As Winston Churchill once pointed out, while Germany was occupying Czechoslovakia, Poland shamefully occupied Danzig, but soon they paid the price. As soon as Hitler occupied Czechoslovakia, he quickly asked for territory from Poland but was rebuffed. So a "lightning war" was carried out in Poland, and World War II thus officially began.

The blitzkrieg started on September 1, 1939. The Polish troops resisted bravely at first, but Poland was no match for Germany on all fronts, whether it be the number of troops, strategic leadership, or equipment. The Polish were defeated in one week. While Poland was fighting the Germans in the west, Stalin, who was good at taking advantage of others' misfortune, acted quickly. On September 17, Russian troops poured into Poland from her eastern border and met the Germans on September 18. Then, Communist Russia shook hands with Hitler.

Before the war had fully broken out, Stalin decided to abandon England and France, and signed a ten-year non-aggression pact with Germany. When Czechoslovakia fell, England and France regarded Germany with hostility, and now Hitler was eyeing Poland. Stalin knew that Poland would not be able to resist the German invasion, and if Poland were invaded, England and France would not sit by idly. The crafty Stalin, after carefully weighing his own interests, decided to side with Germany. He thought that if Germany were to fight England and France, both sides would be wounded, and then they would be easy targets for himself. One more thing was that while Germany was fighting in the West, Stalin could have enough time to mobilize his troops that were scattered around the country to the eastern border.

Thus the non-aggression pact and subsequent agreements signed in September 1939 carved up a part of Poland to give to Moscow, and this created favorable conditions for Stalin's invasion of the Baltic countries.

At the same time, in a secret pact, Germany declared that it had no political interests in Latvia, Estonia and Finland. So just two months after Germany's invasion of Poland, Stalin waged a war against Finland. Finland resisted staunchly but finally fell in March 1943.

The non-aggression pact signed on August 23, 1939 ignited the fuse of World War II. Hitler knew that Stalin would focus on the Baltic countries and had no time to worry about Germany. So one week after the pact was signed, Hitler invaded Poland. At that time, Stalin was exporting a lot of war materials to Germany. In 1938, the Soviets exported to Germany 33,154 tons of oil, and that number increased to 700,000 tons in 1940. In January of 1941, the Soviet Union and Germany signed a huge cooperation agreement on 6 big projects. The agreement required the Soviet Union to export 620 to 640 million US dollars worth of war materials to Germany. Later Stalin ordered an increase in the export to Germany of 6,000 tons of copper, 1,500 tons of nickel, 500 tons of tin, tungsten, and molybdenum respectively. As the director of the German wartime finance department recounted later, the Russians were still exporting goods to Germany right up to the point when Germany started attacking them. In the last few days, rubber was still being sent to Germany by train.

Stalin's decision to aid Germany was definitely a foolish one. He thought it unlikely that Germany would fight in both the East and West. The Battle of Britain stalled the German advance to the West. Hints of Germany's plan to invade Russia kept coming to Stalin, but he didn't believe that Hitler would wage a battle of life-or-death with him so soon.

Hitler was not able to cross the English Channel because he held no advantage on the sea or in the air. More and more supplies came to England from the USA. If Hitler couldn't defeat England quickly, then he'd better defeat Russia. Otherwise, he would soon face the danger of fighting on two fronts.

In the 1930s, Stalin killed 12 million Russian people in a prolonged bloodbath. 35,000 Red Army officers were executed in 1937 and 1938 alone, crippling the army's leadership abilities. The non-aggression pact and the difficulty the Soviet Union had in conquering Finland gave Hitler the impression that the Soviet Union was weak. So he turned his guns from England to the Soviet Union. The German Foreign Minister told the Italian Foreign Minister that if Germany could defeat the Soviet Union in 8 weeks, then Germany would have no worries about the Eastern front. Then it could pour all the food, oil, metals, machines and manpower of the Soviet Union to back another attack on England.

Evil men surly make mistakes, and dictators cannot always be right. Stalin's elaborate plot hurt himself most of all. In a short period of 22 months, Stalin and Russia sacrificed millions of lives. As Churchill alluded to once, if a government pays no respect to moral values, it seems to gain benefits and does whatever it pleases. But, one has to pay his account at the end of the day, and when that time comes, everything will be paid in full.

(To be continued)