Stalin und die Deutschen: Neue Beiträge der Forschung (review)

Josif Stalin is an unusually important historical figure for German scholarship. The centrality of his role is demonstrated once again in this first-rate collection of articles on various aspects of Stalin's historical legacy pertaining to Germany. The book originated in a conference in 2003, but the essays were updated to include materials that became available in 2004–2005. The authors are well-known specialists in the field from Germany and Russia. The contributions appropriately concentrate on both the exciting possibilities of newly available archival resources and the vagaries of incomplete access. The editor, Jürgen Zarusky of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich, divides the book into two parts: the first examines the various aspects of Soviet-German relations during the Stalin period; the second deals with the difficult but essential problem of comparing Stalin with Adolf Hitler and Stalin's Soviet Union with Hitler's Third Reich.

Bert Hoppe's piece on Stalin and the KPD (Communist Party of Germany), like many of the essays in the book, confirms and deepens much of what we knew about Stalin's intrigues with the KPD through the use of new documents, in this case primarily from the archives of the Communist International (Comintern) in Moscow. Stalin encouraged the KPD's line that "social fascism," meaning the politics of the SPD (Social Democratic Party of Germany) and Hitler's fascism "were not antipodes, but 'twins'"(p. 33). Stalin interfered in KPD cadre politics in order to build his own network of supporters, just as he had in the Soviet Communist party. One of those supporters, Herbert Wehner, an important Social Democrat in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), is the subject of the second essay, by Reinhard Müller. Wehner's story is a quintessentially German one, now much better documented from the Russian archives. What we find here, instead of a former Nazi official who ends up being an important official in the FRG, is a member of the Comintern Executive Committee and a proven Soviet secret police (NKVD) informant who later became a West German political leader.

Wehner should certainly be held to account for his spying and reporting on fellow German Communists. Stalin himself also deserves critical scrutiny for having believed his own deceptive rhetoric about and inept diplomacy toward Hitler and the Nazis. Sergei Sluch's fascinating study of Stalin's "calculations and miscalculations" in the period from 1933 to 1941 certainly emphasizes the miscalculations. Despite Hitler's demonstrable antagonism toward the Soviet Union and Communism, Stalin never seemed to doubt that a deal could be worked out to Moscow's advantage. Nothing seemed to deter him: not the Spanish Civil War, not the anti-Comintern Pact, not even detailed warnings from well-placed spies. Sluch concludes that Stalin's deep commitment to Leninist ideology drove his thinking about foreign policy and confirmed his belief that contradictions within the capitalist camp would save the Soviet Union from disaster.

Stalin's readiness to let ideology run rampant over normal human concerns is emphasized in Pavel Polian's essay on Stalin's policies toward the victims of National Socialism. Stalin's disregard of the Holocaust and its victims is one of the saddest and best known parts of the story. But there is also the issue of returning Soviet prisoners-of-war (POWs), who Stalin regarded as deserters and traitors, a situation that lasted for many decades after the war. Even the small number of Soviet Jews who survived the war in German internment were re-interned as spies and traitors. In an essay on German POWs in the Soviet Union, Andreas Hilger makes the important point that no matter how badly the German prisoners were treated, they were not subjected to systematic starvation and elimination, as were Soviet POWs in German hands, especially initially. Soviet leaders were interested in punishing German war criminals, often through harsh military justice. But they also sought to reeducate the Germans and to use them...