Secret German–Soviet military cooperation begins

In March 1922, according to most chronologies, the first officers of the German Reichswehr set off for Soviet Russia to prepare military cooperation with the Red Army. The sources do not give the day of the journey, and often not even the names of those who made it: everything was done in secret, and most of the German documents on this cooperation were destroyed. The date of 1 March is therefore a convention, standing for the month rather than a particular day. What grew out of these first journeys, however, is beyond doubt. For eleven years, until 1933, the Reichswehr did deep inside Russia, and later the Soviet Union, what the Treaty of Versailles forbade it to do: it trained pilots and tank crews, tested chemical weapons and financed the production of armaments. In return the Red Army received money, technology and access to the experience of what was then the finest general staff in Europe. The cooperation between two armies that would face each other in 1941 is one of the strangest chapters on the road to the Second World War.

Two armies left out in the cold

The Treaty of Versailles limited the German army to a hundred thousand men and forbade it tanks, military aviation, heavy artillery, poison gas and submarines. It dissolved the General Staff and placed German armaments works under the supervision of an inter-Allied commission. General Hans von Seeckt, head of the Army Command from 1920, built the Reichswehr as a cadre army that would one day become the nucleus of a large one. But he could not train men in weapons he did not have, nor develop technology that could not legally be produced in Germany. He needed a place beyond the reach of the Allied inspectors.

Only Russia could offer one. The Bolsheviks were winning the civil war, but their country was in ruins, its arms industry had collapsed, and in 1921 the Volga region was struck by a great famine. The Red Army, victorious in the civil war, had lost the Battle of Warsaw in August 1920, and in March 1921 the Peace of Riga settled, for the time being, the question of the border with Poland. Soviet Russia, unrecognised by most states, had space, raw materials and manpower, but lacked experts, money and modern technology. Germany had all of these, but could not use them at home.

The two were also bound by a shared hostility towards Poland. The reborn Polish Republic had been created on lands taken from both empires, and Seeckt regarded it as Germany’s mortal enemy, whose existence could not be reconciled with German interests. His Russian interlocutors knew this. In the summer of 1920, as the Red Army marched on Warsaw, Moscow’s representative in Berlin, Viktor Kopp, spoke at the German Foreign Ministry of a “common border” between the two states, while the former Ottoman war minister Enver Pasha, who had taken refuge in Moscow, acted as a go-between for Seeckt and the Bolsheviks. Defeat at Warsaw put an end to these plans, but not to the interest on either side.

Sondergruppe R and the first talks

Around the turn of 1920 and 1921 Seeckt set up a secret unit for Russian affairs in the Reichswehr Ministry, known as Sondergruppe R (Special Group R, for “Russland”). Its members included Major Kurt von Schleicher, Seeckt’s closest political adviser, Major Fritz Tschunke, and Oskar von Niedermayer, an officer known for his wartime expedition to Afghanistan. The chancellor, Joseph Wirth, himself convinced that Germany needed Russia against Poland, knew of these contacts and shielded them. For a long time the Foreign Ministry knew only part of the story.

According to the German historian Helm Speidel, who was himself one of the initiated in the late 1920s, a German reconnaissance mission went to Moscow after the Upper Silesia plebiscite in March 1921. Most studies say it was led by Niedermayer, and its members inspected armaments works that Germany might bring back into operation. In September 1921 the first secret high-level talks took place in Berlin. On the Soviet side they were conducted by the People’s Commissar for Foreign Trade, Leonid Krasin; on the German side by Otto Hasse of the Truppenamt, the disguised general staff, which he headed from 1922 to 1925. According to some accounts the meetings were held in Schleicher’s flat. The talk was of German money and experts for the Soviet arms industry in exchange for the chance to produce and train in Russia. Moscow pressed for help in rebuilding its factories; the Reichswehr wanted above all ammunition and testing grounds.

At the beginning of 1922 Karl Radek, one of the leaders of the Comintern, arrived in Berlin. He had known German politicians and officers since 1919, when he had been held in a Berlin prison. In February 1922, with the chancellor’s consent, he met Seeckt. According to the accounts on which Speidel relies, Radek spoke of the need for German help for Soviet industry and for training Red Army officers, complained about Germany’s rapprochement with Britain and hinted that Russia might attack Poland in the spring. Seeckt refused to be drawn into any war plans. His letter to Hasse of May 1922 shows that no formal military agreement was concluded at the time. Seeckt valued rather the mere “appearance” of such an understanding, which was meant to unsettle France and Poland.

