Salutes in the street and the Soviet embassy, Berlin 1937
Airmen salute a sentry on a broad avenue, and passers-by read the bilingual plaque of the Soviet embassy chancellery beside a heavy door.
Uniformed men in peaked caps, apparently of the Luftwaffe, walk in threes along a broad pavement past the stone columns of a public building, and one raises his arm to the sentry at the door. Elsewhere two men in dark overcoats stand reading the enamel plaques beside a heavy wooden door while a woman in a fur-collared coat walks past; in close view the plaque names, in Russian and German, the chancellery of the Embassy of the USSR in Germany, open from 10 to 1 and on Saturdays from 10 to 12.
In 1937 Berlin and Moscow faced each other as declared enemies. Germany had signed the Anti-Comintern Pact with Japan in November 1936, and in Moscow Stalin's purges were destroying the Soviet diplomatic service. Less than two years later, in August 1939, Ribbentrop flew to Moscow to sign the pact that opened the way to war.
