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Before Joseph Stalin allied the Soviet Union with the United States and Great Britain, he offered help to Hitler and the Nazis much more than the rest of the world knew at the time. But when Hitler turned on Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union, in desperation the Soviet leader looked to the West for help. Although British prime minister Winston Churchill and U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt despised Communism, they also valued anyone who fought against the Nazis.
Joseph Stalin and Nazi foreign minister Ribbentrop
shake hands after concluding the Nazi-Soviet
Non-Aggression Pact, August 1939.
Could Stalin trust these Western powers that he so desperately needed to save his nation? Having been betrayed by his first ally, as the war progressed, Stalin came to believe these unlikely new allies were betraying him.
Episode 1 – Unlikely Friends lays bare the history of the secret allegiances that Stalin wanted to hide and the alliances he was later forced to make with the West. Here is the inside story of the infamous Nazi/Soviet pact, the Soviet invasion of Poland, the heinous crime that became known as the Katyn Massacre, and the early days of the difficult alliance between the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and the United States.