March 1922: officers on their way to Russia

It was in this atmosphere, in the spring of 1922, that the first German officers began travelling to Soviet Russia. These were not military units or official delegations but individuals, often after a fictitious discharge from the army. Niedermayer formally left the Reichswehr on 23 December 1921 precisely so that he could work for it in Russia as a private person. According to Russian studies, a joint journey by Reichswehr officers and representatives of Hugo Junkers’s aircraft works was being prepared at the beginning of 1922, and on 6 February 1922 the firm signed a preliminary protocol with the Soviet government on building an aircraft factory near Moscow. The officers who travelled to Russia in March were to see on the spot what could be built, where men could be trained and how serious the Russian partners were.

All this happened a few weeks before the Genoa Conference. The German government was at that time pursuing two policies at once: officially it was seeking an understanding with the West over reparations, unofficially it was exploring the possibilities of cooperation with Moscow. Historians long argued over whether the Treaty of Rapallo, concluded on 16 April 1922, had a secret military annex. The prevailing view today is that there was no such annex. The military talks ran on their own track, partly without the diplomats’ knowledge, but they created the climate in which Rapallo became possible, and the treaty itself gave them political cover.

Factories, schools and training grounds

After Rapallo the cooperation quickly gathered pace. According to Russian researchers, a provisional agreement on cooperation between the two armies was concluded on 11 August 1922. In November 1922 Junkers received a concession for an aircraft plant at Fili near Moscow, where it was to produce aircraft and engines, and in 1923 the Reichswehr set up a front company, GEFU (the Society for the Promotion of Industrial Enterprises), to handle the business, through which millions of marks flowed. The industrial results were meagre: Junkers produced less than it had promised, fell out with both the Reichswehr and Moscow, and in 1927 the Russians took over the plant. Hundreds of thousands of artillery shells, on the other hand, made their way from Russia to Germany, and that was what the Reichswehr needed most.

The training centres proved more durable. In 1925 a German flying school opened at Lipetsk, where by 1933, according to various sources, some two hundred or more pilots and observers were trained or given further training, and new aircraft were tested. In the second half of the 1920s a chemical weapons centre code-named “Tomka” was set up near Saratov, and near Kazan the “Kama” armoured warfare school, where from 1929 German and Soviet tank crews trained together and prototype tanks secretly ordered from German firms were tested. In Moscow there was a Reichswehr office, headed for years by Niedermayer. Soviet commanders travelled in the other direction: they observed German manoeuvres, and some, such as Ieronim Uborevich, underwent staff training in Germany. The Russians paid for this with access to their training grounds, the Germans with money and know-how.

The secret could not be kept entirely. Polish and French intelligence knew a good deal about the cooperation. In December 1926 the British Manchester Guardian reported on deliveries of Soviet ammunition, and the Social Democrat Philipp Scheidemann revealed some of the details in the Reichstag, which brought down the government. The cooperation nevertheless continued, and from 1926 the army formally informed the civilian government of its secret programmes, which thereafter shared responsibility for financing them.

Significance

The joint centres operated until 1933. After Adolf Hitler came to power – he regarded Bolshevism as a mortal enemy, and Germany could by then rearm at home – both states withdrew from the cooperation. Lipetsk, Kama and Tomka were closed by the autumn of 1933. Yet none of it had been in vain. The first pilots of the future Luftwaffe and part of the officer corps of the German armoured forces had been trained in Russia, and the experience gained from the trials went into building new weapons when Hitler openly broke with disarmament in 1935. The Red Army adopted German staff and technical methods, and Fili became one of the cradles of the Soviet aircraft industry.

The cooperation of the 1920s also showed that ideological hostility did not stop the two states from jointly undermining the Versailles order when they were united by animosity towards Poland. Seeckt wrote in September 1922 that Poland “must disappear” through its own weakness and through Russia, with Germany’s help. Seventeen years later, in August 1939, men from entirely different political camps, Hitler and Joseph Stalin, concluded the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and partitioned Poland. Many of the Soviet commanders who had worked with the Reichswehr in the 1920s, led by Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky and Uborevich, perished in the Great Purge of 1937, accused among other things of spying for Germany. The generals who had trained at Lipetsk and Kazan led the Wehrmacht into the Soviet Union in 1941.