The Great Mafia Wedding

Fifty years ago, on August 23, 1939, the two top ideological gangsters of this century agreed on a satisfactory division of Eastern European loot and triggered the outbreak of World War II. This was not unpredictable: the ousted Soviet capo, soon to be executed, Leon Trotsky, had forecast Stalin’s move—and in the event approved of it. And for his part, the Nazi godfather had told his (hostile) biographer Herman Rauschnigg that most of Stalin’s “soldiers” would make ideal SS types.

Hitler’s statement is worth quoting: “There is more that binds us to Bolshevism than separates from it. There is, above all, genuine revolutionary feeling, which is alive everywhere except where there are Jewish Marxists. I have always made allowance for this circumstance, and given orders that former Communists are to be admitted to the party at once. The petit bourgeois Social Democrat and the trade-union boss will never make a National Socialist, but the Communist always will.” This sentiment was confirmed by Foreign Minister Ribbentrop after the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact: at the Moscow festivities, which included the Horst Wessel Song and a toast by Molotov to Germany’s beloved Führer, Ribbentrop said he felt as though he were in the company of old Nazi comrades.

JR

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John P. Roche

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Fifty years ago, on August 23, 1939, the two top ideological gangsters of this century agreed on a satisfactory division of Eastern European loot and triggered the outbreak of World War II. This was not unpredictable: the ousted Soviet capo, soon to be executed, Leon Trotsky, had forecast Stalin’s move—and in the event approved of it. And for his part, the Nazi godfather had told his (hostile) biographer Herman Rauschnigg that most of Stalin’s “soldiers” would make ideal SS types.

Hitler’s statement is worth quoting: “There is more that binds us to Bolshevism than separates from it. There is, above all, genuine revolutionary feeling, which is alive everywhere except where there are Jewish Marxists. I have always made allowance for this circumstance, and given orders that former Communists are to be admitted to the party at once. The petit bourgeois Social Democrat and the trade-union boss will never make a National Socialist, but the Communist always will.” This sentiment was confirmed by Foreign Minister Ribbentrop after the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact: at the Moscow festivities, which included the Horst Wessel Song and a toast by Molotov to Germany’s beloved Führer, Ribbentrop said he felt as though he were in the company of old Nazi comrades.