Anti-Comintern Pact

Name and conclusion

Known as the Anti-Comintern Pact, 방공 협정(防共協定), or the Agreement against the Communist International, whose official German title was published in the Reichsgesetzblatt of 1937. It was the first political treaty between Germany and Japan: drafted on 23 October 1936 and signed in Berlin on 25 November 1936 by the Japanese special ambassador Viscount Mushanokōji Kintomo and Joachim von Ribbentrop for a five-year term.

Hitler used the pact to break out of Germany's international isolation after leaving the League of Nations in 1933, seeking allies for a revisionist foreign policy directed against the Soviet Union: Britain and Poland in Europe, with Japan added in East Asia. After his courtship of an alliance with Britain failed, German cooperation with China remained an obstacle and the negotiations were delayed. The idea of a German-Japanese alliance came from Japanese military attaché in Berlin Ōshima Hiroshi, but it found Hitler's sympathy only after long deliberations, and career diplomats in the Foreign Office under Foreign Minister Konstantin von Neurath, including Neurath himself, opposed binding to Japan.

Articles and secret protocols

By public Article 1 the parties informed each other about Comintern activity, consulted on necessary defensive measures and cooperated closely in carrying them out; Article 2 obliged them jointly to recommend that any third state whose internal security was threatened by Comintern subversion adopt defensive measures in the agreement's spirit or accede to it. Article 3 made the Japanese and German texts equally authentic, set a five-year term and brought the agreement into force on the day of signature. The protocol provided for cooperation in exchanging information on Comintern activity, strict measures under existing law against persons serving the Comintern at home or abroad, and a permanent commission to study further defensive measures.

By the secret additional agreements the two states assured each other benevolent neutrality in the event of an unprovoked attack or threat of attack by the Soviet Union, undertook not to conclude with the USSR any treaties contradicting the spirit of the agreement without mutual consent, and gave the arrangement entry into force simultaneously with the pact and the same five-year term. Japan invoked the secret additional agreement when it protested in Berlin against the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of 1939.

Expansion and rupture

Italy joined on 6 November 1937 but was not informed of the existence of the secret additional agreement. Hungary and Manchukuo joined on 24 February 1939, and Spain followed in March 1939, just after Franco's troops entered Madrid; sources differ, giving 26 March (Russian-language source) and 27 March (German-language source). On 25 November 1941 the pact was extended for five years, and Romania, Finland, Croatia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, occupied Denmark and the Wang Jingwei government in Nanjing joined, while Turkey had observer status.

The German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of 1939, concluded without informing Japan and Italy, made the Anti-Comintern Pact and the "world-political triangle" meaningless. Japan, then fighting a costly border conflict with the Red Army at Nomonhan, saw it as a violation of the pact, the surprised Hiranuma cabinet resigned and relations cooled temporarily. Whether Japan formally renounced the pact, as Britannica states for 23 August 1939, or merely distanced itself, as other sources describe without a formal renunciation, is disputed and cannot be settled either way. The September 1940 Tripartite Pact identified the United States, not the Soviet Union, as the primary threat and suspended the pact's operation, leaving membership largely ceremonial. The pact ceased to exist with the end of World War II.

Character and distinctions

The pact was more a statement of mutual ideological alignment and diplomatic attachment than an actual military alliance; the Japanese signatories hoped it would effectively be an alliance against the Soviet Union, which was how the Soviets perceived it. Contrary to its presentation as a purely "anti-Bolshevik" worldview alliance, the pact and its secret protocols primarily served military-strategic goals. The German Anti-Komintern agency (GDAV), an organ of propaganda established by Joseph Goebbels in 1933, pursued anti-communist, anti-Soviet and antisemitic propaganda to build international support for Nazi policy, and the Seventh World Congress of the Comintern in July 1935, which named fascist Germany and Japan among the chief instigators of war, influenced the negotiations.

Until 1939 Ribbentrop tried in vain to develop the "world-political triangle" into a German-Japanese-Italian military alliance aimed at Britain, and the Steel Pact of 22 May 1939, limited to Germany and Italy, made the failure of that intended alliance clear. Accounts differ on the pact's later course: one describes it as converted into an open military alliance in 1939-1940, another as having its operation suspended by the Tripartite Pact.

Examples

As an example of the pact's function as a diplomatic instrument: Germany had concluded the 1922 Treaty of Rapallo and the 1926 Treaty of Berlin with the USSR, but on 25 November 1936 Ribbentrop informed Mushanokōji that Germany viewed these treaties as void under the secret additional protocol, and Mushanokōji replied the same day expressing the Japanese government's "sincere satisfaction". The same day Mushanokōji also asked whether the pact would affect Japan's negotiations with the Soviet Union over fishing rights and the border between Manchukuo and the USSR, and Ribbentrop confirmed that Japan was free to proceed in those matters. On 17 May 1937 Ōshima Hiroshi and Wilhelm Canaris signed a secret military agreement covering information exchange and subversion planning against the Soviet Union. Conclusion of the pact forced the United States to begin revising its "Orange" war plan against Japan.