Hitler Moves East, 1941-1943 (35 page)

Tukhachevskiy's execution and Voroshilov's Order of the Day released an avalanche against which there was no protection. Every disgruntled soldier, every injured subordinate, now settled his accounts by denouncing as suspect any superior he disliked. In that orgy of political purging there was no acquittal. And every man who was condemned dragged down with him his followers, his friends, and his acquaintances— all to their doom. In hundreds at first, but presently in their thousands, and eventually in tens of thousands, the officers made the terrible journey into the NKVD cellars, for a bullet in the back of their necks, or for deportation to the prison camps of Siberia. Within a year the Officers Corps of the Red Army had been reduced by 50 per cent, and its higher ranks almost completely liquidated.

These facts would seem to prove conclusively that, by means of the cunning intrigue of SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, Hitler destroyed the entire command apparatus of the Red Army three years before the attack on the Soviet Union—in other words, that he prepared his victories in the NKVD cellars and the tiled execution rooms of the Lubyanka prison. Can this monstrous thesis really stand up to a thorough examination? Did 30,000 to 40,000 officers of the workers and peasants' army really die through a political swindle by the underworld of the secret service?

Appearances strongly support this conclusion—but appearances are superficial. Heydrich was not the author of the spectacle; he was himself only an assistant. His faked-up file was not the cause of the trial and conviction of Tukhachevskiy and his friends, but only Stalin's alibi. The roots of the tragedy which wiped out the flower of the Soviet Officers Corps were far deeper. They sprang from a genuine ruthless struggle for power between two mighty rivals. It was the savage end of the only power which could have overthrown Stalin. It marked the fateful victory of Georgian despotism over the Russian Bonaparte Tukhachevskiy, who—even if his hand was not yet stretched out to grasp supreme power—was already standing by to take over from the lunatic dictator and, supported by the strength of the Army, put an end to the Stalinist mismanagement. The slaughter of the Officers Corps was the result of a dramatic process, not merely of a low trick.

As such it takes its place in history as the tragic culmination of German-Soviet relations after the First World War, and as one of the factors in that most appalling tragedy of modern history—Operation Barbarossa. It began long before Hitler with playing at war, and it ended with war in earnest. A proper understanding of the whole tragedy of the German-Soviet war requires acquaintance with that earlier chapter.

In April 1925 a strange incident took place in the free port of Stettin. A customs officer newly posted to Stettin—he is still alive, so we shall call him Ludwig, although that is not his real name—was making his nightly routine inspection when he came upon a few men trying to remove a large crate from Shed 1. When challenged the men abandoned the crate and melted into the shadows. Ludwig raised the alarm. A fellow customs officer, who turned up surprisingly suddenly, seemed anxious to dismiss the whole incident. Ludwig became suspicious and ran his torch over the packing-case. "Machinery spares" was stencilled on it in large black letters, first in German and below in Russian. A label glued to the case gave the addressee as GEFU, Berlin, Germany. The sender was GEFU, Lipetsk, USSR. When Ludwig wanted to investigate the mysterious case his colleague suddenly asked him, "Were you in the Army, colleague Ludwig?"

Ludwig was astonished. "Of course." The other man nodded. "And did you see active service?"

"Want me to show you my Iron Cross?" Ludwig retorted angrily. "Or would you like to see my Free Corps service book?"

The other man smiled and tried to pacify him. "No, no, colleague Ludwig; but I think I may tell you now what this case contains. A tin coffin with a body. An Air Force officer of the Reichswehr."

Ludwig stepped back in terror. "What are you saying? A dead man? An Air Force officer? But it says on the case 'machinery spares.' And it's from Russia."

"That's right," the other man nodded. Then they talked for half an hour outside Shed 1 in the free port of Stettin.

After that Ludwig was satisfied, saluted, and left. His colleague whistled lightly. Out of the shadows of the shed appeared four men.

