A Dance on Eggs: Intelligence and the 'Anti-Comintern'

Abstract

Few people are likely to mark, let alone celebrate, the fiftieth anniversary of that most bizarre of international treaties, the socalled Anti-Comintern Pact of 25 November 1936. At the time, most commentators thought it a little odd that it should be signed on behalf of Germany by the ambassador in London, Joachim von Ribbentrop, rather than by the Foreign Minister of the day. Others found the concept of combatting an international organization, and communism as a body of ideas, a trifle hard to take seriously. It was correctly suspected at the time that the pact concealed secret arrangements directed against the Soviet Union, but it was always a puzzle that there should have been such a time-lag between the enunciation of the Anti-Comintern concept in August 1935 and the signature of the Pact itself in 1936. Another puzzle lay in the German preference for a deal with a very remote Japan over one with Italy or some other European neighbour with whom collaboration could be more consistent and direct. Perhaps even more puzzling was the fact that the Pact was not opened for the adhesion of other like-minded states, as occurred in the case of the subsequent tripartite alliance of 1940, and that when the Italians joined in the act in 1937, it was by means of a separate treaty with Japan.1 The many contradictions that attended the 1936 Pact are echoed in the historical literature on the wartime alliance, with the issue of nazi racialist policies as the nub of the contradictions.2 It was easy, but facile as it turned out, to view such contradictions, both then and later, as evidence that such allies could be split up without too much difficulty. It can certainly be argued from the many signs of apprehension shown by Japanese policy-makers toward Hitler, especially following the invasion of the Soviet Union, that the relationship was liable to break up ultimately. But in the event, it took no small amount of effort and sacrifice to crush the Axis Powers one