The date on the spine is 1984. The date of the book is 1981, and the copyright page says so without being asked: "© Politizdat, 1981. English translation © Progress Publishers 1984." Nothing inside contradicts it. The latest events cited are the 26th Congress of the CPSU, whose documents Rozanov quotes from the Novosti edition of 1981, and Brezhnev, quoted twice and alive. The most recent Western sources are from 1978 — Die Zeit of 29 December 1978, Zeit-magazin of 20 October 1978, an article in the 1978 volume of Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte. Andropov and Chernenko do not appear. The word detente appears six times and is used as a live policy, not an obituary. This is a late-Brezhnev book that reached English readers after Brezhnev was dead, and it should be read from 1981.
That matters, because 1981 is the year the argument was aimed at. Rozanov twice interrupts his 1945 narrative to attach a footnote to the present. Major-General Lyman Lemnitzer, one of the two Allied officers sent in civilian clothes to negotiate with the SS at Ascona in March 1945, is identified as later commander of NATO and "today one of the leaders of an extreme right organisation in the US—the Committee on the Present Danger." Paul Nitze, present at the meeting with Speer at Glücksburg castle on 19 May 1945, is "future Deputy Secretary of State and leader of the extreme Tightest organisation, Committee on Present Danger." (The office is wrong — Nitze's senior appointments were at Defense, not State — but the identification is not.) When this was written, Nitze had just been named the American negotiator on intermediate-range missiles at Geneva. The book's real proposition is not about 1945 at all: it is that the men who tried to convert the anti-Hitler coalition into an anti-Soviet one in the spring of 1945 are the same men, or the heirs of the same men, now deploying Pershing IIs. The Conclusion says it in plain words: "Much of the deceit and treachery employed by the Nazis in their diplomacy is now characteristic of reactionaries in the West."
Everything else about the commission is legible. Progress advertised the Sipols volume, Diplomatic Battles Before World War II, on the last page of this one — the two are companion pieces bracketing the war, and this series has already published an introduction to Sipols. Rozanov is a working researcher rather than an institute committee: he reads German, cites Goebbels's diaries in the 1977 Hoffmann und Campe edition, Koller, Schmidt, Steinert, Görlitz, Trevor-Roper, Toland, Ryan and the Foreign Relations of the United States volumes, and reports that in West German archives "this writer managed to uncover a photocopy" of the Ribbentrop memorandum of January 1945, the original of which is in American custody among the German documents captured in 1945. That archive is real, it is large, and it has never been Moscow's to censor. A good deal of what follows in this introduction is criticism, so let it be said at the front: on his own subject Rozanov is often the better historian in the room.
Four books in this series have now been examined on the Treaty of Non-Aggression of 23 August 1939 and its Secret Additional Protocol, and each evaded it differently. Soviet Peace Efforts on the Eve of World War II (1973) evaded by terminus, stopping its documents on 1 September 1939. Deborin's Secrets of the Second World War (1971/72) evaded by assertion, calling the partition "the old lie" and then, thirty pages later, relying on the river line the protocol had drawn. Sipols (1982) evaded by substitution, using the word protocol fourteen times, every one of them an instrument the USSR proposed or signed in the open. Rzheshevsky (1984) evaded by silence: in some ninety-two thousand words the word does not occur.
Rozanov's subject is 1944–45. His narrative opens at a secret meeting at the Obersalzberg on 6 July 1944 and closes with the arrest of the Flensburg government on 23 May 1945. The Pact is simply not in the field of view, and it would be a cheap trick to convict him of an omission his subject does not require. He is not evading; he is writing about something else. That should be said clearly, and the reader should not be told otherwise.
But the habit is visible anyway, and it is visible in a way that is almost too neat. The word protocol occurs twice in this book. Once, Himmler and Schellenberg discuss "points of protocol" — whether to greet Eisenhower with the Nazi salute or a handshake. Once, Speer describes his last visit to Hitler as "merely a matter of protocol." In a fifty-thousand-word study of secret annexes, back-channels and unpublished understandings, the word never once denotes a document. Nor does the secret protocol on the Far East signed at Yalta in February 1945 — the one Deborin defended as proof of Soviet openness — appear in a book whose third chapter is titled "Ribbentrop's Memorandum and the Crimean Conference." There is a shape here that is not accidental, even where the omission is innocent.
The core of the book is the strongest sustained thing in any of the five Soviet war volumes this series has taken up, and a reader who dismisses it will be embarrassed the first time they open a Western monograph on Operation Sunrise.
Rozanov's account of the Wolff–Dulles channel is detailed, sourced and, in its essentials, correct. Karl Wolff, Himmler's chief of staff and from late 1943 the senior SS and police officer in occupied Italy, met Allen Dulles in Zurich on 8 March 1945; Major-Generals Lyman Lemnitzer and Terence Airey came to Switzerland in civilian clothes carrying American soldiers' papers and met the German delegation at Ascona on 19 March; Donovan gave the operation the codename Sunrise. Rozanov quotes the terms Wolff put on the table — that hostilities cease on the Italian front and that Army Group C be allowed home intact, so that "the continued existence of the German order is guaranteed and will in the future be determined by Germans themselves" — and records that Dulles "demanded only one thing: that the negotiations be kept top secret and that other Allies not be contacted."
He then does something a propagandist would not bother to do: he prints the instrument that made this a violation rather than a discourtesy. The Moscow conference of foreign ministers of October 1943 adopted a "Resolution on Peace-Feelers from Enemy Countries" by which the three governments agreed "to inform each other immediately of any peace-feelers which they may receive from the government of, or from any groups or individuals in a country with which any of them is at war." He cites it to the Foreign Relations of the United States series, where it is. Molotov's proposal of 12 March 1945 that a Soviet officer attend was refused by both ambassadors; the Stalin–Roosevelt correspondence that followed is quoted from the Moscow edition. The judgement Rozanov builds on this — that the Bern channel was a real breach of a real undertaking, and that its purpose on the German side was to free divisions for the East — is not a Soviet invention. It is what the record shows.
Nor is it disputed by the tradition this series writes from. Ernest Mandel's The Meaning of the Second World War (Verso, 1986) reaches the same point from the opposite political direction. Discussing the Ardennes offensive in ch. 15, "The Final Onslaught", Mandel writes that its broader strategic objective "was based on the hope that the internal contradictions of the Allied camp, and especially the prospect of Soviet occupation of Eastern and Central Europe, would convince the Anglo-Americans to go for a separate peace" — precisely Rozanov's reading of "Watch on the Rhine", and Mandel quotes Hitler telling his generals in December 1944 that "in all history there has never been a coalition composed of such heterogeneous partners as that of our enemies." More striking still, in ch. 16, "The Outcome", Mandel disposes of the Western right's mirror-image complaint and concedes Rozanov's fact in the same breath: the claim that Eisenhower and Montgomery delivered millions of Germans to Soviet rule by refusing an armistice in the West alone "is pure demagogy. The records show that a de facto one-sided surrender in the West did transpire which enabled the Western Allied armies to advance further east than they would otherwise have done." Two writers who agreed on almost nothing else agreed that the Wehrmacht opened the western door and that the Anglo-Americans walked through it.
Some of Rozanov's individual finds are simply good. Churchill's answer in the Commons in 1954, that he had telegraphed Montgomery to stack captured German arms "so that they could easily be issued again to the German soldiers whom we should have to work with if the Soviet advance continued", is quoted accurately and used well. Churchill's own eight-point summary of his spring 1945 strategy — "that a new front must be immediately created against her onward sweep... that this front in Europe should be as far east as possible" — is from Triumph and Tragedy and needs no gloss. The chapter on the twenty-three days of the Doenitz government at Flensburg is genuinely valuable and hard to find elsewhere in English: the British zone left the Flensburg enclave unoccupied, German officers kept their sidearms, the Doenitz radio station stayed on the air, "Heil Doenitz!" was heard in the street, and Doenitz drove about in Hitler's armoured Mercedes for a fortnight after the surrender. Rozanov's source for the arithmetic of German formations kept under joint command is de Guingand, Montgomery's own chief of staff.
Underneath the narrative there is a real thesis, and it is a Marxist one rather than a nationalist one: that the diplomacy of the dying Reich was not the improvisation of cornered gangsters but a project of German capital, executed through men it owned. Rozanov documents Himmler's Freundeskreis — Bingel of Siemens-Schuckert, Bütefisch of I.G. Farben, Flick, Rasche of the Dresdner Bank, some fifty in all — and the special "R" account through which they paid the SS from 1932, and shows that the man who collected and distributed that money was Karl Wolff. The Strasbourg meeting of 10 August 1944, at which German industrialists were told to move capital abroad against the day after the defeat, is documented from Förster and Gröhler. Speer's obstruction of the scorched-earth order of 19 March 1945 is followed through the visits to Weichs, Heinrici, Himmler, Guderian and Model and the meeting of twenty Ruhr industrialists at Landsberg — with the conclusion that the monopolies "supported and encouraged a 'total war' as long as it raged outside Germany's borders." Rozanov is not credulous about his main witness, either: he twice catches Speer's memoirs going quiet at the useful moment — "though Speer is usually generous with minor details in his memoirs, he does not relate what was said in this important conversation with Himmler." That is a historian's habit, and it earns him the right to be read.
The brief question can be answered directly: Rozanov does not treat Yalta as a betrayal, and he does not treat it sceptically either. He treats it as a weapon. The publication of the Crimean decisions on 12 February 1945, he writes, "completely crushed Nazi hopes for an official separate peace with the West based on anti-Soviet sentiment" — the conference is the instrument that defeated Ribbentrop's memorandum, and its unconditional-surrender clause is the standard against which Churchill and Dulles are then convicted. That is a coherent position and, on its own terms, defensible. It is also the exact opposite of the émigré and Western-conservative reading, and both readings share a premise Mandel rejected: that the shape of post-war Europe was settled at conference tables. Mandel's answer, that the outcome "was determined on the battlefield", cuts against Rozanov as much as against the Yalta-betrayal school.
But the asymmetry is total, and it is the book's real failure. Every peace-feeler in this book runs in one direction. Berlin approaches London and Washington; London and Washington are tempted; Moscow refuses and reports. There is no chapter, paragraph or sentence in which Soviet wartime diplomacy is examined with the scepticism applied to everyone else's — and there was material. The German approaches through Stockholm in 1943, and how far Moscow entertained them, remain genuinely contested among historians and the evidence is thin; but the contest existed, and Rozanov does not acknowledge that anyone has ever raised it. Mandel notes in ch. 12 that the British government trod carefully with Stalin in 1942 partly "for fear that Moscow might sign a separate peace with Berlin" — the fear ran both ways, and only one direction is in this book. Krebs's mission to Chuikov on 1 May 1945 is narrated at length, but as a Nazi provocation heroically refused; the possibility that a Soviet reader might want to weigh it as diplomacy does not arise. The Warsaw Rising, which fell in the months this book covers, is absent; the word Warsaw appears once, in the phrase "Warsaw Treaty". So the book ends with the sentence that gives its method away: the defeat of Germany was "not just the victory of the Soviet Army... but the victory of Soviet diplomacy."
Fairness requires noting that this produces one genuinely surprising judgement. Having spent seven chapters showing Churchill, Dulles, Hoare, Montgomery and the State Department reaching for a deal with the SS, Rozanov concludes that "overall, during 1941–1945 the US and Great Britain pursued a realistic foreign policy," and quotes Churchill's tribute of 27 February 1945 to a Soviet government whose "word is their bond." This is 1981 detente reaching back to arrange 1945 into a usable precedent. It is more generous to the West than anything in Rzheshevsky. It is also, in its way, the same operation in reverse: the past being asked to say what the present needs.
The fifth chapter, "The SS in Action", is where the book fails in a manner that is not a matter of emphasis.
Auschwitz does not appear in this book. Neither does extermination, genocide, or Holocaust. Jew and Jewish appear fifteen times between them, and every occurrence falls inside the account of Himmler's negotiations, where Jews are the object of a transaction — the currency in which the SS hoped to buy a hearing in the West. The camps appear as a "pretense" available to Anglo-American reactionaries: "negotiations with Himmler and other SS officers could be cloaked under the pretense of concern for the prisoners being held in Nazi concentration camps."
The passage that settles the matter is the meeting between Himmler and Norbert Masur of the World Jewish Congress on the night of 20–21 April 1945. Rozanov prints, from Joseph Kessel's biography of Felix Kersten, what Himmler said: "These men helped the Resistance. They fired on our troops from their ghettos. And, moreover, they carry diseases such as typhus. It was to stop epidemics that we sent them to the ovens... The concentration camps! They should be called education camps." Rozanov offers not one word about this. The next sentence is: "Passing on to the most important issue, Himmler then asked Masur to act as a mediator in the negotiations with the West." A man has just described the gas chambers and offered the standard falsification of what they were for, and the book steps over it to reach the diplomacy. That is the whole method in four lines. The killing of European Jewry is not denied here; it is not disputed; it is simply never the point.
What replaces it is worse. Masur, who had flown into Tempelhof in the last fortnight of the Reich to bargain with Himmler, "did not interest him in the slightest" — Rozanov's judgement, offered without evidence, of a man who went to negotiate with the head of the SS. Gillel Storch — in Rozanov's description a representative in Stockholm of the Jewish Agency and the World Zionist Congress — did not go to Berlin, Rozanov writes, not from fear of the Gestapo, because "he had too much in common with the men who worked there"; the phrase "ulterior motives of the Zionist reactionaries" follows a paragraph later. Bernadotte's shuttling is dismissed as a cover for saving the Nazi regime, on the strength of a letter of March 1945 in which he is said to have written that "Jews are just as unwelcome in Sweden as they are in Germany." Rozanov takes that letter from the opening pages of a 1978 article in Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte and treats it as settled. He does not tell the reader that the standing scholarly question about that document is where it came from, and that its provenance runs through the Kersten circle rather than through any archive of Bernadotte's own — the very question the journal article was about. And in a chapter of nearly six thousand words on negotiations conducted over the fate of camp prisoners, not a single prisoner is recorded as having been released. Some were. The white buses ran; women came out of Ravensbrück in April 1945.
Set beside this, Mandel's chapter 9, "Ideology", is not a corrective of detail but of category. The Holocaust, Mandel wrote, "the deliberate and systematic killing of six million men, women and children simply because of their ethnic origin — stands as a unique crime in mankind's sad criminal history"; and in the same chapter he records that "the Danish resistance saved nearly all the Danish Jews from the Holocaust by transporting them overnight to Sweden." That is the rescue Rozanov's chapter is unable to see, in the same geography, in the same war. Mandel is at the same time explicit that the Nazis and the extreme proponents of racial superiority "by no means intended the enslavement and extermination only of the Jews; gypsies and sections of the Slav people figure on the same list" — so the corrective is not a nationalist one. It is that the crime has to be named before anything else can be said about the men who bargained over it.
The pattern is not Rozanov's invention. It was the settled Soviet practice, from the suppression of the Black Book in 1947 onward, to dissolve the murder of the Jews into the general figure of Soviet and European losses. Rozanov inherited it. Inheriting it is not the same as being blameless for it.
It was made while the events were happening, and it was not the reply Rozanov's Western critics would have made.
The Fourth International's American organ reviewed the Crimean conference within weeks. Its "Month in Review" in Fourth International, vol. VI no. 3, March 1945, treated Yalta as neither charter nor betrayal but as a carve-up: "The 'Big Three' have further perfected at Yalta their ghoulish schemes to bleed the German people, to reduce Europe to the status of a wretched beggar, to carve up the ruined continent into spheres of influence of the respective three giant powers." In the same article — and this is the sentence Rozanov's whole apparatus is built to prevent — "Roosevelt and Churchill have underwritten the territorial booty that the Kremlin grabbed as a result of its 1939 pact with Hitler." And in a passage that concedes Rozanov's central charge before Rozanov was old enough to make it, the same editorial noted that against insurgent German workers Churchill and Roosevelt would not hesitate to arm the Nazis, "with whom the American military authorities have been so brazenly collaborating in the occupied areas." The collaboration Rozanov documents in 1981 from the German archives was named in New York in March 1945 from the newspapers. What the writers of 1945 would not do was name it while exempting Moscow.
Felix Morrow's "'Big Three' Differences in Germany", published in June 1945 — the month after the Flensburg arrests — read the occupation zones as Rozanov cannot: not as an anti-fascist condominium under strain, but as three bases held with a view to the next war. "Each of the Big Three cannot fail to operate in its own occupation zone on the perspective of eventual utilization of its German base against one or both of the others in World War III." That is the same fact Rozanov reports about the British zone, generalised.
And the mature reply is Mandel's book of 1986, which should be read against this one because it grants so much of it. One correction has to be carried in the open, since this series applies the same standard to its own tradition: Mandel dates the Secret Additional Protocol to 27 August 1939. It was signed on the night of 23 August 1939, and the error is his. It does not touch his account of 1944–45, which is the part that bears on Rozanov, and which — on the Ardennes, on the one-sided surrender in the West, on the emptiness of the Yalta-betrayal literature, on the German divisional balance at the start of 1945, 185 in the East against 147 in the West and Italy — largely confirms him.
Read chapters two, four and seven as the work of a competent researcher with a real archive and a real thesis. The account of Sunrise, of the Ribbentrop memorandum, of the Bernadotte and Musy channels as diplomacy, and of the twenty-three days of the Doenitz government under British protection, is worth having in English and is not available in this compass anywhere else. The class analysis of German war-terminal diplomacy — the Freundeskreis, the "R" account, Wolff as the monopolies' man inside the SS, Speer as their minister — is the book's best idea and it is carried by evidence.
Then read the fifth chapter with the knowledge that the word Auschwitz is not in it, and read the Conclusion knowing that the whole book has been built so that its last pages can say that the men who negotiated at Ascona are the men now sitting across the table at Geneva. Both things are true of this book at once: it caught a real conspiracy against its ally, and it could not describe the largest crime committed by the government whose conspiracies it was cataloguing. It is not a book that lies about what it saw. It is a book that was permitted to look in one direction.