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German-Soviet Military Parade
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At Brest-Litovsk, Red Army and German Army commanders hold a joint victory parade before German forces withdraw west behind the new demarcation line. Relations between the Red Army and the Wehrmacht at this time are genuinely friendly, being based on mutual hostility towards Poland. The parade has been organized by the Wehrmacht's General Heinz Guderian and the Red Army's Semyon Krivoschein. The Germans release no official photographs of the parade, as they wish to be seen as strongly anti-communist both at home and abroad. This 1939 encounter with Guderian, almost cost Krivoschein his life when, in April 1945, a SMERSH (an abbreviation of its motto: smert' shpionam - death to spies) military counter-intelligence detachment scouring Nazi archives discovered a photograph of Krivoschein and Guderian shaking hands. The Soviet general was questioned but released, probably because he was Jewish and therefore viewed as an unlikely Nazi spy.
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