German rearmament
It began on a small, secret, and informal basis shortly after the treaty was signed and was openly and massively expanded after the Nazi Party came to power in 1933.
Secret cooperation between the German military and Soviet Russia began in 1921 and grew to include training in and manufacture of weapons banned by the Versailles Treaty.
Germany's defeat in the First World War and the peace terms of the Treaty of Versailles shaped the thinking of the leadership of the Weimar Republic's armed forces, the Reichswehr.
The illegal measures they took included providing Freikorps units and local Citizens' Defense groups (Einwohnerwehren) with military training and equipment;[4] establishing the Black Reichswehr;[5] creating secret funds such as were uncovered in the Lohmann Affair;[6] disguising state intervention in the armaments industry (Montan-Schema [de]); planning secretly for ramping up the German arms industry (Statistische Gesellschaft [de]); conducting secret armaments research in cooperation with the Kaiser Wilhelm Society;[7] continuing the banned general staff under the cover name Truppenamt;[8] and cooperating militarily with the Soviet Union to gain fundamental tactical and technical knowledge.
In the early years of the Weimar Republic, the paramilitary Freikorps grew rapidly with the support of the republican government and its first Defense minister, Gustav Noske.
[14] Even though the Black Reichswehr grew to a strength estimated at 50,000 to 80,000 men, it never went into action and was disbanded in late 1923 following the failed Küstrin Putsch, which involved some of its members.
[15] Units of the Citizens' Defense were formed in early 1919 to provide quick reinforcements against leftist revolutionary forces through the recruitment of small groups of civilians.
[19] Germany's secret rearmament program in the Soviet Union began in 1921 when the Ministry of Defence, with the approval of General Seeckt and the knowledge of Chancellor Joseph Wirth, established a Special Section R for the purpose.
[21][22] The cooperation expanded in 1926 to include the manufacture of poison gas and the establishment of a tank training school near Kazan, but due to the hesitation of German companies to invest in projects in the Soviet Union, the new ventures did not progress very far.
[25] When Seeckt was dismissed as Chief of the Army High Command in October 1926, the new leadership under General Wilhelm Heye realised that only cooperation with the Reichstag (parliament) would provide political safeguards for the desired rearmament measures.
[26] On 29 November 1926, Minister of Defence Otto Gessler, accompanied by the heads of both the army and navy, announced to the cabinet of Chancellor Wilhelm Marx that the secrecy towards state leadership would be abandoned and that from then on, comprehensive information would be provided about the rearmament measures that had been taken.
Gessler agreed to review the material, but the SPD did not trust him to make a clean breast of the situation so that it could be brought under Reichstag control.
On 16 December 1926, Philipp Scheidemann of the SPD delivered a speech in the Reichstag condemning the secret cooperation with domestic right-wing groups and with the Soviet army.
In a cabinet meeting on 26 February 1927, General Heye, who had been convinced by the arguments of Colonel Kurt von Schleicher, the High Command's liaison in the Reichswehr Ministry, proposed to form a committee which would include the states and political parties in order to reach agreements on the secret rearmament.
[28] After almost two years of preparatory work, the First Armament Program was approved by the Chief of Army Command on 29 September 1928 and adopted by the Müller cabinet on 18 October.
The air force, which was included for the first time, was to receive 110 million RM and consist of a total of 150 aircraft (78 reconnaissance, 54 fighters and 18 bombers).
Since it was a tightly calculated program designed for a maximum of armaments, it proved to be particularly sensitive to the economic situation, with the result that Groener was forced to request an additional one billion marks from the government over the five years.
The key players in German rearmament policies were Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick and Hjalmar Schacht, who had been president of the Reichsbank from 1923 to 1930.
[40] Schacht created the Metallurgische Forschungs-G.m.b.H, a shell company that would issue short-term treasury notes, which would "function as a concealed form of money".
Since Schacht's company did not function and instead just worked as a front for government-issued debt, this allowed the Nazi regime to conceal their rearmament funding from the international community.
[41] In another instance of money market fraud, one can examine Schacht's manipulation of the American international exchange system, which provided Germany an arbitrage opportunity allowing them to fund their rearmament program.
Adam Tooze noted in 2008 that an instruction manual given to tank crews during the war made clear this connection:[47] For every shell you fire, your father has paid 100 Reichsmarks in taxes, your mother has worked for a week in the factory ...
Think what you have in your hands!The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) provided an ideal testing ground for the proficiency of the new weapons produced by the German factories during the rearmament years.
[citation needed][disputed (for: conflicting information without verification) – discuss] The rearmament program quickly increased the size of the German officer corps, and organizing the growing army would be their primary task until the beginning of World War II on 1 September 1939.
[50] Since World War II, both academics and laypeople have discussed the extent to which German rearmament was an open secret among national governments.
George F. Kennan stated: "Unquestionably, such a policy might have enforced a greater circumspection on the Nazi regime and caused it to proceed more slowly with the actualization of its timetable.
This took place through a complex network of business interests, joint ventures, cooperation agreements, and cross-ownership between American and German corporations and their subsidiaries.
[53] Resources supplied to German companies (some of which were MEFO front companies established by the German state) by American corporations included: synthetic rubber production technology (DuPont[52] and Standard Oil of New Jersey),[53] communication equipment (ITT),[52][54] computing and tabulation machines (IBM), aviation technology (which was used to develop the Junkers Ju 87 bomber),[52][55] fuel (Standard Oil of New Jersey and Standard Oil of California),[56] military vehicles (Ford and General Motors),[57] funding (through investment, brokering services, and loans by banks like the Union Banking Corporation), collaboration agreements, production facilities and raw materials.
