FROM FLAPPERS AND THE Charleston, to speakeasies and the Wall Street boom, America’s roaring twenties are remembered as a time of exuberance and hope. Having emerged from World War I as the world’s largest creditor nation, the United States enjoyed a decade of economic growth. But Europe’s 1920s stood in shocking contrast. Devastated by the Great War, Britain and France had lost a generation of young men. The Russian Revolution had unleashed fears of contagious unrest. And nowhere on the continent was the situation more unstable than in Germany. The decade’s early years brought invasion, hyperinflation, political assassinations, and revolts across the nation. Throughout the tumult, one of the few steady hands was Dr. Gustav Stresemann.
Squat and stocky, a lover of good food and wine, Stresemann never saw fit to exercise. He consumed his work like his meals, spending long hours and late nights at his desk. There was an intensity to his manner, whether opining on high literature or dissecting political alignments. So much of his passion shone through in his face. His personal secretary once described his boss’s “watery and bloated skin” as merely the frame around his piercing eyes.1 Born in 1878 to a lower-middle-class beer distributor in Berlin, Stresemann developed into something of a Wunderkind. By the age of twenty-one, he had already earned a doctorate in economics, writing his dissertation on the bottled beer industry. He landed his first job in Dresden, representing the organization of chocolate manufacturers for the state of Saxony. As a lobbyist for industry, he became closely tied to politics. In 1906, he won a seat on the town council, and the following year he stood for and won a seat in the German Parliament as a member of the National Liberal Party. When World War I came, a weak heart left him unable to serve. Later he would suffer from kidney disease. His overall ill health condemned him to die in office, much too young and far too soon to check the spread of extremism.
After the war, Stresemann emerged as a leader in the right-of-center German People’s Party, serving a mere 100 days as Chancellor, then assuming the role of foreign minister, a post he would retain until his death in 1929. Within a few years of taking office, Stresemann came to be seen by Western publics as a sensible statesman intent on establishing his country as a cornerstone of European stability. Coming to terms with Britain and France at a meeting in Locarno, Switzerland, in 1925, Stresemann pledged Germany to join the League of Nations, settle its disputes with eastern neighbors, and preserve the current arrangements in the West. In recognition of Locarno, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace.2 Albert Einstein later praised Stresemann as a great leader, asserting that his finest achievement was “to induce a number of large political groups, against their own political instincts, to give their support to a comprehensive campaign of European reconciliation.” Einstein concluded that Stresemann was a “man of mind and bearer of an idea. . . . as different from politicians of the usual stamp as a genius differs from an expert.”3
The Locarno Agreement has been called the hinge on which the interwar era turned. It marked the true end of the First World War, and its collapse eased the way for the Second to occur. Despite its ultimate failure, the “spirit of Locarno” stabilized Germany’s international relations and reestablished Germany as an equal among the European powers.4 Given the series of crises that the Weimar government confronted following the war, maneuvering Germany back to strength was a remarkable feat, one that only a masterful strategic empath could pull off.
How did Stresemann do it? How did he succeed in sensing his rivals’ drivers and thereby help reclaim his country’s greatness? One way to answer that question is by focusing on Stresemann’s reading of the Russians: the pattern of Soviet behavior and their behavior at pattern breaks.
In order to restore his nation’s position among the great powers, Stresemann needed to balance dangerously delicate relations with Britain and France on the one hand and with Soviet Russia on the other. He had to manage this while simultaneously safeguarding his own position atop the Foreign Ministry. The keystones of his Western strategy were twofold: fulfill the terms of the Versailles Treaty (a policy dubbed “fulfillment”) and normalize relations with Britain and France. To bolster his bargaining position with the Western powers, he needed to foster ties to the Soviet Union through overt accords and covert deals. It was a daring strategy. Any moves too far into one camp or the other risked upending the entire endeavor. To advance along such a tenuous tightrope, Stresemann had to assess the drivers and constraints of his adversaries both East and West. While the drivers of Western statesmen were not always completely transparent, they were far simpler to assess than those of the Soviets. Gauging whether the Soviets wanted to ally with the German government or to overthrow it formed a crucial test of Stresemann’s strategic empathy. Fortunately, he possessed a true knack for learning how the other side thought and felt.
One of Stresemann’s contemporaries, Antonina Vallentin, tried to encapsulate the great statesman’s diplomatic aplomb:
The moment he sat down opposite a man, he was no longer confined within his own personality, he felt himself into the other man’s mind and feelings with such amazing accuracy that he could follow the most unusual trains of thought as quickly as if he had been familiar with them for years. He could thus forestall objections, and so startle his interlocutor by his intuition, that the latter found himself strangely disposed to reach agreement. . . . His sudden flashes of capacity for self-transference into another’s mind gave him moments of uncanny clarity of vision such as scarcely any statesman has possessed before him.5
Stresemann’s empathic gifts undeniably aided his sense of what drove others around him. Yet the traits that Vallentin described were not the only factors fueling Stresemann’s success. The Foreign Minister also possessed an acute capacity for recognizing the constraints upon his rivals. From the moment he assumed the Chancellorship through his long tenure as Foreign Minister, he would need every drop of strategic empathy he could muster when dealing with the Soviets. The Russians played diplomatic hardball, and Lenin had skillfully selected the man to represent the Bolshevik regime.
Georgi Chicherin stood in striking contrast to his German counterpart. Unlike Stresemann, whose father was a lower-middle-class beer distributor, Chicherin was heir to the refined traditions of Russia’s landed aristocracy. Tall and heavy-set, with a moustache and thin beard, Chicherin walked hunched over, as if weighted down by the knowledge contained in his capacious mind. Conversant in English, French, German, Italian, Serbian, and Polish, he could dictate cables in multiple languages simultaneously. He played piano expertly and studied the works of the composers he adored: Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner. Like Stresemann, Chicherin never exercised, typically working at his desk until early morning, and his health suffered as a result. Intensely introverted, his preference for books over people left him with long hours to absorb seemingly endless facts and figures.6 Riveted by history, he consumed volumes about the wider world. In 1904, he adopted Marxism, and with it came the zeal of the converted. His commitment to the movement had a passion that rivaled even Lenin’s. He gave all that he possessed—wealth, time, energy, and talent—to furthering the cause. Intent on renouncing the outward ostentation of his class, he lived in spartan accommodations and wore only a single yellow-brown tweed suit, never varying his attire. Chicherin’s convictions, coupled with his extraordinary breadth of knowledge and his aristocratic erudition, made him a brilliant choice by Lenin to lead the Soviet Foreign Ministry. The statesmen of Europe could not begrudge him their respect. He was, in short, a daunting opponent in diplomatic affairs.
One of Chicherin’s earliest impressions on the world stage came at the economic conference in Genoa, Italy, in 1922, when he stunned his Western interlocutors. The Bolsheviks had not only frightened Western states by threatening to spread revolution throughout the world; they had also earned Western ire by repudiating the Tsarist debts. Britain and France in particular had invested enormous sums into prewar Russia, and they fully intended to recoup those funds. The Bolsheviks maintained that the corrupt Romanov dynasty did not represent the Russian people’s will, and therefore the new communist regime was not bound to honor Tsarist commitments. At Genoa, Britain and France pressed their case with the Soviet delegation. Chicherin responded by presenting the Allies with the Soviet Union’s counter-claims—to the staggering tune of 35 billion gold marks, a figure even greater than what the Allies claimed was owed to them.
To justify these counter-claims, Chicherin, along with his deputy Maxim Litvinov, conjured up an obscure precedent of international law. Chicherin drew British attention to the Alabama Claims Case, which followed the American Civil War. During that conflict in the 1860s, Britain had supported the South, even funding the building of southern warships, one of which was called the Alabama. After the U.S. Civil War concluded and the North prevailed, the American federal government sued Great Britain for damages inflicted on the North by those British-built ships. The United States won the case, and Britain paid. Chicherin then drew the obvious analogy. During the Bolshevik struggle for power against the conservative White Russian armies, Britain and her allies had supported the Whites, thereby prolonging the conflict. Chicherin asserted that Britain and her allies therefore owed the Bolshevik regime for damages inflicted during the Russian Civil War. The Soviets, rather conveniently, estimated those damages at an amount even greater than what the Tsarist government owed the West.
