Two dictators who despise each other agree not to fight, yet
What happened
Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, ideological enemies who had spent the 1930s denouncing each other, signed a ten-year nonaggression pact in Moscow. Publicly, each side promised not to attack the other. Secretly, a protocol attached to the pact carved eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence and agreed to partition Poland between them along the Narev, Vistula, and San rivers. Hitler privately regarded the pact as purely tactical, a way to attack Poland and then France without fearing a two-front war; barely a month after defeating France in 1940, he ordered his generals to begin planning the invasion of the Soviet Union he had always intended.
Why it matters
The pact is the single clearest piece of evidence that neither dictator meant to keep it. It freed Hitler to invade Poland eight days later without worrying about Soviet intervention, and its secret partition of Poland shows both regimes agreeing, in writing, on how to erase a sovereign country before either had even attacked it.
How we know
The pact's public text was published immediately, but its secret protocol only became widely known after the war, when captured German Foreign Ministry documents and postwar Soviet archival releases confirmed the partition terms both governments had denied for decades.
Sources
- Holocaust Encyclopedia, US Holocaust Memorial Museum. German-Soviet Pact · Reputable sourceencyclopedia.ushmm.org · The domain "encyclopedia.ushmm.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
See something wrong? . Corrections with a source get fixed fastest.
Part of a timelineWorld War II59 events · From a staged skirmish at a bridge outside Beijing to a charter signed in San Francisco, the deadliest conflict in history, every event sourced.View all →