On 22 September 1939, military columns moved through Brest-Litovsk beneath two dictatorships’ flags. German armoured troops were preparing to leave the city they had captured; Soviet forces were arriving from the east. Generals Heinz Guderian and Semyon Krivoshein stood together as German units passed the reviewing point. The filmed ceremony was brief, ordered and public. Behind it lay a catastrophe: Poland was being crushed between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
The images have often been called a “joint victory parade.” The label can obscure as much as it reveals. The forces did not fight side by side in Brest, and Krivoshein reportedly limited Soviet participation. What the surviving newsreel unmistakably records is a coordinated handover, a German march past both commanders, and the transfer of the city to Soviet control. It was cooperation made visible under the secret terms of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.
A city caught between two invasions
Brest stood where railways, roads and the River Bug made it strategically important. Its nineteenth-century fortress had become a Polish strongpoint. Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, beginning the European war; armoured formations pushed east with extraordinary speed. Guderian’s XIX Army Corps reached the Brest area in mid-September. Polish defenders held the fortress through repeated attacks before withdrawing during the night of 16–17 September.
That same morning, Soviet troops crossed Poland’s eastern frontier. Moscow claimed that the Polish state had ceased to exist and that it was protecting Ukrainians and Belarusians. In fact, the move followed the secret protocol attached to the German–Soviet non-aggression pact of 23 August. The protocol assigned spheres of influence across Eastern Europe and contemplated Poland’s partition. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum describes the pact as the arrangement that enabled both powers to invade and occupy Poland.
The Red Army’s advance opened a second front against a country already fighting for survival. Polish commanders had to decide whether to resist Soviet units, avoid them, or attempt to reach Romania and Hungary. The dual invasion destroyed any realistic prospect of an organized national defence, although Polish units continued fighting in several places into October.
The agreed line—and the problem of Brest
The first secret protocol drew the German and Soviet spheres along the Narev, Vistula and San rivers. Operational realities soon outran the map. German forces reached territory intended for Soviet occupation, including Brest. Officers on both sides therefore had to arrange withdrawals, handovers and boundaries while combat in Poland continued.
Guderian and Krivoshein met on 22 September. Later memoirs differ in emphasis, and postwar recollections must be handled carefully. Contemporary German film is firmer evidence. An UFA newsreel preserved with a translated description by Histdoc shows the commanders at the reviewing stand, German vehicles and troops moving past, Soviet personnel in the city, and the lowering and raising of flags. It calls the event a handover of Brest-Litovsk to the Red Army.
Krivoshein did not commit his tired formations to a full combined parade. The resulting ceremony was instead a German march past a joint reviewing point, followed by departure and transfer. That distinction matters, because accuracy is more valuable than a dramatic shorthand. It does not, however, make the meeting politically insignificant. German and Soviet officers coordinated the change of occupation, posed together, and marked the moment before cameras.
What the cameras showed—and omitted
The newsreel presented disciplined columns, salutes and commanders. It did not show what the invasions meant for civilians or captured soldiers. German occupation policies were already rooted in racial conquest and political terror. Soviet security organs began arrests, deportations and the dismantling of Polish institutions in the east. Different systems of repression took shape on either side of the partition line.
Brest’s population included Poles, Belarusians and a large Jewish community. For them, a change of flags did not restore safety. Soviet rule brought nationalization, political persecution and deportation. When Germany broke the pact and invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Brest again became a battlefield. Under subsequent German occupation, the city’s Jewish population was forced into a ghetto and murdered in mass killing actions.
The ceremony’s polished visual grammar therefore deserves resistance. It was not peace arriving after battle. It was one occupier replacing another in a country whose sovereignty neither recognized. The absence of fighting between the two armies at the reviewing stand was the product of an agreement to divide a third state.
Partition formalized
One week later, on 28 September, Germany and the Soviet Union signed the German–Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty. It adjusted the partition: Germany obtained more Polish territory in the centre, while Lithuania was shifted toward the Soviet sphere. The new demarcation was not a temporary field arrangement. It was diplomacy built on conquest.
Germany annexed western Polish territories and placed the centre under the General Government. The Soviet Union incorporated the occupied east into the Ukrainian and Byelorussian Soviet republics after controlled assemblies and elections. Both regimes pursued elites, officials and suspected opponents. The Soviet NKVD later murdered thousands of Polish officers and prisoners in the Katyn massacres; Nazi Germany pursued an escalating program of persecution, forced labour, dispossession and murder that culminated in genocide.
The partnership had limits and was never an alliance of shared ideology. Yet from 1939 to 1941 it involved economic exchange, border coordination and the suppression of Polish statehood. Calling the two regimes future enemies does not erase what they did while the pact held.
Why Brest-Litovsk still matters
Brest provides a rare filmed junction between secret diplomacy and lived occupation. The non-aggression pact can appear abstract when reduced to signatures in Moscow. On 22 September its consequences had wheels, uniforms and a city changing hands. The review by Guderian and Krivoshein showed that the Polish campaign was not simply a German assault followed by an unrelated Soviet move; the territorial outcome was negotiated and managed.
The scene also teaches a lesson about visual evidence. Film can prove who stood where and what passed before the lens. It cannot, by itself, settle every later label or reveal what was outside the frame. “Joint parade” should therefore be used with explanation. “Coordinated handover ceremony” is more precise, while still confronting the collaboration the footage documents.
For the broader opening of the war, read Germany Invades Poland and The Soviet Union Invades Poland. Explore more in World War II, or return to the September 22 Daily Edition.
Sources and method
This account compares the contemporary UFA newsreel description and transcript preserved by Histdoc with the USHMM’s institutional histories of the German–Soviet Pact and invasion of Poland. Later memoir claims are treated cautiously, and the disputed phrase “joint parade” is qualified rather than presented as an uncontested description.
Written and fact-checked by the Discover Today in History editorial team.
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