Anti-Comintern Pact
The pact's legitimacy was undermined when Germany blatantly broke it by secretly negotiating the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact with the Soviet Union. During the negotiations between Ribbentrop and Stalin in Moscow in August 1939, just a few weeks before the outbreak of World War II, the Anti-Comintern Pact proved only a small obstacle. Ribbentrop explained to Stalin that, in fact, the Anti-Comintern Pact had been aimed against the western democracies, not the Soviet Union. Stalin accepted this for the sake of his country's diplomatic goals, and there were jokes made among the German public that the Soviet Union would end up joining the Anti-Comintern Pact itself. Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov had not made the Anti-Comintern Pact an issue during the negotiations with Ribbentrop and German ambassador to the Soviet Union Schulenburg.