this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2025
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I only recently learned that the Soviet invasion (which I think was beyond justified but still an invasion) was 17 days or so after the Nazis invaded. By that point, the Polish government fled to another city, and then another, right on the border with Romania that they had at the time, and then once the Soviets invaded they fled within 24 hours, indicating that they were already well-prepared to pull the ripcord. The Soviets seemed to have actually waited until the government had reached a terminal condition, which is just how they described the state of things when they were explaining why they invaded.
It's very different from the "joint invasion" of Poland that you always hear it described as.
People talk about the joint military parade, but I think it says enough on its own that they struggle to point to literally anything else besides the parade and the treaty itself. The Nazis took over a city past the dividing line and the Soviets demanded they left. For reasons that I still don't understand, the commanding officer on the Nazi side wanted them to do a military parade together, so they did (and I think agreeing to do it makes enough sense, because the Soviets really did not want the war between them to start too early). Maybe the Nazis were trying to look like they weren't driven out? But the way people point to it to say that the countries were allies is so ridiculous. In one city the Soviets basically agreed to stage a stupid event together in the process of removing Nazis from the city, and this is more important as a data point than the military preparations made across the entire border, that city included, for the inevitable Nazi invasion, or all the people the Soviets evacuated, or the fact that you'd need to be a madman to side with the people who wrote Mein Kampf, which extensively discusses dominating Eastern Europe (though I guess the Polish government did show them preference for a time), or the Soviet's proposed anti-fascist alliance that England and France rejected, not to mention the statements made by the Soviets constantly since the Nazi party first gained prominence to the effect of the Nazis being abominations to humankind.
Yeah, nearly all the replies are photos of Molotov with Nazi officials taken during the negotiations.
I just recently learned about the parade. It's a red flag for propaganda when the Wikipedia talk page is ten times as long as the actual article.
The Eastern Front is so memory-holed in the West that I think most people are unaware that the fiercest battle literally in human history was between the Nazis and Soviets (Stalingrad).
At least there are some people there who are advocating for not uncritically presenting a trumped-up version of what happened.
The only knowledge Westerners have about Stalingrad is Enemy at the Gates and Call of Duty.
If the Nazis were already using socialism as a cover, doesn't it stand to reason that this parade serves the same purpose? I guess its a moot point because as we can see it absolutely served that purpose. The real question becomes, was this the calculation at the time?
Probably hard to know. Unlikely to be any written internal records expressing this plot.
Definitely not. Hitler made it extremely clear before the war that his "socialism" was one in complete opposition to Marx, who he said corrupted the word, and that Marxist socialism as exhibited by the Bolsheviks was essentially a Jewish plot to dominate the world.
This is why the only thing that I can think of is that the commander present there was simply trying to avoid looking weak by making the hand-off look voluntary via the parade.
-- Mein Kampf
https://www.nationalists.org/library/hitler/speeches/hitler-speech-sep14-1936.html
Granted, there are some times where he spoke positively of Marxism because he didn't believe most of what he said, but I don't think he ever spoke fondly of the Bolshevik project.
Here's another speech which includes more or less the same content along with other subjects. I think it's phrased interestingly, because in some ways he poses himself as almost an ultra, feigning a call for the immediate elimination of class differences (not class itself) rather than the supposedly despotic rule of the workers, which he agrees the Bolsheviks accomplished but views as a bad thing:
https://www.worldfuturefund.org/wffmaster/Reading/Hitler%20Speeches/Hitler%20Speech%201937.01.30.html
And I found the one I was initially thinking of:
Which was published in a paper in 1932
I appreciate the effort here, and this is history I am very aware of to be clear; maybe my phrasing was wrong: The Nazis, Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or National Socialist German Workers' Party, deliberatly apropreated the asthetic and rehtoric of a working-class movement, even adopting the word Socialist into their party name, to capture working-class support in their rise to power. What I'm unsure of is if this was understood at the time, by the party leadership, to have a dual character: garnering working-class support while also tarnishing or muddying socialism as an idea through its association with their party and activity.
Holding a parade with the army of the Bolsheviks, having so theorly attacked them over the years, is a strange thing to do. It would be interesting to read if German papers wrote about this parade and how it was framed. The point I'm trying to articulate here is, clearly, throughout history post WW2, historians and economists alike have attempted to conflate socialism and nazism as twin ideologies in practice, and I wonder if this was something the Nazis understood during their time in power and actively attempted to foment through things like this parade. How many people of the time believed this pact represented a kind of commonality or shared ideal, and how much of that is strictly ahistorical interpretation?
I feel like the Nazis probably understood this a little bit at the time, because the "holodomor was a genocide" narrative was popularized by Goebbels as a way of justifying the Nazis and OUN-B, etc. doing real genocide.
When I was poking around about the subject, one theory I saw was that the Nazis wanted to allay fears from the German people about war with the Soviet Union by making the relationship look much better than it was. I think between that and saving face over ceding the territory, it overall makes sense.