A Sense of the Enemy: The High Stakes History of Reading Your Rival's Mind (7 page)

Within such a tempestuous domestic and international scene, Germany needed stability abroad as much as at home. Soviet Russia represented one essential part of the foreign policy puzzle. Unfortunately for Stresemann, the Russian piece was exceedingly hard to fit into place. This was partly because Stresemann could not forget the Bolshevik attempt to overthrow him. He would remain conscious of the dangers Moscow posed even as he dealt secretly with that same regime.

Inconsistent Ally

Stresemann faced a conundrum. How could he deal with a Soviet Union that wanted to cooperate militarily on the one hand yet overthrow him on the other? He was well aware that the recently failed communist revolution had been funded with Russian gold. In a letter to Brockdorf-Rantzau on December 1, 1923, Stresemann, now serving as foreign minister, admitted that this covert financial support to revolution was the worrisome aspect of their relations with Russia.
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The Foreign Minister described how the Russians, under cover of their embassy in Berlin, had clumsily attempted to purchase weapons from a local arms dealer, but the dealer immediately informed the police. The buyer was a counselor in the Soviet Embassy, a Frenchman using the pseudonym Petrov. The entire episode underscored Soviet untrustworthiness and Germany’s current weakness. Yet Stresemann assured Brockdorff-Rantzau that Germany’s present state was merely temporary. Like a fever, it would soon pass and the nation would return to strength.
He urged the Ambassador that, at such challenging times, it was crucial for him not to be merely a “diplomatist like Chicherin, but a German Count,” whose powerful personality could represent his nation well. Such pep talks did nothing to resolve the basic tension. To avoid isolation, Germany had to preserve diplomatic relations with an aggressive communist regime.

Stresemann’s deputy, Carl von Schubert, emphasized this point in a meeting with Soviet Ambassador Krestinski, even though the Ambassador himself was known to be involved in the failed October uprisings. When the Prussian police raided Ruth Fischer’s apartment, they discovered a cache of letters between her and Zinoviev in Moscow, along with documents linking her to Petrov, Radek, and the entire misbegotten plot.
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The Soviet regime had been caught red-handed, yet the German Foreign Ministry knew that its larger foreign policy objectives depended on preserving the semblance of alliance.

In time, Stresemann came to see that the Soviets were changing and could be encouraged to change in a direction beneficial to German interests. Sobered by its debacle in Germany, the Kremlin leadership increasingly sought to focus on normalizing relations with continental powers in order to avoid a concerted bloc of hostile states to its west. To that end, relations with Germany assumed a growing importance. Stresemann, however, had to be wary. What Soviet leaders said mattered far less than what they did, but their actions were often contradictory. Even as Stresemann felt embattled by Soviet efforts to overthrow the Weimar regime, he recognized that Russia also sought German technical assistance in building up the Red Army.

Secretly, and in stark violation of Versailles, the German military, along with German industry, was conducting a covert rearmament plan in collaboration with the Russian government. Beneath the Soviet Union’s cloak, German industrial giants such as the Junker aircraft manufacturer established satellite factories inside Russia. German companies built munitions, arms, and poison gas there and quietly shipped their illegal war materiel back to Germany. Though Stresemann repeatedly denied these activities, he was not only well aware of them but took considerable risks to help them continue.

