Nor did Stalin believe that Hitler would be blind enough to attack the Soviet Union while still engaged against the British in the West. As demonstrated in World War I, Germany simply did not have economic resources or population to fight a war on two fronts. Another huge discrepancy in correlation of forces was the sheer size of the Soviet Union when compared to Germany. Moreover, Stalin was fully aware of what it meant to fight in the vastness of Russian time and space, while German planners were constricted by their experiences in the tight confines of central Europe.
Striving to buy time, in a move that shocked Western governments, the Soviet Union signed a ten-year nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany on August 24, 1939. “War would pass us by a little longer,” Stalin stated to those of his closest circle.[14]
One of the key points of this pact was the agreement by both parties to maintain neutrality if one of the signatories became engaged in war against a third party. In a parallel agreement several days before, on August 19, both countries signed a seven-year trade agreement in which Germany paid the Soviet Union in hard currency for raw materials much needed by Germany—grain, timber, oil, and some minerals essential for war industry.
In a secret protocol of the treaty, Germany and the Soviet Union divided Eastern Europe into two spheres of influence. Consequences of this agreement continued to influence the course of European affairs well after the fall of Germany in 1945 and the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Opportunity to act upon this secret protocol promptly presented itself. On September 1, 1939, merely a week after signing the treaty, Nazi Germany unleashed World War II by invading Poland. While the main portion of the Polish army was defeated in a two-week campaign, giving rise to the term “blitzkrieg,” the Polish government still nursed hopes of holding out until France and England intervened. Its hopes were crushed on September 17, when the Soviet Union crossed the Polish borders in the east, mortally stabbing Poland in the back. The fact that Poland and the Soviet Union signed their own nonaggression treaty in 1932 did not carry much weight with Stalin. Hitler would negate the German-Soviet nonaggression pact in a similar off-hand manner just two short years later. In addition to reaching an agreement with the Germans, the USSR signed a neutrality pact with Japan on April 13, somewhat securing the Siberian back door. In a special article of this pact, like the one between Russia and Germany, it was agreed upon that if a third party would attack one of the two signatories, the other one would remain neutral in the war.
As the result of its participation in the 1939 campaign, the Soviet Union acquired approximately 155,000 square miles of territory with a population of over 13 million. This was more of re-acquisition, rather than acquisition. In March 1918 the nascent Soviet state signed a humiliating Treaty of Brest-Litovsk under which it ceded large portions of now-defunct Russian Empire, namely western portions of Ukraine and Belorussia, the Baltic states, and Finland, plus some other minor territories in the Caucasus. After carving up Poland in concert with Germany in 1939, the Soviet borders were returned farther west, a fact that would play a significant role in the early stages of upcoming Soviet-German struggle in 1941.
Now, as the clock inexorably inched closer to fateful June 22, Soviet forces deployed along these new western borders began sounding alarms in increasing frequency and urgency. The most evident of these were over-flights by German reconnaissance aircraft over Soviet territory. Since late 1930s, a Luftwaffe formation called Special Purposes Squadron (or Squadron Rowehl after its founder Colonel Theodor Rowehl) had been flying high-altitude reconnaissance missions over Europe. Soviet Union was one of the countries on which it routinely spied. However, as the plans for Operation Barbarossa proceeded ahead, increasing demands for military intelligence about the Soviet Union caused Colonel Rowehl to give top priority to activating directed against the Soviet Union.
In January of 1941, Rowehl added another, fourth, squadron to his unit, which by now expanded into a full air wing. This fourth squadron was tasked solely with collecting information on Soviet Union. According to David Kahn: “Altogether, [Rowehl’s] craft violated Soviet air space several hundred times between October 1939 and the German invasion of Russia.”[15]
On two occasions when German aircraft were forced to land in the Soviet territory due to technical difficulties, evidence of German intelligence-gathering was irrefutable. On both of these occasions, a camera in working order was found in the wreckage of a German plane. Developed film clearly showed Soviet military installations and road junctions photographed from the air. Despite clear indications of intelligence-gathering activities by German aircraft, numerous requests by Soviet air defense units to open fire were invariably met with instructions to hold their fire so as not to provoke Germans into escalating the issue into a wider conflict.
Sometimes German attempts to cover up intelligence-gathering activities were so porous as to be insulting to the Soviets. Still, Stalin did everything possible to appease Hitler. In the spring of 1941, Germany requested and received permission to search the area on the Soviet side of the border for graves and remains of German servicemen fallen during World War I and the recent campaign against Poland in 1939. While Soviet commanders along the border gnashed their teeth in frustration, the Germans made the most of their opportunity to conduct ground reconnaissance.
When the Soviet border moved west in 1939, a somewhat chaotic situation existed for a time along the new frontier. The new border was easily crossed by people moving back and forth across the border, especially by local residents. Along with smuggling, information trade on a local level flourished. These porous borders, aided by largely difficult thickly wooded terrain, were favorable to penetration by spies and intelligence agents from both sides. Germany, especially, benefited from services of the underground Ukrainian organization, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalist (OUN, the Organizatsiya Ukrainskikh Natsionalistov) who viewed the Germans as the lesser evil compared to the Soviets. Multiple local sympathizers passed the information directly to Germans or through the OUN. Lieutenant Fedor Arkhipenko, a fighter pilot stationed near Kovel, voiced his suspicious of the locals: “There were many civilians from the neighboring villages employed in building the landing strip, and there were many spies infiltrated among them, who observed the airfield.”[16]
Once the Soviet Union joined the western Ukraine to the rest of the country, it began brutally asserting its rule over this newly acquired territory. Tens of thousands people were arrested and jailed locally or transported to concentration camps and jails deeper within the Soviet Union. At this point, executions, while common enough, did not attain the level they would reach immediately after German invasion.
This brutal treatment at the hands of their new Soviet masters created widespread discontent among the Western Ukrainian population. While a majority were sufficiently cowed into sullen inactivity, a small core of Ukrainian militant patriots rallied around the OUN. These men and women provided the Germans with a valuable network of agents reporting on Red Army’s dispositions and strengths. Lieutenant Arkhipenko writes: