German-Soviet border and friendship treaty

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German-Soviet border and friendship treaty
Date: September 28, 1939
Come into effect: September 28, 1939
(Additional Protocol: October 4, 1939)
Reference: RGBl. 1940 II, p. 4 f.
Contract type: Bilateral
Legal matter: Border and friendship treaty
Signing: September 28, 1939
Ratification : December 15, 1939
Please note the note on the applicable contract version .

Signing of the contract by Ribbentrop. In the background Stalin , Molotov and Schaposhnikov , in front u. a. the ambassador of the Soviet Union, Alexei Schkwarzew and Gustav Hilger .
Announcement of the contract in the Reichsgesetzblatt of January 5, 1940

The German-Soviet border and friendship treaty , together with the German-Soviet non-aggression pact of August 23, 1939, represent the political cornerstones of the so-called Hitler-Stalin pact and was signed on September 28, 1939 in Moscow between the German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and his Soviet counterpart Vyacheslav Molotov closed.

prehistory

Adolf Hitler had with the preparation of the Polish campaign aware of a world war risks and the Soviet Union shortly before the invasion of Poland concluded a non-aggression treaty that would prevent the Western powers from entering the war and avoid a premature war with the Soviet Union. In the secret part of the contract, in which u. a. the partition of Poland between the German Reich and the Soviet Union had been agreed, the continued existence of a residual Poland as a buffer state between the German Reich and the Soviet Union and as a possible negotiating point for an arrangement with the Western powers had been left open.

On September 1, 1939, Germany attacked Poland and, on September 3, called on the Soviet Union to invade the independent Polish state as well. Stalin and Molotov hesitated until September 17th with the occupation of eastern Poland , not to share the role of the aggressor with Hitler, but to appear in the historical propaganda as a "peace power" and to be able to wait for the reactions of France and Great Britain , which a declaration of guarantee for had given up the territorial integrity of Poland. Great Britain and France declared war on Germany on September 3, but only responded with a seated war . From this, Stalin concluded that the Soviet invasion of Poland would not lead to war with the Western powers. Molotov explained several times to the German ambassador Friedrich-Werner Graf von der Schulenburg that it was important for the Soviet Union to “underpin the political process” only after the political center of Poland, the capital Warsaw , fell. Molotov therefore urged Schulenburg to “inform as approximately as possible when the capture of Warsaw can be expected.” According to Claudia Weber, the Soviet Union never tired of exerting a little diplomatic pressure on the German Reich to quickly take Warsaw. The German government then spread rumors of an armistice with Poland. Stalin took this as an opportunity to accelerate the preparations for the invasion of eastern Poland in order not to go empty-handed. The invasion came shortly after the signing of an armistice in the border conflict with Japan and before the surrender of Warsaw .

After Great Britain and France entered the war and rejected German negotiation proposals, Ribbentrop traveled to Moscow a second time at the end of September 1939. Josef Stalin was adamantly opposed to the German ideas for a German-Soviet alliance against England . On September 25th, Stalin informed von Schulenburg that in the event of a final settlement of the Polish question, everything that could lead to friction between the Soviet Union and Germany should be avoided. That is why he did not consider it desirable to allow an independent “residual Poland” to continue. Stalin expressed his willingness to forego part of the Warsaw and Lublin voivodeships as far as the Bug River in favor of the German Reich, in return for which Lithuania was to be incorporated into the area of ​​interest of the USSR. This was agreed a little later as part of the German-Soviet border and friendship treaty. Against the background of the desired anti-British alliance, it was a failure that on September 28 only a border and friendship treaty was concluded, which led to a new definition of the German-Soviet areas of interest in Eastern Europe. Poland, now occupied by Germany and the Soviet Union, was divided up along the Curzon line according to ethnographic principles .

Content of the contract

Card from September 28, 1939 with the signatures of Stalin and Ribbentrop. The smaller signatures of Stalin indicate coordinated minor changes in the line.

The German-Soviet border and friendship treaty included:

  1. The contract and the additional protocol together with the associated cards
  2. Secret additional protocol to stop Polish agitation
  3. Secret additional protocol that assigned Lithuania to the Soviet sphere of influence
  4. Joint statement by the two governments
  5. Confidential protocol on the relocation of Reich and ethnic Germans
  6. Exchange of letters to expand commercial traffic
  7. Exchange of letters regarding special economic requests

These agreements were laid down in three secret (additional) protocols. In the non-aggression pact, the question of maintaining an independent residual or rump Poland as a buffer state was left open. Due to the course of the war, the complete partition of Poland ( fourth partition ) was decided. Under the (pseudo) legitimation of the ethnographic principle, Stalin accepted the Curzon Line as a border, which, after the breach of the pact by Germany, made the way to an alliance with Great Britain easier.

The German Reich was thus the Lublin Region and parts of the Warsaw Province slammed the provisional boundary line then proceeded along the rivers Pisa , Narew and San . The exact boundary line was recorded accordingly in the additional protocol between Germany and the USSR of October 4, 1939.

Deviating from the originally agreed limit of areas of interest, Lithuania was included in the Soviet sphere of interest at Stalin's request . At the request of the Germans, Vilnius , which was controversially occupied by Poland, was handed over to Lithuania itself . ( General Żeligowski had conquered the south-eastern part of Lithuania, an area around Vilnius, with the private permission of Józef Piłsudski in 1920 , which he named Central Lithuania ; this happened with reference to the Unia Lubelska, which existed before the first division . The population of Vilnius was predominant at that time After the partition of Poland required by Germany from mid-September 1939, the Vilna area would have fallen to the USSR.) For the German side, the ethnographic partition only resulted in disadvantages. They renounced the Ukrainian-populated eastern Polish areas with oil deposits and the area of ​​interest of Lithuania with its large German minority.

