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This below is Chapter 2 Section 8:
8. State relations between Germany and the Soviet Union
German-Soviet relations have attracted much attention in the literature, far more than the relationship between Communists and National Socialists. If this relationship is in the foreground of interest, those relations must take a back seat, at least until 1933, because the National Socialists were the main representatives of the socio-political line in German policy towards the Soviet Union and Communism, i.e. the line that perceived above all the world-revolutionary will and the intention to annihilate the bourgeoisie, and in this respect agreed with the communists in the opposite assessment. But the state-policy line was not simply opposed to the socio-political line; there were manifold entanglements and tensions, but hardly ever an exclusionary contradiction.
In a way, the state-policy line was even the older one: by strategically promoting revolutionary propaganda during the war and especially by allowing Lenin to travel through, Germany was in a way the founder of Soviet Russia and, after Brest-Litovsk, its preserver for decisive months,. The perception of the Red Terror, the cries for help of many representatives of the bourgeoisie, the revolutionary propaganda in the German army and behind the front did not remain without influence on the leading men, and both the Kaiser and the Reich Chancellor Hertling as well as the chief of staff from Oberost, General Max Hoffmann, seriously considered marching German troops to Petrograd and Moscow to install a pro-German White government. But the Whites were not uniformly pro-German, and a good part of them were Red: no party was more resolutely on the side of the Entente than the Social Revolutionaries, and the assassination of the German envoy, Count Mirbach, by leftist Social Revolutionaries clarified this for the German government that the Bolsheviks were the only strong and organized force in Russia radically opposed to resuming the war. Thus the new State Secretary for Foreign Affairs, von Hintze, prevailed against all other efforts and concluded the so-called “supplementary treaties” with the Soviet government at the end of August 1918, which meant a new breathing space for Lenin.
A little more than two months later, full of relief and triumph, the leading men in Moscow were able to make their first contact with the revolutionary German government, and the disappointment was great when the People’s Commissioner Haase behaved coolly and reservedly and when a little later, the Ebert government protested sharply against the interference in Germany’s internal affairs which had been brought about by the various appeals and proclamations of the Soviet government. Consequently, diplomatic relations, which the Imperial Government had broken off in one of its last official acts, were not resumed, and after the deaths of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, who had already been expected to be the future President of the German Soviet Republic, relations deteriorated more and more, not least because of the resistance that the German troops in the Baltics continued to put up against the advance of the Russian and native Reds. But at the same time, Mann and the Foreign Minister Count Brockdorff-Rantzau, saw quite clearly how great a trump card the Bolshevik government could have in the hands of the defeated Germany: by linking it to the socio-political concerns of the Allies who could make Germany a valued ally, or allying closely with Russia against the Entente.
Both possibilities arose inevitably from the state-political situation and the geographical position of Germany: western orientation with an anti-Bolshevik accent, i.e. adaptation of the state-political line to the socio-political line, or eastern orientation as agreement with Bolshevik Russia. The deep disappointment and humiliation that Brockdorff had to endure in Versailles made him a champion of the second line, even if he never went as far in the eastern orientation as General von Seeckt, who was primarily concerned with the destruction of Poland and who wanted to make considerable domestic political concessions in return. Ebert and almost all the Social Democrats, on the other hand, unflinchingly advocated the line of western orientation, which for them was the only possibility of self-assertion against the communists.
But a third line also came into play, the economic-political line taken by many German entrepreneurs and which did not have to be apolitical or philo-Bolshevik under all circumstances, as it could be linked to the conviction that the establishment of trade relations would mitigate the barbaric or Asiatic character of Bolshevism. The same conviction was represented in England by Lloyd George, and as early as 1920 the English and Germans began to compete for the Russian market. From the Soviet side, Karl Radek was the first to make a move in the direction of a pragmatic understanding with the bourgeois German government, which for him was of course only intended as a prelude to the ideological and material unity of the Russian and German Soviet countries: “I am not too little of a diplomat to pretend that I believe in the longevity of the German state of today. The German bourgeoisie does not believe in longevity of our life. So we are of one mind. But why shouldn’t we exchange linen for medicines, wood for electrical appliances? Surely you don’t demand a certificate of immortality from people you sell underwear to!”
