AHC: Russo-German WWII Axis

The British won't consciously give it to them is the only problem, again Soviet influence in Northern Iran means a spear pointed directly at the heart of Khuzestan, from which 80% of Iran's oil comes.

The problem is that concessions have to be made to someone, especially if the British government provoked the Soviet Union by bombing Baku and now has egg on its face after getting kicked out of Persia.
 
Or a Weimar Republican regime that doesn't see anyone else who will open up to them but the Soviets, really quite a lot of different things work. Or some pragmatic, conservative junkers that aren't any big fans of the Bolshevik menace but aren't about to turn down a very convenient partnership either.

The Weimar regime will never have the army's support, which is the spanner in the works here. A strictly military dictatorship *will* prefer a USSR it can control to gambling on the destruction of Bolshevism, Hitler fired the original Reichswehr leadership that was not keen on his idea in 1935 that in four years Germany must have a war.
 
IIRC, Germany actually extended an invitation to the USSR to join the Tripartite Pact at some point in 1940, after the fall of France. Negotiations broke down over the extent of Soviet demands, which included control of Bulgaria and the Dardanelles.

Not quite. What happened was that Molotov went to Berlin to confirm the nature of the Tripartite Pact, made demands of the Germans involving strict adherence to the Pact in Europe, the Germans decided they didn't want to do that and so things went downhill from there. The ol' Nazi inability to stick to their own agreements even when they were pretty clear beneficiaries of them is what prevented this. Not that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was intended to last overlong by either side, mind.
 
Top