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preface
The German-Soviet Agreement of 23 August 1939 was broken 22 months after its signing when Germany attacked the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. In one sense, this rupture is easy to explain. While the agreement was still under negotiation, Hitler had intended to break it when it suited his needs; The Russians, for their part, also expected that sooner or later he would break the agreement.
The ultimate goal
Gaining control over the vast territory and vast resources of the Soviet Union was the ultimate goal of all Hitler's successive acts of aggression, because only then could he realize his ambition to build Germany into a superpower the size of the United States. This could not be achieved only by achieving his more immediate goals, such as: the incorporation of all neighboring German-speaking inhabitants within the territory of the Third Reich; imposing German hegemony on its European neighbors on both the east and the west; and sacrificing the Western European countries that suffered from it for Germany to gain tropical possessions in Africa and perhaps also in Indonesia.
If Germany was to raise its position in the 20th century to the extent that the United States raised its status in the mid-19th century, it would have to discover an unexplored continent in the existing territory of the Soviet Union and dispose of the local population as American pioneers did with American Indians, claiming the land for itself. However, on the part of the Russians, they will certainly rise up and fight, and if they are defeated, they will continue to fight, and will not obediently give in, playing the role of the North American Indians to the benefit of Germany. For at least 500 years, Russians have been inspired by their constant confidence in their destiny. As Christians, they have always believed that they are the trustees and guardians of God's chosen Orthodox Church after they conquered Constantinople in Turkey and thus completed the great cause of conquering the Orthodox peoples of Anatolia and southeastern Europe.
Moreover, since 1917, the few Communists in power among the Russian people have appointed themselves trustees and guardians of Marxist orthodoxy throughout the world, since the Soviet Union was the first great power in the world to formally believe in communism. As a result, the Russian Communists and the Russian Christians worked together to resist the Nazi German invaders and to defend Russian territory, which was sacred to Russians of all faiths. In this sense, the Russian-German conflict that broke out on June 22, 1941, cannot be suppressed. However, why Hitler broke the agreement he signed with Stalin on August 23, 1939, on this day raises two questions. First, why did Hitler decide to abandon the python strategy and switch to the tiger tactic in his pursuit of Russia's goal? Second, even when he had already concluded that pressure alone could never bring the Soviet Union entirely under his power, why did he fight against the Soviet Union before Britain had yielded?
The first question arises because Hitler has benefited from using the python strategy against the Soviet Union since August 23, 1939. It was clear that the Soviet government was so afraid of Germany that it would never dare to dream of attacking it. The Soviet government would not go to war unless Germany attacked the Soviet Union directly, as it did on June 22, 1941; The Soviet government has repeatedly shown how much it wanted to avoid giving Hitler any excuse to fight the Soviet Union. It had demonstrated its attitude that in the gradual carving up of Eastern Europe between the Soviet Union and the Axis powers, it would make concessions to Germany wherever their interests clashed. It also demonstrated this attitude once again by the fact that the Soviet Government was willing to supply Germany with valuable goods and continued to do so when Germany had proved unable or unwilling to supply the Soviet Union with goods of equal value.
Deterioration of German-Soviet relations
During those 22 months, the Soviet government did more to appease Germany than the British and French governments did between Hitler's rise to power and March 15, 1939. Couldn't Hitler take the carefully planned step of continuing to push the Soviet Union further down this deadly line, keeping it completely under control? Hitler had proven himself to be a master in the past, better than calculating how much and how many humiliations his victims would endure without fighting back. It seems that Hitler, in dealing with the Soviet government in his usual ways, may have realized at some point during those 22 months that if a certain line was crossed, the Soviet government was not willing to accommodate in order to avoid war. The USSR, unlike Czechoslovakia and Romania, would not have given him complete control without a fight. He must therefore gain control of it by force, just as he has already acquired control over Poland, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Yugoslavia and Greece.