Britain’s Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, was, in a word, flabbergasted. He retorted that Britain had never billed France for its support of the British monarchy during the English Civil War, and France had not billed Britain for its support of the Bourbons in the French Revolution.7 Lloyd George’s protestations notwithstanding, the fact remained that the Allies had actively intervened against the Bolshevik government, backing anti-Bolshevik Russian armies, and even deploying forces of their own. The analogy remained, and negotiations stood at an impasse.
Although Chicherin had the capacity to rival Stresemann in diplomatic skill, Chicherin was hamstrung by the Politburo, the key decision-making body of which he was not even a member. Unlike Stresemann, who had tremendous latitude over German foreign policy, the Soviet Foreign Minister was forced to execute the wishes of his superiors. In fact, if Chicherin had had his way, the Soviet Union would have honored the Tsarist debts. He urged Lenin to do so, but Lenin was adamant. On May 2, 1922, Lenin sent a telegram to the Soviet delegation essentially ordering his foreign minister not to grant any concessions to the West. The Soviet government would not even return any private property it had seized since the revolution. If Chicherin vacillated, Lenin threatened, he would be publicly disavowed. Before the message was sent, the Politburo removed the language about discrediting its foreign minister, but it retained the stern warnings not to compromise.8 There was nothing Chicherin could do.
Using his formidable knowledge of history and world affairs, Chicherin fell into line, toughened the Soviet position, and dispatched an armada of arguments like the Alabama Claims case. As with so many legal wranglings, the move was extremely clever and thoroughly unwise. The talks eventually disbanded without agreement. Constructive diplomatic relations between Russia and Britain would not resume for years. Later in the conference, the Soviet delegation met secretly with German representatives at the nearby town of Rapallo. There, the then German Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau signed the treaty renouncing all debts between the Russian government and his own, and the two countries embarked on a troubled alliance that would shape the decade to come.
We cannot comprehend the full challenge Stresemann confronted in reading the Russians without first recognizing the dangerous environment in which he had to function. Stresemann had to develop his strategic empathy in the crucible of nationwide upheaval. He and most of Germany’s prominent politicians in the immediate postwar years risked much more than merely their careers. In a very real sense, they had reason to fear for their lives. With the stakes this high, knowing one’s enemy could literally be vital.
In January 1919, both of the German Communist Party’s (KPD) most prominent spokesmen, the fiery Jewish intellectual Rosa Luxemburg and the rash Karl Liebknecht, were murdered by right-wing Free Corps units, paramilitary bands that had sprung up across the nation. Another left-wing leader, Bavaria’s Jewish Minister-President Kurt Eisener, was shot and killed in Munich. Immediately thereafter, Bavaria declared itself a Soviet Republic. Within one month, that government was overthrown by Reichswehr (the German military) and Free Corps forces who killed more than 1,000 government supporters during the struggle. The following year, Free Corps units under the leadership of Wolfgang Kapp marched on Berlin, forcing officials of the federal government to flee to Stuttgart. Though militarily proficient, Kapp and his men failed to forge the political alliances needed to govern. A general strike quickly brought them down, and the Social Democratic government returned to power.
The year 1921 saw workers’ strikes and revolts flare up across the country. In the wake of Rosa Luxemburg’s assassination, Ruth Fischer, a fervent Marxist who had helped found the Austrian Communist Party before moving to Berlin, assumed an increasing leadership role within the KPD. Yet neither she nor her comrades were able to inspire enough of the German working class, the majority of whom still supported the more moderate Social Democratic Party. The KPD attempted to spark a revolution, but the unrest was met with force and quelled.