The first formal contacts between the two governments served to solve the problem of the mutual prisoners of war. There were over a million Russian prisoners of war in Germany, and in Russia, alongside the considerable number of German prisoners of war, there were numerous civilian internees. In early 1919, for example, a “Reich Central Office for Prisoners of War and Civilians” was created, with a former vice sergeant named Moritz Schlesinger appointed as its head. With the backing of Brockdorff-Rantzau, he thwarted Allied plans to recruit an anti-Bolshevik army from the POWs, and in November 1919 Viktor Kopp arrived in Berlin as a confidante of the Soviet government to deal with the prisoner of war issue and, if possible, to establish further contacts. In April 1920 an agreement was concluded and the representatives of both sides, Viktor Kopp in Berlin and Gustav Hilger in Moscow, were given certain consular powers and personal immunity after some time.
Rumors were constantly circulating in Germany of Russian participation in revolutionary movements, especially after the Kapp Putsch, but no compelling evidence was presented. The months of July and August 1920 marked a high point in relations, which were not yet official, when Lenin wanted above all to establish a common border with Germany. The German government declared itself neutral, but the anti-Western, anti-Polish line of not a few right-wing politicians also had considerable influence in the Reich Ministry of Defense and the Foreign Office: not only Seeckt, but also the diplomat Ago von Maltzan and the later Reich Chancellor Josef Wirth adopted it. The strength of the Russophile Prussian-German tradition and the confidence to regain political power by exploiting the East-West antagonism was thus impressively demonstrated, because after the formation of the Unified Communist Party of Germany in December 1920 at the latest, nobody could overlook the fact that the situation was completely different from before the war, because now Soviet Russia could now think it had its own party in Germany with much better reason than Germany thought it had in 1917-18 in the form of the Bolsheviks in Russia. But Lenin stubbornly strived for state rapprochement, because he too hoped to profit from divisions and because, like many Russians, he held German organization and technology in very high esteem. On the German side, in turn, there were not only the strategic considerations of Seeckt and Maltzan, but also the interests of many entrepreneurs in the resumption of trade, that is, the pressure of that relatively independent economic policy line. Thus, in the spring of 1921, Foreign Minister Simons found kind words about Soviet Russia: despite the ideological opposition, both sides could deal with one another in a realpolitik way. The March Action did not fundamentally change this attitude either, although this time the influence of the Comintern was beyond doubt. A major reason for this was certainly concern about Section 116 of the Versailles Treaty, which reserved the right for Russia to assert claims for reparations. Moreover, the fulfillment chancellor, Wirth, was an outspoken enemy of the robber state of Poland. In September 1921 mutual representatives were appointed, admittedly still below full diplomatic status: Professor Kurt Wiedenfeld in Moscow and Nikolaj Krestinski in Berlin. After the Allied decision on Upper Silesia, which was deeply disappointing for Germany, Ago von Maltzan was appointed head of the Eastern Department of the Foreign Office. At about the same time, the first contacts between the Reichswehr and the Red Army were established. On the other hand, various plans were made in the West for the formation of an international financial consortium for the purpose of Russia’s economic reconstruction, among whose exponents were Lloyd George and also the Western-oriented Reich Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau. Lenin saw in this an attack by capitalism against the independence of his country, and gave his delegation highly revealing instructions when Russia was invited, like Germany, to take part in a world economic conference in Genoa. Its most important and most sensational result was the Treaty of Rapallo, which was signed on April 16, 1922. The immediate history of its creation was strange and has not been fully clarified to this day due to the inaccessibility of the Soviet files. Basically, the treaty was signed against the will of Rathenau and Ebert, but it was nevertheless a consistent event: the two great defeated nations of the world war found each other, mutually renounced highly uncertain, albeit fundamentally important claims—the Russians the section 116, the Germans compensation for the nationalizations of German property—and they established full diplomatic relations. The signing of the treaty came as a real shock to the Western powers, because a new possibility in international politics now came into view: Germany and Russia might one day form a genuine alliance against the West. The radical alternative that Churchill had championed against Lloyd George seemed irretrievably vanished: making Germany an ally in an anti-Bolshevik war of liberation. How deep would the shock have been if a Soviet Germany had actually signed a much more far-reaching treaty! Indeed, among the German Communists there was a mixture of triumph and disappointment, for while the treaty broke the isolation of Soviet Russia, it also strengthened German bourgeois government and thereby resistance to the revolution. Was it really a stage on the right road? Wasn’t the Ebert government of 1918/19 wrongly called a stage, i.e., mistaken for a Kerensky government? It sounded neither convincing nor really convinced when the Rote Fahne made the following statement on April 18 under the heading “German-Russian Peace Treaty”: “For Germany, the present turn in her policy can have important consequences. If Rathenau seizes the moment and continues the policy he has begun, then all questions between Germany and the Entente states can be asked anew. We do not want to hide the fact that we do not trust Mr. Rathenau to consistently continue this policy. We also do not believe that a bourgeois government could do it.”
