The Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact

Stalin

The Nazi-Soviet Pact was a World War II political agreement—a treaty--enacted on 23 August 1939 between Hitler and Stalin, which Hitler flagrantly violated on 22 June 1941 when he ordered Nazi troops to invade Soviet territory. 

Hitler

Ostensibly, the pact was intended, by Hitler, to prevent a possible Soviet intervention on the side of Britain and of France should these two nations “honor their treaty obligations to come to the aid of Poland in case she were attacked.”[1] For Hitler, it meant that, a week later when his forces fell upon Poland, the Russians would not take up arms nor assist in any material way, French or British efforts to retrieve the situation. For Stalin, it meant concessions from Hitler of large tracts of territory, or at least a German concession of Soviet “rights” in certain countries of Eastern Europe, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia, for example. In effect, it gave Stalin a ‘buffer zone’ between the Soviet frontier and German-controlled territory. After a period during which the Germans seemed to holding the pact in little regard, Hitler violated its terms with the operational commencement of operation Barbarossa, Germany’s 1941 blitzkrieg attack on the Soviet Union.

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[1] William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), 541.