The contracting parties also undertook not to tolerate any Polish agitation in either part of occupied Poland that would affect the areas of the other part (“Secret Additional Protocol II” of September 28, 1939). It was also agreed that the German population groups from the Soviet sphere of interest "if they so wish" could be resettled to Germany and that the representatives of the Reich government would arrange this resettlement with the "competent local authorities" with the approval of the Soviet Union. Without specifying the population groups, this mainly referred to Bessarabian Germans , Baltic Germans and Bukowina Germans . The Reich government took on a corresponding obligation for the “persons of Ukrainian or Belarusian origin residing in their areas of interest ” (“Confidential Protocol” of September 28, 1939).

According to Article V, the contract entered into force on the day it was signed on September 28, the associated (public) additional protocol - to which Article I refers - according to Section III of this protocol only when it was signed on October 4, 1939 Maps ratified December 15, 1939 .

In the literature, provisions of the additional protocols to this German-Soviet border and friendship treaty are often incorrectly identified as provisions of the original Hitler-Stalin pact of 23 August. This applies in particular to the assignment of Lithuania to the Soviet sphere of influence and to the agreed resettlements.

German-Soviet War

On June 22, 1941, Germany attacked the Soviet Union without a declaration of war, and on the same day Hitler claimed in a diplomatic note and a speech that the Soviet Union had broken the treaty several times and that he was preparing an attack on Germany together with Great Britain , which he had to come before. With British assistance, the Polish government in exile signed the Sikorski-Maiski Agreement with the Soviet Union on July 30, 1941 . In it the Soviet Union declared to recognize that the German-Soviet treaties "concerning the territorial changes in Poland have ceased to be in force". The borderline for the post-war period was left open.

literature

Web links

Commons : German-Soviet Border and Friendship Treaty  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ 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 , p. 447.
  2. ^ Martin Broszat : National Socialist Poland Policy 1939–1945 . De Gruyter, 1961, p. 12.
  3. ^ Martin Broszat: National Socialist Poland Policy 1939–1945 . De Gruyter, 1961, p. 13 f.
  4. ^ Lev Gincberg, cited above. According to Sergej Slutsch: September 17, 1939: The Soviet Union's entry into World War II. A historical and international legal assessment. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 48 (2000), pp. 219–254, here p. 222 ( PDF , accessed on June 6, 2020).
  5. ↑ Sven Felix Kellerhoff : This is how Stalin staged his attack on Poland , Welt Online , September 16, 2019.
  6. ↑ 80 years ago: Hitler-Stalin pact , contribution to the background current of the Federal Agency for Civic Education , August 19 of 2019.
  7. ↑ Claudia Weber, The Pact: Stalin, Hitler and the Story of a Murderous Alliance , Kindle edition, CH Beck, 2019, chap. 3: “As among party members”, position 1420–1466.
  8. ↑ Claudia Weber, The Pact: Stalin, Hitler and the Story of a Murderous Alliance , Kindle edition, CH Beck, 2019, chap. 3: “As among party members”, position 1474.
  9. ↑ Claudia Weber, The Pact: Stalin, Hitler and the Story of a Murderous Alliance , Kindle edition, CH Beck, 2019, chap. 3: "As among party comrades: The Red Army in Poland", position 1489–1502.
  10. ↑ Masake Miyake: The idea of ​​a Eurasian block Tokyo-Moscow-Berlin-Rome . In: International Dilemmas and European Visions . Lit Verlag, Münster 2010, ISBN 978-3-643-10481-6 , p. 344.
  11. ↑ Vladimir Nevežin, German-Soviet Border and Friendship Treaty, September 28, 1939
  12. ↑ Markus Leniger: National Socialist People's Work and Resettlement Policy 1933–1945. Berlin 2006, ISBN 978-3-86596-082-5 , p. 54 ff.
  13. ↑ 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 , p. 467.
  14. ^ 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 , p. 451 f.
  15. ^ Ingo von Münch : German-Soviet Treaties . De Gruyter, 1971, ISBN 3-11-003933-8 , p. 55 ff.
  16. ^ Martin Broszat: National Socialist Poland Policy 1939–1945 . De Gruyter, 1961, p. 15.
  17. ↑ Stephan Lehnstaedt: The forgotten victory . Beck, Munich 2019, ISBN 978-3-406-74023-7 .
  18. ↑ Markus Leniger: National Socialist People's Work and Resettlement Policy 1933–1945. Berlin 2006, ISBN 978-3-86596-082-5 , p. 57.
  19. ↑ Johannes Bühler: From the Bismarck Empire to the divided Germany . De Gruyter, 1960, p. 815.
  20. ↑ Agreement between the Government of the USSR and the Polish Government , in: Journal for Foreign Public Law and International Law , Vol. 11 (1942/43), p. 100: "Documents regarding the Soviet-Russian-Polish Agreement of July 30, 1941" ( PDF ).
  21. ↑ Bernd Ebersold: Decline of Power and Power Consciousness: British Peace and Conflict Resolution Strategies 1918–1956 . Oldenbourg, 1992, ISBN 3-486-55881-1 , p. 62 ff.