This is the CBS I in the world. I'm John Bachelor with Professor Sean McMekin at Bard College, his new book

Stalin's War, a new history of World War II, how what we regard as the Second World War was a product of

Stalin's manipulation and cold-bloodedness.

We come now to May 3rd, 1939. Hitler is a threat to all of Europe. Everywhere. He's a threat to

Stalin as well. However, Stalin means to convince Hitler that they can work together in some fantastic way.

Itiologically it doesn't work, but bloody-mindedness in both Hitler and Stalin.

May 3rd, 1939, the NKKVD, aka the KGB,

State Security, surrounds the foreign ministry,

arresting the foreign minister himself, Lidfernov,

and all of his staff who are Jewish. Molotov, the gangster, a colleague of

Stalin's from signing death warrants during the great purges of the 30s and they will continue.

Becomes the new foreign representatives of Stalin to Hitler.

Sean, why did they arrest Lippinoff?

He'd been an accomplished Bolshevik all these years.

Well he had been certainly useful for a time being when it came to things like public relations.

In part because he was Jewish and he was abused

for being Jewish and these kind of Nazi propaganda caricatures.

And he had come to seem the face of, you might say,

the more respectable Soviet foreign policy image that is that the

Soviets were anti-fascist because of the popular front they were devoted opponents of

Hitler and so on and there's no reason to doubt that

that Vienoff himself likely felt that way he was after all Jewish however he

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