The Völkischer Beobachter, on the other hand, spoke of a “bartering away of the German people” and of the “crime of Rapallo,” and after Rathenau’s assassination, wrote on June 28, 1922: “Rathenau stepped up in Cannes for a supranational banker government. The name of the same man stands but also on the Treaty of Rapallo, which binds Germany to the Bolshevist, allegedly anti-capitalist Russia to the core. Here we have the personal union between international Jewish high finance and international Jewish Bolshevism.”
The state-political line was thus a middle line, and it served to maintain Germany’s middle position. Although Brockdorff-Rantzau was proud of the relationship of trust that he felt bound him to Ischitscherin, he never lost the conviction that he was dealing with “unscrupulous fanatics” in Moscow whose intention it was one day to advance the “borders of Asia” as far as the Rhine. Stresemann, on the other hand, covered up all the efforts of his officials to protect Russian-German relations from damage, even if it meant yielding to blackmail, but in his eyes a marriage to Soviet Russia would have meant “getting into bed with the murderer of one’s own people.” Brockdorff-Rantzau and Stresemann continued the Rapallo policy only because Germany's position as a great power seemed tied to maintaining maneuvering room vis-à-vis the Western Allies, and they did the Soviet Union a great service in supporting the policy of accommodation with the West with the “Berlin Treaty” of April 1926 which counterbalanced the possibility that Germany could ever be used by England or France as a staging area for a war against the Soviet Union. The policy of the Communist Party of Germany leadership in those years also served the goal of preventing Germany from becoming definitively oriented towards the West and counteracting “Western European” tendencies within communism itself. It is doubtful whether the Soviet government actually believed in the danger of war, which it painted on the wall in garish colors, because there were good reasons for the correctness of an assumption shared by supporters and opponents alike, namely that in the event of an aggressive war of the western powers against the Soviet Union, an insurmountable resistance would develop behind the front and in the homeland. But relations had been extremely strained since the Baldwin government, threatened by the great general strike of May 1926, took very energetic action against the Soviet system of influence and espionage in the country and finally broke off diplomatic relations in the spring of 1927. Titles like “Soviet versus Civilization” were no longer unusual in England, and theses were heard again that had been advocated almost exclusively by Winston Churchill after 1920: there was a virtual state of war between Moscow and the capitalist states, in which the Bolsheviks attacked all the time, while the bourgeois side—Great Britain today, maybe the United States tomorrow—so far has only been a victim and hasn't even started to seriously defend itself. A little later, the French ambassador in Moscow was faced with a situation similar to that of General Hoffmann in the summer of 1918: in the Soviet Union, a new revolution was taking place against the peasants and the last remnants of the bourgeoisie, which was “carried out in cold blood in a state of complete external peace and full of internal order, in order to eradicate whatever remains of personal liberty and private property.” Jean Herbette therefore suggested to his foreign minister, Aristide Briand, that it would be better to consider breaking off relations than to show “yielding to evil.” So the desire to go on a crusade was certainly present in England and France, but it never developed into a will, because in the end the prevailing consciousness was that the structure of society would not permit a war of this particular kind.
