalition, the Soviet government never doubted that the British Empire and the United States were concerned solely with maintaining their rule over their colonies and eliminating their most dangerous competitors, Germany and Japan. It was a foregone conclusion in Moscow that the Anglo-American powers would support the Soviet Union simply to put the brunt of the struggle on it. This explains the constant wakeful mistrust of the Soviet Union and the repeated calls for a second front .
Already at the beginning of the war conferences it became clear how difficult it was to work together, so that the formulations of goals that were jointly found almost always left a lot of room for interpretation for both sides. For example, it was decided to rebuild defeated Germany after the war according to democratic principles - which form of democracy was thought of was deliberately left open, as an agreement on this was hardly to be expected. The seeds of serious disagreements also carried the text of the agreement signed by Churchill and Roosevelt on August 14, 1941 Atlantic Charter in itself, in what was, to all nations to return the sovereign rights, which they have been snatched by force and that all peoples have the right, to choose for themselves the form of government they want to live under. Here the Soviet Union found themselves in extremely contestable positions due to their annexations, but also the Allies due to their colonies.
The greatest difficulties arose with regard to an agreement with the Polish government-in-exile , since it demanded the recognition of the integrity of the Republic of Poland within the old borders. Since Moscow declined to discuss the matter, the question was officially passed over in silence under British pressure and a Polish-Soviet military agreement was signed on August 14, 1941, with reservations. The relationship between the Polish government-in-exile and Moscow grew cold, however, as the release of Polish prisoners of war made little progress and Moscow refused to recognize the jurisdiction of the Polish government over citizens of the annexed Polish territories, as Soviet citizenship was imposed on the residents there they were thus Soviet citizens. When one of the 50 or so official questions to the Soviet government regarding the Polish military prisoners was not answered and the Polish government requested an investigation by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) after the discovery of the mass graves in Katyn , Moscow broke relations with the Polish government on the charge that she was in contact with the Hitler government and had joined a fascist smear campaign.
How fragile the anti-Hitler coalition actually was became clear soon after the end of the war: Not only the different interpretations of the joint resolutions of the Potsdam Agreement , but also considerable tensions in Berlin , which became the center of the conflict due to its four-power status , soon led to it to break the coalition. Ever since the Truman Doctrine and since Andrei Alexandrovich Zhdanov's speech on July 30, 1947, there was open talk of a divided world ( two-camp theory ): the Cold War era began .
See also
Remarks
- ↑ See Jochen Laufer, Stalin's Peace Goals and the Continuity of Soviet Germany Policy 1941–1953 , in: Jürgen Zarusky (Ed.): Stalin and the Germans. New research contributions. Oldenbourg, Munich 2006, ISBN 978-3-486-57893-5 , pp. 131–158, here p. 146 .
- ↑ See Michael Salewski : The Germans and the Sea. Studies on German naval history in the 19th and 20th centuries. Part II. Steiner, Stuttgart 2002 (= HMRG, supplement 45), p. 178 .
- ^ Iwan Maiski : Memoirs of a Soviet Ambassador. Dietz-Verlag, Berlin 1967, pp. 532 ff., 622.
- ^ Winston S. Churchill: After the war. Amalthea-Verlag, Zurich 1930, p. 70 ff.
- ↑ Ibid., P. 735.
- ↑ In an official meeting with the Polish Prime Minister Sikorski, Stalin stated that all Polish prisoners had escaped and fled to Manchuria. Two days after the discovery of Katyn, however, the Russian side suddenly declared that the Poles who were busy with construction had fallen into the hands of the fascist executioners near Smolensk. (Source missing!)
- ↑ Horst Boog, Jürgen Förster, Joachim Hoffmann , Ernst Klink, Rolf-Dieter Müller , Gerd R. Ueberschär : The attack on the Soviet Union (= Military History Research Office [ed.]: The German Reich and the Second World War . Volume 4 ). 2nd Edition. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1987, ISBN 3-421-06098-3 , pp. 803 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
- ↑ Wichard Woyke (ed.), Handwörterbuch Internationale Politik , 11th edition 2008, p. 420 ; Hans J. Reichhardt in: Georg Kotowski , Hans Joachim Reichhardt, Berlin as the capital of post-war Germany and the state of Berlin: 1945–1985 (= Berlin Democracy; Vol. 2), de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 1987, p. 36 .