Ambassador Brockdorff-Rantzau had been cabling from Moscow with periodic updates. On September 10, 1923, the Ambassador attempted to
fill Stresemann in on the secret dealings between the Reichswehr and the Red Army. Brockdorff-Rantzau complained that the military had been keeping him in the dark about their efforts. The previous year, he told Stresemann, a six-member military mission traveled to Moscow for talks, but these conversations failed to produce concrete agreements. A second mission resulted in equally little success. The third high-level conversation occurred when a Russian representative visited Berlin on July 30, 1923, and met with Stresemann’s predecessor, Chancellor Wilhelm Cuno. Brockdorff-Rantzau expressed relief that in the event of an indiscretion, Germany would at least not appear as culpable as it would if German military representatives were discovered in Moscow. He worried that these secret Reichswehr dealings could be exposed, having damaging effects on Germany’s international position.
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The signs from Moscow throughout 1924 continued to be mixed. Brockdorff-Rantzau urged the continuation of relations and argued that all Western nations must deal with Russia’s dual policy.
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In April, the Ambassador informed Stresemann of difficulties delivering funds to the Junker factory inside Russia, evidencing signs of growing cooperation between both governments over the production of war materiel.
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Yet by May, another source of tension emerged when the Prussian police raided the Soviet trade delegation in Berlin. The Soviets were outraged. The German Interior Ministry, which had overseen the raid, thought it was doing its job. But the affair put Stresemann and the Foreign Ministry in a bind. Stresemann took the Interior Minister to task for failing to consult with him beforehand. The raid, coupled with Stresemann’s efforts to improve relations with the West, made the Soviets increasingly anxious.
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Their nervousness did not stop them, however, from escalating their demands both for compensation and full extraterritoriality for the trade delegation. Stresemann attempted to placate the Soviets, but by the month’s end he had reached the outer limit of what he was willing to do.
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Then came a signal that the tensions would be, if not exactly forgotten, then at least surmountable.

At 9:30 on the evening of June 10, Trotsky received Brockdorff-Rantzau in the War Commissariat. Looking fully recovered from his recent illness, Trotsky vigorously insisted that positive relations with Germany were paramount. The Ambassador worried that the raid had severely damaged relations, but Trotsky fervently objected. He assured the
German Ambassador that the problem would be solved. The positive and important military cooperation they had already begun, he declared, must continue.
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Following Lenin’s death in January 1924, Trotsky appeared to many outsiders as Lenin’s most likely heir. Stalin had yet to consolidate his power and destroy his rivals.
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Since Chicherin was not even a Politburo member, he could not be considered a true shaper of Soviet foreign policy. Trotsky’s pronouncements, in sharp contrast, had to be taken seriously. For Brockdorff-Rantzau, meeting with Trotsky at night in the War Commissariat and hearing him passionately assert that the German–Soviet military agreement must continue, was a break in the normal routine. Whether it was a meaningful break remained to be seen.

Tension flared again when Joachim Pieper, head of the Soviet Trade Mission in Berlin, made scarcely veiled threats to expose the two countries’ secret military cooperation unless the Germans accepted the Russian demands. Now it was Stresemann’s turn to be incensed. Brockdorff-Rantzau tried to obtain Chicherin’s written confirmation that the Soviet government would not permit its officials to blackmail Germany. Chicherin received the Ambassador at half past midnight on July 2, but their conversation did not resolve the matter. The following night at 10:00, Trotsky himself came to see the Ambassador. Brockdorff-Rantzau had been attempting to reach him for several days, but Trotsky had been in the countryside. Having only just returned and learned the news, Trotsky tried to calm the situation down. Russia and Germany, he insisted, had exactly the same interest in keeping their military relationship secret. If Pieper were to make any moves to expose relations, Trotsky assured the Ambassador that he personally would, in the name of the Soviet regime, denounce Pieper and throw him out.
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Not entirely satisfied by Trotsky’s promises, the Ambassador still attempted to obtain a written statement of the Soviet government’s stand on Pieper’s threats.