Obstacles included not only the existence of a strong socialist movement, which was in significant parts pro-Soviet, but also the German middle position policy. Within this policy, it was precisely the Reichswehr that formed the left wing, so to speak, and was most closely allied with the Soviet Union. When they crushed the threatening uprising of the communists in Central Germany in 1923, there was already a “Sonderstab R” in the Reichswehr Ministry, German and Russian officers had been conducting negotiations behind the ambassador’s back, and a German aircraft factory was already under construction near Moscow. Cooperation continued after 1923, and the Lipetsk Aviation School near Voronezh, a gas combat school near Saratov and a training ground for combat vehicles near Kazan were established. Even when the Manchester Guardian and a few days later Philipp Scheidemann in his Reichstag speech of December 16, 1926 brought the hitherto strictly secret cooperation out into the open and both the Social Democratic Party and the Communist Workers’ Party began a violent campaign against the Soviet shells, nothing essential changed. In Reichswehr circles in particular, an image of the Soviet Union and its army spread that was far more positive than that of the German Nationalists or even the National Socialists. Whereas communist publications praised the unity and inner strength of the Red Army “of which a bourgeois army cannot even dream,” the Chief of the Troops Office, General von Blomberg, came to a not so dissimilar conclusion in 1928 after an extensive inspection trip, and he could not praise enough the warm commitment of War Commissar Voroshilov “for maintenance of close military relations with the Reichswehr.”
But it was Voroshilov who caused a serious disruption in German-Soviet relations in the next year.
On May 1, 1929, Brockdorff's successor, Herbert von Dirksen, had to report that a replica of the armored cruiser had been carried along at the May parade in Moscow, with an inscription affixed to it saying that Germany was sacrificing 80 million for the armored cruiser, but was letting the unemployed starve. Caricatures moved on the ship, which was marked by the German colors and which, according to inscriptions, represented the Social Democratic Reich Ministers, the Reich Minister of Defense, the Prussian Minister of the Interior and the Chief of Police of Berlin. Voroshilov explained in his speech that in so-called democratic Germany, the social democratic police chief Zörgiebel had banned May Day demonstrations, but despite this ban the working people were taking to the streets to demonstrate for their goals. This time Stresemann did not mince his words and instructed the ambassador to protest sharply against the “impudent mockery of the Reich flag” and against Voroshilov’s inadmissible interference in domestic German affairs. In a conversation with Stresemann, Ambassador Krestinski explained the events in such a way that the parades for May Day were being prepared for months in workers’ circles, with not even the party authorities and certainly not the government being able to get involved. But Voroshilov had actually only polemicized against the Social Democratic Party and not against the German government. The German government was satisfied with this not very credible explanation; but it could hardly have had any doubt that friendly state relations rested on exceedingly fragile foundations. At the same time, the state of the Soviet Union wanted to identify itself with a German party, and this German party had in the meantime built up a comprehensive intelligence apparatus, the management of which was entirely in the hands of Soviet specialists and which tended to turn German industry into a glass house, the interior of which was well known to Moscow. It is true that German engineers who were active in the Soviet Union also allegedly worked for the German intelligence service, as was alleged in the so-called Shakhty trial of 1928, but whoever looks at the gigantic apparatuses of the Communist Party of Germany and the intelligence service of the Red Army and the almost complete closure of the The Soviet Union on the one hand, and the corresponding institutions on the German side, could not have the slightest doubt about the enormous disproportionality. However, the best non-communist friends of the Soviet Union in Germany, in a seemingly paradoxical way, were the representatives of the monopoly bourgeoisie, along with the Reichswehr and intellectuals such as Thomas and Heinrich Mann who formed the “Society of Friends of the Soviet Union.” Some of them—including such influential men as Peter Klöckner, Ernst von Borsig and Ernst Poensgen—set out on a trip to Russia in the spring of 1931, from which they returned with great hopes and expectations, for they had been promised that the Soviet Union would buy even larger part of the industrial equipment that it needed to fulfill the five-year plan than it had already done. Admittedly, this trip in particular was sharply criticized in the German press, and state relations were once again put to the test when the Soviet Union signed non-aggression treaties with Poland and France in January and November 1932, thereby appearing to strengthen the Versailles system, among whose harshest critics it had belonged to since 1919 and, according to Stalin, wanted to continue to belong. A more peculiar relationship between two states had not existed in world history up to that point: Germany’s economic and political hopes of overcoming the world economic crisis rested to a large extent on orders from the Russians; in terms of state-policy, the country’s middle position between East and West was linked to the existence of the Soviet Union; socio-politically, however, the Soviet Union was a party to the civil war that began to unfold in Germany after the Bloody May, when Black Friday on the New York Stock Exchange in October 1929 brought about an analogue of the post-war crisis of 1919-1923.