"Everything's all right," the customs officer said softly. "A new chap, didn't know the ropes yet. But we've got to get a move on now, gentlemen; it's getting late." They put the case on a trolley and wheeled it to a pier. Alongside a small boat was made fast. Cautiously they lowered the freight into it. Then they jumped in themselves. They saluted and quietly rowed away, towards the bank of the Oder.

If the customs officer Ludwig had been a man of the political left rather than the right this incident would probably have triggered off a political scandal that would have reverberated round the world. The episode in the port of Stettin, with a dead body in a packing-case from Lipetsk, in Russia, declared as machinery spares, would have torn the curtain of silence which hid one of the most astonishing chapters of the Weimar Republic—the chapter of secret collaboration between the German Reichswehr and the Red Army. This collaboration formed the background to the Tukhachevskiy trial. It marked a dramatic period in the German-Soviet alliance, an alliance whose champions and representatives were murdered by Stalin, but are to-day being rehabilitated by Khrushchev.

Germany was the great loser of the First World War. But Russia too, Germany's former adversary, was not on the side of the victorious Powers. She stood aloof, isolated from the rest of the world, as did Germany—for the October Revolution and the establishment of a Communist Soviet State had given rise to a coalition of capitalist countries aiming at the overthrow of the Bolsheviks. They tried to achieve this aim by military intervention. When that failed an attempt was made to put economic pressure on the Soviets and coerce them into recognizing the obligations undertaken by the Tsarist empire. But Lenin's Government resisted, and the Soviet Republic refused to pay the Tsarist empire's debts to the Western 'capitalist' democracies.

Germany similarly resisted reparation payments, and in particular opposed the suggestion of Western statesmen that she should also pay the Tsar's old debts to the Western Powers. Out of this common opposition to the victorious Western Powers sprang the alliance of the defeated and have-nots. Logically enough, it began in the economic field. Its first fruit was the Treaty of Rapallo-—a quickly arranged agreement signed between German and Soviet negotiators in the little Italian riviera resort of Rapallo on Easter Day 1922. Ra-pallo swept away the legacy of the war between the Soviet Union and Germany. The two Powers waived compensation claims in respect of war costs and war damage. It was decided to resume diplomatic relations, to regard one another as equal partners, and apply in matters of trade the principle of most favoured country treatment. There were no secret military clauses in the Treaty of Rapallo, although this suggestion is occasionally heard to this day. This misconception springs from the fact that the agreement on common economic interests soon gave rise to further agreements. It was a logical development.

Rapallo had put an end to both Germany's and the Soviet Union's diplomatic and economic isolation. Why should not an attempt be made to develop the spirit and the letter of this Treaty into a kind of blockade runner against the military impositions and prohibitions with which Versailles had hamstrung the German Reichswehr? The Reichswehr, for instance, was forbidden to possess any tanks or anti-tank guns, any heavy motorized guns, any aircraft, and any means of chemical warfare. Under such restrictions it was impossible to build up a modern army. In particular, the strict ban on all armour was cutting Germany off from the military developments which were bound to follow from the introduction of armoured fighting vehicles in the First World War, developments which were generally regarded as being of decisive importance. Indeed, for that very reason the victorious Powers had insisted, in Article 171 of the Treaty of Versailles, that Germany must neither manufacture fighting vehicles nor "import armoured cars, tanks, or any similar constructions suitable for military purposes." In the circumstances, what could Germany do? Unless these prohibitions could be circumvented every single mark paid out on the Reichswehr was a pointless waste of money.

It was Karl Radek, the brilliant intellectual in Lenin's Old Guard, who brought about the first contacts between the Soviets and Colonel-General von Seeckt of the Reichswehr Directorate, and thereby helped Germany to cast off the shackles of Versailles.

