Adolf Hitler, Hypocrite: What the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact Teaches Us About the Führer and Nazism

Among the enduring narratives about Adolf Hitler is the idea that he was unbothered by the apparent hypocrisy of concluding a treaty of non-aggression with Stalin’s Soviet Union. In many narrative histories of Nazism, Hitler treats the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact as but a public relations nuisance and simply reassures his ruffled minions that it was not to be taken seriously. These histories suggest that the military emergency facing Nazi Germany in the fall of 1939 merely pushed Hitler’s ideological program to the second tier of priorities, diverting his attention from the supposed Jewish monster in the Kremlin but never altering the alien personality of his temporary partner. But is this a realistic portrayal of the man who told an indulgent Munich judge, “I have resolved to be the destroyer of Marxism,” and who wrote in Mein Kampf, “[t]here is no making pacts with Jews; there can only be the hard: either – or”? Did Hitler’s analysis of Soviet state and society really remain undisturbed in the dangerous months after the Anglo-French declaration of war?

In my paper, I will maintain that Hitler was, in fact, greatly troubled by the charges of hypocrisy leveled at him from many quarters. He responded by latching onto the arguments of his foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, that owing to the USSR’s “de-Judaization” and the rise of a Russian nationalist ethos in the Kremlin, no betrayal of National Socialist principles had taken place. This psychological process, which has received only sporadic attention in the literature, holds the key to a more convincing representation of Hitler’s mentality during the détente with Moscow. My proposed exercise will question scholarly representations of the Führer as a man of utterly unchanging conviction—a narrative which, even today, owes much to Hitler’s own self-image which should not be accepted at face value.