Soviet-German cooperation
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[edit] 1920s
On Thursday, April 15, 1920, Victor Kopp, the Russian SFSR's special representative sent by Lenin to Berlin, asked at the German Foreign Office whether "there was any possibility of combining the German and the Red Army for a joint war on Poland". This was the start of military cooperation between the two countries, which ended with the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941.
Germany's Army had been reduced to a limit of 100,000 men by the Treaty of Versailles (1919), which also forbade the Germans to have aircraft, tanks, submarines, heavy artillery, poison gas, anti-tank weapons or anti-aircraft guns. A team of inspectors from the League of Nations patrolled German factories and workshops to ensure that these forbidden weapons were not being manufactured.
Practically, military cooperation of the USSR and Weimar, Germany began in 1923 after the treaty of Rapallo. Both countries were dissatisfied with the restrictions of the Versailles treaty.
The Russians offered Germany facilities for building and testing these arms, forbidden by the Treaty of Verseilles, deep inside Russia, well away from inspectors' eyes. In return, the Russians asked for a share in the German technical developments and assistance in creating a Red Army General Staff.
The first German officers went to Russia for these purposes in March 1922. One month later, Junkers began building forbidden aircraft at Fili, outside Moscow. The great cannon manufacturer Krupp was soon active in south Russia, near Rostov-on-Don. A flying school was established at Vivupal, near Lipetsk, beginning in 1925 to train the first pilots for the Luftwaffe of the future. A tank warfare school was created at Kazan, where the tactics for Blitzkrieg were worked out. This military cooperation enabled the basis for the new German armed forces to be created before Hitler came to power on January 30, 1933. A joint German-Soviet poison gas factory in the Urals was not a success.
In the late 1920s, Germany helped Soviet industry modernize and establish tank production at the Leningrad Bolshevik Factory and the Kharkov Locomotive Factory.
The Soviets offered submarine-building facilities at the Black Sea, but this was not taken up. The German Navy did take up a later offer of a base near Murmansk, where German vessels could hide from the British. One of the vessels that participated in the invasion of Norway came from this base. During the Cold War, this base at Polarnoye, built specially for the Germans, became the largest weapons store in the world.
Alongside Moscow's military assistance to the Reich, there was also political backing for Germany's aspirations. On July 19, 1920, Kopp told the German Foreign Office that Russia wanted "a common frontier with Germany, south of Lithuania, approximately on a line with Bialystok". In other words, Poland was to disappear completely. These promptings were repeated over the years, with the Soviets always anxious to stress that ideological differences between the two governments were of no account; all that mattered was that the two countries were pursuing the same foreign policy objectives. However, all German governments before Hitler rejected any venture into war.
[edit] 1930s
The cooperation ended in 1933 when Hitler came to power. From 1938 to 1939 the USSR was in strong opposition to nazi Germany, supporting republican forces of Spain who struggled against German and Italian troops. In 1938 Germany signed the Munich treaty, and together with the Western Powers and Hungary, divided Czechoslovakia. The Soviet government being afraid of a German attack on the USSR began diplomatic maneuvers.
[edit] 1939-1941
In 1939 Poland refused to participate in any measures of collective safety with the Soviet Union and on August 23, 1939, Germany and Russia signed the Ribbentrop-Molotov non-aggression pact, containing a secret protocol dividing up Eastern Europe. Poland was then indeed divided along the line suggested by Russia nineteen years earlier. Bialystok itself went to the Soviet Union, which took the larger share of Poland: 201,000 square kilometres, against 188,500 going to Germany. Some authors consider Soviet Union of that phase a non-belligerent partner of the Axis powers.[1] From August 1939 to June 1941, no sympathy for the nations under German occupation was expressed in Soviet media and, according to H.Kohn, while Lenin's Bolsheviks had promoted defeatism in both warring sides of the World War 1, “the subversive communist propaganda that was resumed in 1939 was directed only against the democratic nations.”[2]
While Britain blockaded Germany at sea to prevent the import of war materials from overseas, all the supplies which the Reich needed for the war were sent directly from the Soviet Union by rail. Stalin promised that what the Soviets could not supply from her own resources, they would buy up on the world's markets and pass on to Germany. Three-eighths of the oil used by Germany in 1940 came from the Soviet Union, including high-octane spirit for the Luftwaffe to fight the Battle of Britain.
The British historians Alan S. Milward and W.Medicott show, that Nazi Germany – unlike Imperial Germany – was only prepared for a short-term war (Blitzkrieg).[3] According to Andreas Hillgruber,[4] without the necessary supplies from the USSR and the strategic security in the East, Germany could not have succeeded in the West. Had Soviets joined the Anglo-French blockade, German war economy would have been blocked soon. With her own raw materials in September 1939, Germany could have been supplied for mere 9 to 12 months.[5]
From the start of the war until Germany invaded the Soviet Union less than two years later, Stalin supplied Hitler with 1.5 million tons of oil, the same quantity of grain, and many thousands of tons of rubber, timber, phosphates (for making explosives), iron and many valuable metal ores, particularly chromium, manganese and platinum. At the time of the invasion, Germany was heavily in debt to the Soviet Union.
According to Mr. Rapoport , "one of Stalin's first gifts to the Nazis was to turn over some 600 German Communists, most of them Jews, to the Gestapo at Brest-Litovsk in German-occupied Poland.”.[6] Soviets also offered support to Nazis in the official statements, Stalin himself emphasised that it was the Anglo-French alliance that had attacked Germany, not the other way round[7] and Molotov affirmed that Germany had made peace efforts, which had been turned down by 'Anglo-French imperialists'.[8]
[edit] References
- ^ N.S.Timasheff, Four Phases of Russian Internationalism - Thought, Vol.20 (March 1945) p.47. Cited in: Pan-Slavism and World War II by Hans Kohn in The American Political Science Review Vol. 46, No. 3 (Sep., 1952), pp. 699
- ^ Pan-Slavism and World War II by Hans Kohn in The American Political Science Review Vol. 46, No. 3 (Sep., 1952), p. 699
- ^ Milward, German Economy at War. London 1965, pp. 2-18; Medicott, The Economic Blockade. Vol I, London 1952, pp. 47-48.
- ^ Hillgruber, Germany at two World Wars. Harvard University Press, 1981, p. 75
- ^ Hillgruber, Hitlers Strategie. Politik und Kriegsführung 1940 – 1941. Frnakfurt am Main, 1965. S.667-671
- ^ Anatomies of a Murderer by DAVID K. SHIPLER http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE5DF1331F93BA25752C1A966958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all
- ^ Pravda, 30 November 1939, http://www.magister.msk.ru/library/stalin/14-25.htm
- ^ It is generally known, however, that the British and French governments turned down German peace efforts, made public by her already at the end of last year, which for its part, owed to preparations to escalate the war. Molotov's report on March 29, 1940 http://www.histdoc.net/history/molotov.html
