Commitments

Abstract

The year 1939 was a year of harsh realities in international politics. First, Hitler tore up the Munich settlement and, on 15 March, occupied the remainder of rump Czechoslovakia. According to Bernardo Attolico, the Führer’s decision had been made suddenly, like ‘a bolt out of the blue’, as he put it. Even Goering, part of the dictator’s inner circle had, apparently, known nothing and had left Berlin for San Remo on the 3rd, unaware that anything of the sort was planned.¹ Hitler’s action came as a surprise to everyone. The British and French governments reacted with stunned embarrassment, and over the coming weeks and months came to the slow, painful conclusion that deals with Hitler were a bad idea. The dramatic events of March 1939 also impacted markedly on relations between the two arch-antagonists, Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. As Geoffrey Roberts notes, the seeds of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, concluded that August amid a shocked global reaction, are to be found in the events of that spring.² Even as Hitler and Ribbentrop prepared the ground for the signing of the Pact of Steel with Mussolini’s Italy, tentative German attempts at a rapprochement with the Russians had already begun, arousing the profound interest of the Italian ambassador in Moscow.³