Hitler's peace

When Schmidt had cleaned himself up and changed his clothes, we went forward. Only one man was in the mess when we got there. He was a lean, athletic-looking man wearing a Yale bow tie, a V-necked pullover, and half-moon glasses. There was a knife-edge crease to his gray flannels. His hair was short and silvery, and in his hand was a book as thick as a car tire. It was titled The Fountainhead. He had a distant manner and seemed to view our arrival with all the enthusiasm of a courtier finding a dog turd inside the gates of the Forbidden City. Schmidt introduced him.

“This is John Weitz,” he said.

I nodded, smiling affably, but hardly liking this man at all. Weitz nodded back and sent up a small puff of smoke as if signaling that he wasn’t particularly friendly. Meanwhile, a mess attendant announced that he would fetch a fresh pot of coffee.

“John’s the other Russian specialist they’ve sent from State,” added Schmidt.

It was a remark that provoked some indignation in John Weitz. The first, I was to learn, of a lot more where that had come from.

“Can you believe that?” Weitz said to me. “ Can you? The most important diplomatic event of the century and just two of us from the State Department.”

Having already learned Harry Hopkins’s low opinion of State, I could believe it only too easily. And John Weitz seemed hardly the type to restore the reputation of the department in the eyes of Hopkins.

“It seems to me,” said Schmidt, “that the president has a dog but wants to wag the tail himself.”

Weitz nodded, angrily. This show of agreement between the two Russian specialists did not, however, extend to how the Soviet Union ought to be treated as an ally of the United States, and it wasn’t long before a heated discussion was under way. I kept out of it for the most part, not because I disliked political arguments but because it seemed to me there was something personal about this particular argument. Something that wasn’t quite explained by the simple fact that John Weitz was a shit.

“It sticks in my throat that the president is going to shake Stalin’s hand,” Weitz confessed.

“Why the hell shouldn’t the president shake Stalin’s hand?” Schmidt asked. “The Russians are our allies, for Christ’s sake. That’s what you do when you’ve made an alliance. You shake hands on it.”

“And it doesn’t bother you that Stalin signed the death warrant on ten thousand Polish officers? Some ally.” Weitz relit his pipe, but before the still hungover Schmidt could answer, he added, “Some ally, one that tries to make a separate peace with Germany. That’s the only reason there hasn’t been a Big Three before now.”

“Nonsense.” Schmidt was rubbing his eyes furiously.

“Is it? The Russian ambassador to Stockholm, Madame de Kollontay, has been practically sleeping with von Ribbentrop’s representative, Peter Kleist, since the beginning of the year.”

Schmidt looked at Weitz with contempt. “Bullshit.”

“I don’t think you understand the Russian mentality at all,” Weitz continued. “Let’s not forget that the Ivans have made a separate peace with the Germans before. In 1918, and again in 1939.”

“Maybe that’s true,” said Schmidt, “but things are very different now. The Russians have every reason to trust us.”

“Hey, I’m not saying they can’t trust us, ” laughed Weitz. “The question is, can we trust them?”

“We promised Stalin a second front in 1942, and again in 1943, and look where we are now. There won’t be a second front before August of next year. How many more Red Army soldiers will die before then? A million? Stalin can be forgiven for thinking that he’s fighting this war by himself.”

“All the more reason, then, for him to negotiate a separate peace,” insisted Weitz. “It’s hard to imagine any country being able to sustain losses like that and want to go on fighting.”

“I might agree with you if the Red Army had lost the initiative. But they haven’t.”

Even as the two men argued, I had thought of a better reason why Stalin might just have been inclined to sue for peace: his greatest fear was not the Germans but the Russians themselves. He must have been terrified that his own army would mutiny against the appalling conditions and high casualties, just as it had in 1917. Stalin knew he was sitting on a powder keg. And yet what choice did he have?

John Weitz could only see the Soviet Union as a potential aggressor. “You mark my words,” he said. “Stalin is coming to this Big Three with a shopping list of countries he thinks he can occupy permanently without a shot being fired. And Poland is at the top of the list. If he thought that Hitler would agree to those demands, believe me, he’d make a deal with him even while he was shaking FDR’s hand. You ask me, we should let them both bleed white. Let the Nazis and Communists kill each other off and then pick up the pieces.”

By now the argument had grown very bad-tempered. And personal, too.

“Hell, it’s no wonder the Russians don’t trust us with bastards like you around,” yelled Schmidt.