Radek, a convinced Bolshevik, a genuine people's tribune, one of the founders of the Communist Party of Germany, and an associate of Lenin during the latter's Swiss exile, was an ardent champion of the idea that "the common enemy, the victors of Versailles," must be defeated by an alliance between the Soviet Union and Germany. Radek did not consider it necessary that, for the purpose of such an alliance, Germany had to be Communist. In fact, he regarded the,German nationalists as a transitional stage on the way to Bolshevism. Thus, when Albert Leo Schlageter, a second lieutenant in one of the irregular German Free Corps, an underground fighter against the French occupation of the

Ruhr, was sentenced to death and shot by the French in May 1923, for an act of sabotage, Radek paid tribute to him before the Communist International on 20th June 1923 in a sensational speech entitled "Leo Schlageter, Traveller into Nothingness."

Karl Radek assisted at the birth of the military alliance between the Red Army and the Reichswehr. He was also to become its gravedigger.

The Soviets were interested in letting their young armed forces profit from the experience of German officers and in rebuilding their utterly derelict armament industries with German help. The Reichswehr, on the other hand, needed weapons whose manufacture was prohibited in Germany; it also needed training grounds where men might learn to use these forbidden weapons. On this basis a number of secret agreements were concluded between the Reichswehr and the Red General Staff. On the German side these activities were entrusted to "Special Group R"—R standing for Russia—a top-secret department of the German Army Directorate. Its executive organ was an economic front organization, the firm named GEFU, the Association for the Promotion of Commercial Undertakings.

This camouflage firm had an office in Berlin and another in Moscow. It was financed from the secret funds of the Reichswehr. It concluded contracts with Soviet authorities, maintained daughter companies in the most diverse parts of Russia, and set up German—Russian production units for the purpose of secret rearmament, with a production programme confined not only to aerial bombs, tanks, aircraft, and means of chemical warfare, but including even submarines—in short, everything that Germany, under the Treaty of Versailles, was forbidden to manufacture or use.

Geoffrey Bailey, the American expert on this backstage work of the Red Army, says in his book
Conspirators:

By 1924 the firm of Junkers was building several hundred all-metal aircraft a year in the Moscow suburb of Fill. Very soon more than 300,000 shells a year were coming from the reconstructed and modernized Tsarist arsenals in Leningrad, Tula, and Zlatoust. Poison gas was manufactured by the firm of Bersol in Trotsk (now Krasnogvardeysk), and U-boats and armoured ships were being built and launched in the yards of Leningrad and Nikolayev. In 1926 more than 150,000,000 marks, nearly one-third of the Reichswehr's annual budget, went on purchases of armaments and ammunition in the USSR.

The directing body which controlled these German activities in the Soviet Union was a secret organization under the code name ZMO, short for "Zentrale Moskau," or Moscow Central Office. ZMO was the German Army Directorate's 'Foreign Office' in Russia. Its representatives, von der Lieth-Thomsen and Professor Oskar Ritter von Niedermayer, known as Neumann, conducted all negotiations with the top officials of the Red Army and the Soviet Government.

ZMO was ever present. ZMO, in fact, was a kind of shadow Government of the Weimar Republic functioning in Russia. Yet its -representatives carefully kept out of the limelight.

Naturally, the manufacture of the forbidden war material was only one side of this collaboration. Since the importation of such weapons into Germany was likewise forbidden and, in the circumstances, would have been impossible to keep secret, it was equally important to make arrangements for the establishment of training centres outside Germany for the use of these weapons. The Soviet Union thus became the Reichs-wehr's training-ground.

Between 1922 and 1930 the following facilities were set up or extended for German use: a German Air Force centre at Vivupal near Lipetsk, 250 miles south-east of Moscow; a school of gas warfare in Saratov on the lower Volga, in operation since 1927; and a school of armoured fighting vehicles with training-grounds at Kazan on the middle Volga, in use since 1930.

As a collateral, Soviet officers who were being groomed for the Red Army staffs—former NCOs of the Tsarist Army, meritorious civil war fighters, and decorated political commissars—sat side by side with German General Staff aspirants in the classrooms of the German military academies and listened to lessons on Moltke's, Clausewitz's, and Ludendorff's art of warfare.