and the Soviet Union, signed three days after the offensive, nullified the Anti-Comintern Pact between Germany and Japan. Even more than the battlefield defeat, the Nazi-Soviet alliance brought a political earthquake to Tokyo. The Japanese government fell, as would several more in the coming months. Once Germany seemed to have chosen the Soviet Union rather than Japan as its ally, the Japanese government found itself in an unexpected and confusing situation... if the union between Moscow and Berlin held, the Red Army would be able to concentrate its forces in Asia rather than in Europe. ... Hitler had given Stalin a free hand in Asia, and the Japanese could only hope that Hitler would betray his new friend. ... When the Red Army defeated the Japanese, on 15 September, Stalin had achieved exactly the result that he wanted. ... Stalin had replaced the phantom of a German-Polish-Japanese encirclement of the Soviet Union with a very real German-Soviet encirclement of Poland, an alliance that isolated Japan." Later events and total trade After the German invasion of Poland, to administer the economic blockade of Germany, the British Ministry of Economic Warfare was established on September 3, 1939. By April 1940 Britain realized that blockade appeared not to be working because of "leaks" in the blockade, with two major "holes" in the Black Sea and Mediterranean provided by several neutral countries, including Italy. {| class=wikitable |- ! !!SovietUnion ||Poland&Danzig ||Finland ||Estonia ||Latvia ||Lithuania |- style="text-align:center;" | align="left"|1939||52.8 ||140.8 ||88.9 ||24.3 ||43.6 ||27.8 |- |colspan="13"|*German Imports in millions of Reichsmarks |} On September 17, the Red Army invaded eastern Poland and occupied the Polish territory which held up to 70 per cent of Poland's pre-war oil production. In October three German trade partners - Baltic States – Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania – were given no choice but to sign a so-called Pact of defense and mutual assistance which permitted the Soviet Union to station troops in them. German-Soviet tensions were also raised by the Soviet invasion of Finland started at November 1939. Several German merchant ships were damaged Germany and the Soviet Union continued economic, military and political negotiations throughout the last half of 1939, which resulted in a much larger German–Soviet Commercial Agreement was signed on February 11, 1940. Under that agreement, the Soviet Union became a major supplier of vital materials to Germany, including petroleum, manganese, copper, nickel, chrome, platinum, lumber and