Hitler fit examiner le lobe de l'oreille de Staline pour voir s'il était juif

Lire également: Le plus grand succès de la gauche : faire oublier le pacte germano-soviétique par Daniel Hannan @ Contrepoints

Peter Hitchens a lu deux livres sur le pacte germano-soviétique d'août 1939 entre Hitler et Staline - ‘The Deadly Embrace – Hitler, Stalin and the Nazi-Soviet Pact 1939-41’ d'Anthony Read et David Fisher, publié en 1988 et ‘The Devil’s Alliance- Hitler’s Pact With Stalin 1939-41’, de Roger Moorhouse qui vient d'être publié. Bien que des milliers d'ouvrages continuent d'être écrits sur le nazisme, ce sujet intéresse peu les historiens du fait de la bonne opinion qu'on avait en Europe du communisme. Anthony Read et David Fisher ne sont pas des historiens attachés à une université car à l'époque il n'était pas bon d'être trop critique envers l'URSS et la plupart des universitaires tiennent avant tout à préserver leurs carrières.

Par ailleurs, on apprend, sans surprise, que même au moment de la signature du Pacte l'obsédant "problème juif" absorbe Hitler:

Hitler a ordonné à son photographe de faire des bonnes prises du lobe des oreilles de Staline.  Il voulait savoir si Staline était juif, et était convaincu que la judéité d'une personne pouvait être détectée par un examen des lobes. Les résultats furent formels: Staline n'était pas juif. Heureusement pour les négociations, il n'a jamais découvert que la femme de Molotov était juive. Par ailleurs, un diplomate allemand but "accidentellement" une gorgée du verre de vodka de Staline au cours d'une séance interminable de toasts. Le verre était rempli d'eau. Hitler ordonna que les photos de la cérémonie de signature soient retouchées. Staline fumait des cigarettes - Hitler les fit effacer car il un caractère frivole à une cérémonie si importante. Et ainsi de suite car c'est ainsi que l'histoire est faite...

Une étrange amitié:

"Yet what a subject it is. Here were the century’s two regimes of utter evil, both close to the high tide of their violence and murder, supposedly each other’s most irreconcilable enemies – yet actually forming an alliance. When they did so, they appeared, in all visible respects, to be on friendly and civil terms with each other. They even held joint victory parades, their armies mingled, in Brest-Litovsk, Pinsk and Grodno. Polish sources, until Warsaw sold its soul to Berlin and Brussels, used to be the best place to find entertaining photographs or even films of these immensely sinister events, ghostly in grey and white. The Polish embassy in Berlin did for a while have a fine window-display on the joint parades, back in the late 1990s. I always thought it amazing that any records survived at all, given the USSR’s strong interest in keeping the whole thing quiet later. As everywhere in that whole blasted part of the world, one is always amazed to find that anything has survived at all." [...]


"Communism and National Socialism were both based on power worship (itself founded on Utopian ideals which allowed each faction to believe its absolute triumph was absolutely necessary for the good of ‘mankind’), and so had no inescapable moral certainties. Both could therefore make deals with each other without reservation. Both were also scientistic creeds which believed in the ultimate malleability of man, rather than in his being created in the image of God (and therefore fundamentally unalterable). Communism;s modern heirs suffer from the same problem, which uis why they hate God so, simuklatneously jeering at the idea that he exists at all, much as the Bolsheviks did."

Peter Hichens rapporte d'autres anecdotes qui révèlent l'abyssale vilénie des protagonistes:

"[...] when Ribbentrop’s aircraft arrived in Moscow, the Soviet authorities were so short of German flags that they had to get them from the Mosfilm studios, where they had been employed until then in the making of anti-Nazi propaganda films. And Ribbentrop stayed in the old Austrian Embassy (closed after the Anschluss and refurbished for the purpose) in the well-named ‘Death Lane’ . The building is still there and is once more the Austrian Embassy. I do not think there is a plaque. And I think it’s here that I recently learned that Hitler had wanted to settle the Germans of the South Tirol (which he had ceded to Mussolini as an act of special favour) in the Crimea, long a territory much envied by German expansionists."

"The story is in fact even more outrageous than we thought. If you didn’t know about the friendly exchanges of prisoners between the Gestapo and the GPU, here they are. An entire German warship, almost complete, was handed to the USSR. The German navy was allowed to use Soviet bases. Germany shared designs of its advanced aircraft with the Soviets (who thought they were being palmed off with inferior goods). Germany did not in fact rely on Soviet oil( a mistake I’ve often made). Hitler ordered photographs of the signing ceremony to be airbrushed to remove the cigarettes Stalin was smoking, as he thought they made the occasion look frivolous. He also ordered his photographer to ensure that eh got good shots of Stalin’s earlobes, as he wanted to know if Stalin was Jewish, and believed that Jewishness could be detected through an examination of the lobes. He decided Stalin was not Jewish. Luckily for the negotiations, he never discovered that Molotov’s wife *was*Jewish. A German diplomat managed to take an ‘accidental’ sip from Stalin’s vodka glass during an interminable series of devastating toasts – and found it was full of water. The enjoyable story that Molotov, sheltering from British bombs in a Berlin shelter, was told by the Germans that Britain was defeated and asked ‘then why are we sitting in this shelter, and whose bombs are these which we hear falling?’ was almost certainly invented by Churchill, who attributed it to Stalin. Thus is history made."