There is no doubt that Hitler in 1941, as Chamberlain did in 1939, seriously underestimated the combat effectiveness of the Soviet Union. Up to that time, the only foreign governments that had experienced the true weight of the Soviet Union's combat effectiveness were the two governments that had recently directly confronted the Red Army on the battlefield. The disastrous defeat of the Japanese army at Nomenkan in August 1939 taught Japan a lesson that it did not dare to join Germany in attacking the Soviet Union, even though the Soviet Union was at its worst in the German-Soviet war. The Finnish army achieved a brilliant victory in the winter campaign of 1939-1940 to thwart the first attacking Russians, but this victory did not blind the Finnish government to the need to surrender once the Red Army began to attack the Mannerheim Line in full force. Foreign governments lacking this experience tend to draw a less sober and unrealistic conclusion from Russia's defeat in the first phase of the Winter Campaign. They overestimated the damage inflicted on the Red Army by the Great Purge of 1936 and underestimated the value of the two special advantages that the Soviet government had for fighting a defensive war on its territory.
They could not appreciate the patriotic spirit with which the Great Russian nation and many other peoples of the Soviet Union would rally around the Soviet government in the face of a ferocious invader; Nor could they appreciate that the Red Army had a vast presence in their own territory, making the Soviet Union an ideal target for blitzkrieg. The German armed forces proved that their mechanized and armored offensive forces could encroach on Denmark overnight, occupy Poland in three weeks, and crush France in a month; But the difference in size between these weak European countries and the Soviet giants made the military problem of "fatal blow" to the Soviet Union not only in degree but also in substance. Undoubtedly, this extremely important distinction was known to some of Hitler's most talented military advisers. But Hitler himself did not know; So much so much underestimating the Soviet Union's ability to resist that he decided to gain control of it by force, as soon as he realized that the Soviet Union could not be brought completely under his power without the pressure of war.
If this is the answer to the first, the second question remains. Why did Hitler start a war against the Soviet Union before Britain was conquered? If he had set out to attack the Soviet Union immediately after the fall of France, it would have been easier to understand in this case. Because, like the French, the Germans believed that the fall of France was equal to the end of the war in Western Europe. They did not believe that Britain wanted to continue fighting after losing its main allies and troops and being driven off the continent; And when Britain was once again so absurd in its history that it did not know that it had been defeated, the Germans did not believe that it could withstand a German attack on it. However, by the time Hitler launched his attack on the Soviet Union, it had been nine months since the Luftwaffe suffered a decisive defeat in the "Battle of Britain", and these nine months were not the period of "unchanged on the Western Front". The shock of France's collapse and the joy of victory in the Battle of Britain catapulted Britain from a languishing ally of defeatist France to a David who dared to fight the giants.
Moreover, these two same experiences work together to transform the United States from an isolationist outsider in the New World to an "arsenal of democracies." America's war potential was the decisive military factor in the world at that time; Thus, in the long run, this time on June 22, 1941, with the British perseverance on their island and the backing of the United States, Hitler's Western Front was more difficult to deal with than when he launched his offensive against the Low Countries on the night of May 9-10, 1940. Britain had by this time become an American aircraft carrier, moored within range of the western wall that could bombard Hitler's Europa fortress, and it posed a threat to Hitler's power and even his continued existence in 1941, more than 13 months earlier in France, when it was huddled behind the Maginot Line and its western end could be bypassed simply across the Ardennes. There is no doubt that Hitler did not know—and he never knew—the obvious fact that the United States could influence the outcome of the war, and thus he failed to perceive the danger of Anglo-American union at a time when the United States had not yet formally become a belligerent power.
On the other hand, one of Hitler's basic principles was that Germany had suffered defeat in the First World War by allowing itself to fight on both sides at the same time, so avoiding a repeat of this fundamental strategic mistake was a necessary condition for the success of Germany's second attempt to achieve world hegemony by force. Hitler was so convinced of this principle that he reconciled with the Soviet Union in August 1939 to ensure that his attack on Poland would not be at war with one great power on the Eastern Front and two other powers on the Western Front. Events prove that this last resort decision was carefully considered; For, even though the Soviet Union was a friendly non-belligerent, the Third Reich's military power at this time could only defeat Poland in the autumn campaign of 1939 while holding the Siegfried Line. If the French had not had such a total defeatist mentality and the Poles were not so poorly equipped, the German blitzkrieg in Poland, perhaps due to the breakthrough of Britain and France, across the Rhine into the Ruhr zone, would have stopped abruptly.
Resources
Survey, 1939-1946: On the Eve of the Great War, 1939, pp. 24-25.
German Foreign Policy Papers, vol. 8, No. 13.
German Foreign Policy Papers, vol. 8, Nos. 271, No. 280.