Read: the Deadly Embrace Book

The secret protocols of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact spelled out how Stalin would swallow the Baltic states and divide Poland with Hitler. The Deadly Embrace, is an engrossing account of the Nazi-Soviet alliance.The authors have provided an invaluable service to the layman, weaving together a compelling, complex story in a taut narrative that still produces astonishment and outrage, no matter how many times this tale has been told. The richness of this account is in its devastating details. There was the boundless stupidity and cynicism of the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, and Lord Halifax, his Foreign Secretary. Even after the sellout of Czechoslovakia at Munich and the vows to defend Poland, they were floating proposals to Hitler for a "full-bodied political world partnership," with the promise that they would pressure the Poles to make concessions. As Britain and France dithered in their military negotiations with Moscow in August that would culminate in the Nazi-Soviet pact, Chamberlain took a fishing trip to Scotland and Halifax shot grouse at his Yorkshire estate. Then, too, there was the blindness of Stalin, who recognized that Hitler could turn on him but refused to acknowledge that June 1941 could be the fateful moment. Brushing aside countless warnings from his own agents and the West, he stepped up deliveries of food and raw materials to the German war machine in the final months before his country was invaded. He refused to let his troops prepare for an attack along the border, allowing the Germans to destroy airplanes still pegged to the ground and to march over intact bridges. They suggest that the Soviet leader was virtually forced into cutting a deal with Hitler. But, as this book makes abundantly clear, Stalin was driven as much by his lust for conquest as by his instinct for survival. That is why this chapter in history continues to evoke visceral emotions among the victims of an alliance that, in Stalin's words, was "sealed in blood."Read More