For Stresemann, the ongoing anxiety over the possible exposing of military cooperation only worsened as his Western policy progressed. On September 24, a Soviet Embassy advisor in Berlin came to see Stresemann to voice concern over Germany’s plan to join the League of Nations.
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Stresemann’s tightrope dance now stepped up in earnest. Soviet fears of being isolated waxed. So too did their threats to expose Germany’s Versailles violations. Stresemann had to keep both the
Russians and the Western powers satisfied that Germany was not fully committed to one camp or the other. All the while, Stresemann also faced the threat of Soviet-inspired agitation via the Comintern, which served largely as a tool of the Soviet regime. Chicherin maintained the party line, much to the annoyance of Western statesmen, that Comintern activities had no connection to the government in Moscow. On September 26, the Russian newspaper
Izvestya
reported on Chicherin’s meeting with American Secretary of State Hughes, in which Chicherin stressed that a sharp dividing line separated the Comintern from the regime. In the margin of this translated article in Stresemann’s collected papers is the handwritten note: “This hypocrisy is revolting.”
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The great complication in German–Soviet relations continued to be the threat of Soviet-inspired revolution inside Germany and more broadly Soviet meddling in German domestic affairs. In October 1924, Britain’s ruling Labour Party was defeated in general elections, partly because of the now infamous “Zinoviev Letter.” Although the document was probably forged by White Russian expatriates, the conservative British newspaper
The Daily Mail
published a letter from Moscow’s Comintern to the British communist party calling for revolutionary incitement in Britain. The letter was allegedly signed by Zinoviev, who forcefully denied having anything to do with it. Real or not, its effects were potent enough to concern Stresemann. Having already survived a communist revolution the previous year, the Foreign Minister had no intention of allowing a similar Zinoviev Letter to weaken his own government. At the close of October, Stresemann met with Soviet Ambassador Krestinski to warn him that a Zinoviev Letter episode in Germany could have a deeply damaging impact. Naturally, Krestinski fell back on the standard Soviet defense that would irritate diplomats across the continent: Zinoviev was not a member of the Soviet government but instead of the Comintern. The government thus had no control over his actions. Nevertheless, Krestinski agreed to pass along Stresemann’s concerns to Moscow.
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Meanwhile, power within the Bolshevik hierarchy was shifting, signaling a change relevant to Germany. In December 1924, Stalin declared that building socialism in one country represented a legitimate interpretation of Leninism. This enabled him to distance himself from the failed October revolution from the previous year and to begin
undercutting Trotsky, Kamenev, and Zinoviev. But Stalin’s pronouncement was hardly a guarantee that Stresemann could take seriously.

By the start of 1925, Stresemann was still frustrated with the Comintern. On January 2, the Foreign Minister sent a sternly worded note to Krestinski, demanding that the Soviet government cease interfering in German domestic affairs. The Soviets continued to insist that they had no control over Comintern calls for worldwide revolution, but no one took this claim seriously. Stresemann reiterated that he viewed the Comintern and Soviet regime as intimately intertwined.
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By June, Stresemann’s fears of Soviet interference had increased. Writing to American Ambassador Houghton, Stresemann expressed deep anxiety over Soviet meddling in Bulgaria, believing that Moscow was behind a recent political assassination and saying, “These events demonstrate in shocking manner the methods they use.” They show, he told Houghton, that the Soviets remain wedded to world revolution.
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Stresemann also assured Houghton that the communists were not likely to make much headway in Germany if the German economy remained stable. Naturally, the Foreign Minister was playing on the Americans’ concerns of a communist takeover in order to keep up pressure on the Western powers to reduce German reparations and ensure American loans to Germany. Despite this, Stresemann’s comments reflected his consistent worry over Moscow’s machinations.

The following week Stresemann held a two-and-a-half-hour discussion of the Russian problem with Brockdorff-Rantzau and two days later discussed the situation with Ambassador Krestinski. On June 11, Stresemann made plain his deep distrust of the Soviets and their attempts at worldwide revolution. Entering into an alliance with the Soviets was like “going to bed with the murderer of one’s own people.” There could be no illusions that the Soviet regime genuinely sought friendly relations with Germany, he declared, while it simultaneously used the Comintern to undermine Germany.
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The complexities of Stresemann’s policies were substantial. On the one hand he feared Soviet-led revolutions and on the other he facilitated secret military cooperation. Though initiated by the Reichswehr, Stresemann knew of the initial attempts at military collaboration as early as September 1923, thanks to Brockdorff-Rantzau’s reports. Stresemann undeniably understood the details of the relationship at least as early
as June 18, 1924, when he forwarded to General Seeckt a report from Brockdorff-Rantzau detailing some of the arrangements.
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He denied the existence of this relationship just six months later. On December 30, 1924, Stresemann told foreign journalists: