German-Soviet Treaty’s WWII Role Hit by U.S.

The Reagan Administration, in a sharp rebuttal to Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, charged today that a 1939 German-Soviet nonaggression pact encouraged Adolf Hitler far more than appeasement by Britain and France.

The State Department reacted point-blank to what it called “implied criticism” from Gorbachev that President Reagan and other leaders at the recent Bonn summit “somehow countenanced the actions of Hitler’s SS or were responsible for the outbreak of World War II.”

“We disagree fundamentally with a number of Mr. Gorbachev’s assertions about U.S. foreign policy,” department spokesman Edward Djerejian said, reading a statement responding to a speech by the Soviet leader in Moscow Wednesday marking the 40th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s surrender. (Story, Page 12.)

“Whatever mistakes French and British leaders committed in the 1930s, they don’t compare with the encouragement Hitler received from the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact,” Djerejian said. “France and Britain declared war on Hitler because of the invasion of Poland. The Soviet Union joined Hitler in that attack on Poland.”

The nonaggression treaty between Hitler’s Germany and Josef Stalin’s Russia was signed in August, 1939, by Vyacheslav M. Molotov, Soviet commissar for foreign affairs, and Joachim von Ribbentop, the German foreign minister.

German Invasion in 1941

The treaty allowed Hitler to concentrate on his confrontation with Britain in the west, but Germany broke the pact in 1941 by invading the Soviet Union. The Soviets then joined the Allies in fighting Hitler, sharing in the victory May 8, 1945.

The U.S. statement was the latest salvo in the controversy over commemoration of the 40th anniversary of V-E Day, fueled by Reagan’s visit last Sunday to the Bitburg cemetery in West Germany where some Waffen SS troops are buried.

In his speech Wednesday, Gorbachev blasted last week’s summit of what he called “the leaders of the seven principal capitalist states,” a session overshadowed by Reagan’s cemetery visit.

“There were politicians there ready to forget or even justify the SS cutthroats and, moreover, pay honors to them, which is an insult to the very memory of mankind of the millions of people shot, burned or gassed,” Gorbachev said.