decades, this view has been disputed. Historian Werner Maser stated that "the claim that the Soviet Union was at the time threatened by Hitler, as Stalin supposed,...is a legend, to whose creators Stalin himself belonged." In Maser's view (1994: 42), "neither Germany nor Japan were in a situation [of] invading the USSR even with the least perspective [sic] of success," and this could not have been unknown to Stalin. The extent to which the Soviet Union's post-Pact territorial acquisitions may have contributed to preventing its fall (and thus a Nazi victory in the war) remains a factor in evaluating the Pact. Soviet sources point out that the German advance eventually stopped just a few kilometers away from Moscow, so the role of the extra territory might have been crucial in such a close call. Others postulate that Poland and the Baltic countries played the important role of buffer states between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, and that the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was a precondition not only for Germany's invasion of Western Europe, but also for the Third Reich's invasion of the Soviet Union. The military aspect of moving from established fortified positions on the Stalin Line into undefended Polish territory could also be seen as one of the causes of rapid disintegration of Soviet armed forces in the border area during the German 1941 campaign, as the newly constructed Molotov Line was unfinished and unable to provide Soviet troops with the necessary defense capabilities. Historians have debated whether Stalin was planning an invasion of German territory in the summer of 1941. Most historians agreed that the geopolitical differences between the Soviet Union and the Axis made war inevitable, and that Stalin had made extensive preparations for war and exploited the military conflict in Europe to his advantage. A number of German historians have debunked the claim that Operation Barbarossa was a preemptive strike. Such as Andreas Hillgruber, Rolf-Dieter Müller, and Christian Hartmann, they also acknowledge the Soviets were aggressive to their neighbors Recent studies, based on 70 years old archives, have found that before signing non-aggression pact with Germany, the Soviet Union proposed an anti-German alliance to Britain and France. The Soviets proposed sending more than a million Soviet troops to the German border in an effort to entice Britain and France into an anti-German alliance. But the British and French side did not respond to the Soviet offer, made