illes Treaty. The Nazi dictatorship liquidated the powerful German communist party. Stalin supported Western European efforts to restrain Nazi expansionism in the 1930s. In Mein Kampf, Hitler "blended into his obsessive antisemitism, aimed at the destruction of 'Jewish-Bolshevism,' the concept of a war in the East for 'living space' or Lebensraum," which was "needed for the 'master race' to sustain itself" (Kershaw 241 and 243). In August 1936, Hitler shared with Hermann Goering and a few other senior Nazi leaders his belief in "the necessity of war between Marxist Russia and Western civilization" (Overy 34-35).
However, under the Nazi-Soviet pact of August 1939, relations between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were temporarily patched up, which safeguarded Germany's eastern flank as it destroyed Poland. Stalin, disillusioned with the weak response of Great Britain and France at the 1938 Munich Conference to Germany's eastward expansion into Czechoslovakia, made a deal with Hitler to create a buffer zone along his western frontier and to buy time to strengthen the Soviet Union's defenses. However, Stalin was alarmed by Hitler's astonishingly swift military victories in Scandinavia, France and the Low Countries. After the fall of France, according to Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin "said that now Hitler was sure to beat our brains in" (Tucker 610). Relations between Germany and the Soviet Union worsened after the Soviet Union aggressively expanded its control over key points in eastern Finland as a result of the Winter War of 1939-1940, absorbed the Baltic States, seized portions of Romania, Bessarabia (designated as within the Soviet sphere of interest under the pact) and northern Bukovina (not so designated), thereby potentially threatening German influence in Romania, whose Ploesti oil fields "were the Reich's largest supplier of oil" (Read and Fisher 464). According to Stackelberg, Soviet demands for increased influence in those area...