The people in the countries occupied by the Nazis or the Soviets continued their fight for freedom during the first years of the Second World War. They created governments in exile that sustained diplomatic activity and organised resistance movements in their occupied homelands. The Western countries did not recognise the occupation of the Baltic states and allowed their diplomatic representatives to continue their work in Western capitals.25 All this appeared to be consistent with the tenets of the Atlantic Charter approved by Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill at Placentia Bay in August 1941. The Charter affirmed ‘the right to restore self-government to nations who have forcibly been deprived thereof.’ Four months later, the Prince of Wales (the flagship used by Churchill during the summit) was sunk by Japanese dive bombers off the coast of Singapore. The principles of the Atlantic Charter were scuttled only a short while after.26
During the first years of the Second World War, Hitler and Stalin cooperated closely.27 Deliveries and military assistance from the Soviet Union helped Hitler to conquer Western Europe. Stalin even rallied the Communist parties of Western countries against their own governments, in this way supporting Hitler’s aggression. Cooperation between the two dictators went so far that the Gestapo and the NKVD began to exchange detainees. Stalin delivered German Communists who had escaped to the Soviet Union in the 1930s to Hitler. In 1940, tensions nevertheless began to develop between Hitler and Stalin. Stalin became jealous of Hitler’s success in Europe, while Hitler was displeased about Stalin’s plans to start a new war with Finland at the end of 1940 and his plans to swallow Romania and take control of Turkey.28 As a result, both sides started to make secret preparations for war. Hitler prepared his ‘Barbarossa’ plan, while Stalin began preparations for his plan ‘Groza’ (Thunder) to launch a surprise attack against Hitler with the aim of conquering and subsequently Sovietising all of Western Europe. Overwhelming numbers of Soviet troops, tanks and planes were concentrated on the Western borders of the Soviet Union.29 However, Hitler was faster and attacked at dawn on 22 June 1941. The war between Russia and Germany had started. The German attack took Stalin by surprise: the Soviet forces were surrounded and destroyed, taking Hitler to the gates of Moscow.30 The German attack opened the way for Great Britain and later the United States to join the Soviet Union and restore a modified version of the the First World War ‘Entente’. Churchill explained Great Britain’s decision to support Stalin thus: ‘If Hitler invaded hell, [he (Churchill)] would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.’ Massive Western help allowed Stalin to restore the strength of the Red Army faster than Hitler had anticipated.
Early in the war, Stalin was clearly eager for an arrangement based on the 1941 borders. He would probably have been willing to trade recognition of these for acceptance by the Eastern European governments in exile with the caveat that the Baltic States remain under Soviet dominance. Unfortunately, the United States had other ideas. Roosevelt preferred to concentrate on the war effort rather than stand against Soviet expansionism. This gave Stalin the opportunity to delay political discussions and seize as much booty as he could. He was not asked to make any concessions while German army was still in the field. Although Churchill understood what was taking place, Great Britain alone was not strong enough to oppose Stalin’s creation of a Soviet sphere of influence in Central and Eastern Europe. Consequently, Stalin took what he wanted. Using Western support to great effect and disregarding enormous losses, Stalin built the Red Army up into the fighting machine that by 1942–1943 crushed the German army and then pushed it back to the West.31
Vae victis! Red Army in conquered Germany, 1945
At the Yalta Summit in February 1945, the Western allies accepted Russia’s conquests prior to 1941 and put their stamp of approval on the new ones. For the countries that were thus absorbed into the Soviet bloc, this sentence was to last 45 years. Stalin’s concession to his allies was a Joint Declaration on Liberated Europe that promised free elections and the establishment of democratic governments in Central and Eastern Europe. As the weeks passed after Yalta, it became increasingly evident that Stalin did not intend to honour the terms of the agreement. Governments in the countries conquered by the Red Army were appointed by the Soviet authorities.32 In February 1945, when King Michael of Romania refused to remove the national government from office and replace it with pro-Communist forces, Stalin’s representative Vyshinsky arrived in person in Bucharest, hinting bluntly to the King that refusal might mean the end of Romania. The Communists got what they wanted.
Map 4
Divided Europe
The realities of this new order were soon clearer to the captive nations of Central and Eastern Europe than they were to the Western world. For the nations now under the control of the Red Army, the Soviet advance constituted a change from one totalitarian ruler to another. In Central and Eastern Europe, the Red Army was received with mixed feelings at best. In countries that were taken by the Soviet Union as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the first year of Soviet rule with its brutal terror was such a shock to the people that the traditional hatred of Germans was forgotten and the German army was welcomed as a liberator in West Ukraine and the Baltics in 1941. National armed units were formed to fight the Red Army and national governments declared. These were, nevertheless, crushed by the Germans and people quickly found that there was no difference between the Nazis and the Communists: both kill people, burn books and are against the independence of smaller nations. So the national resistance movement started, now targeted