Russia at war 1941-1945

Since the Molotov visit to Berlin and, even more so, since the middle of January, the Russians had, indeed, more and more cause for uneasiness, but they continued for as long as possible to hope that Germany was still not interested in the East. On January 7 a photograph—obviously old, and dating from September 1940—was published in Pravda showing a crowd of English children in a trench watching an Anglo-German dogfight in the sky. Would Hitler get bogged down in the West?

However, appearances had to be kept up. On January 11, Pravda announced "Another Victory of Soviet Foreign Policy": the signing of the Soviet-German Agreement on the State Frontier between the two countries, a frontier running from the Igorka river to the Baltic, mostly through "former Poland". There was a picture of Molotov and Schulenburg signing the agreement. The publication of the agreement was accompanied by a

communiqué on reciprocal property claims in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia and on the repatriation of Germans from these countries; as well as on a new Mikoyan-Schnurre

economic agreement. All was well, Pravda suggested:

The present agreement, based on the Soviet-German agreement of February 11,

1940, covers the period from February 11, 1941 to August 1, 1942 and marks the

next stage in the economic programme approved by the Soviet and German

Governments. It provides for a much larger volume of trade than that provided for during the previous period. The USSR will send industrial raw materials, oil

products and foodstuffs, particularly grain... Germany will send us industrial

equipment. This new economic agreement of January 10, 1941 marks a great step

forward.

The exact volume and nature of this trade was kept dark at the time, and even today it remains one of the more obscure aspects of the last war. There are conflicting views as to the contribution these Russian supplies made to Germany's war economy. Certain

German studies have tended to exaggerate their importance, while the Russians have

tried, on the contrary, to minimise them. More recently Professor Friedensburg of the West German Deutsches Institut für Wirt Schaftsforschung published a detailed study on the subject. According to him, Germany received from the Soviet Union between January 1, 1940 and June 22, 1941 roughly the following deliveries: 1.5 million tons of grain, 100,000 tons of cotton, 2 million tons of petroleum products, 1.5 million tons of timber, 140,000 tons of manganese and 26,000 tons of chromium.

The last two items were of course of great importance to Germany's war industry at the time when the British blockade had deprived it of many of its customary sources of

supply. According to Friedensburg, Russia had not supplied them before the Soviet-

German Pact had come into force. He also claims that the Russians had resold to

Germany copper bought from the United States. On the other hand, the Russians seem to have received fairly little in return. According to the same author, German statistics for that period show a balance of 239 million Reichsmarks in the Russians' favour, while the Russian statistics for 1940 showed a balance of 380 million roubles also in their favour, a sum which the Hitler régime had never paid and which the author asserts the Russians themselves refrained from claiming after the war, suggesting that they found it more convenient to forget about it.

During May and June 1941 when Stalin dreaded more than ever a German attack,

important raw materials such as copper and rubber were being rushed to Germany by

express trains from the East and the Far East to keep Hitler happy in an effort of

"appeasement" that was as frantic as it was futile. A few weeks later this copper, after processing, was used to kill thousands of Russians.

So, on the surface, all seemed well on January 10 when the new economic agreement was signed with Germany—an agreement which covered the period up to August 1, 1942—

by which time the Germans were well on their way to Stalingrad and the Caucasus.

But only three days later a new kind of rot started. Pravda published the following ominous statement: "The foreign press has suggested that we had approved the entry of German troops into Bulgaria. If there are German troops in Bulgaria, they are there