Political violence touched even some of the government’s highest officials. In 1922, Weimar’s first Chancellor, Philipp Scheidemann, who had resigned in protest over the Versailles Treaty, went strolling in the woods. His daughter, along with her eight-year-old niece, walked at his side. From behind a large tree, an assailant rushed toward the ex-Chancellor and sprayed acid at his face. The chemicals missed his head, burning instead his arms and legs. Prudently, given the climate of political violence at the time, Scheidemann was armed. Pulling a revolver from his pocket, he managed to fire two shots before he collapsed. The perpetrator and his accomplice escaped.9 Years later, Scheidemann’s assailants were captured and tried. In their defense they claimed that their actions had been inspired by the right-wing media.
One of the first to contact Scheidemann to congratulate him on his escape was the German Jewish Foreign Minister, Walther Rathenau. A few weeks later, when Rathenau was driving to work at the Foreign Ministry, armed gunmen drove up beside him, fired machine guns, and lobbed a hand grenade into his car. It was Rathenau who had signed the Rapallo Treaty with Russia, normalizing relations with the communist regime, an extraordinary diplomatic move but one that the far right-wing could not abide.
As turbulent as the political scene had become, it was about to grow worse. In January of 1923, French and Belgian armies invaded. Frustrated over Germany’s refusal to pay the exceedingly high reparations imposed at Versailles, France and Belgium seized the coal-producing Ruhr region of western Germany. The plan was ill-conceived from the start. Militarily, Germany had no means of response. Unwilling to accept a violation of its sovereignty, the German government organized a general strike in the region. Without German workers to mine and extract the coal, France had no ability to remove what it had seized. A popular cartoon of the day depicted a French general telegraphing to Paris that the military operations had gone exactly to plan, but the soldiers were freezing, so please send some coal.
Just as Kapp’s plans had succeeded militarily but foundered politically, defeated by a general strike, the French and Belgian efforts met a similar result. Force could not accomplish what only a political solution could achieve. Yet the strike took a painful toll on the German populace. In order to maintain their defiant action, the federal government continued to pay workers in the Ruhr not to work. This decision, combined with the printing of money in order to purposely inflate the Reichsmark and thereby render reparation payments worthless, led to hyperinflation. The political costs of extreme economic dysfunction left the country primed for revolution.
It was in this troubled context that Gustav Stresemann assumed the Chancellorship in August of 1923. Although he served as Chancellor for a scant three months, it proved a breathtakingly tense period. Facing the fallout from domestic hyperinflation and foreign invasion would have challenged any new regime. On the economic front, Stresemann’s introduction of the Rentenmark dramatically reduced inflation.10 On the political front, however, instability was still deadly. On September 26, Stresemann called off resistance to the Ruhr occupation, realizing that it only inflamed the situation and hindered Germany’s hopes of normalizing relations with the West. Continued truculence could not raise the nation up from its supine posture. He believed that a certain degree of compliance with the West was the only feasible method of getting Germany back on its feet and restoring its strength. The danger in his fulfillment policy was that the far right viewed it as unforgivable: nothing less than subservience to the victors. Unbeknownst to Stresemann, scarcely more than one month into his Chancellorship, Hugo Stinnes, an extremely wealthy Ruhr industrialist, was plotting a coup. Stinnes approached American Ambassador Alinson B. Houghton to feel out whether he could obtain American support. In place of Stresemann, Stinnes himself, along with the head of the Reichswehr, Hans von Seeckt, and the former chief of the Krupp corporation would rule Germany, presumably ensuring order and economic growth. This in turn would enhance Germany’s ability to repay its reparations to the United States and others. American Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes was not impressed, and the plot never materialized.11
But this was merely the first bullet that Stresemann luckily escaped. Another came from within a rogue band of the German military. Hans von Seeckt, head of the Reichswehr and a staunch monarchist, had no fondness for the Weimar Republic. He served the state in order to rebuild the military. His eventual hope was to destroy Poland and restore German borders to their prewar frontiers. Although in 1920 he had refused to move the Reichswehr against the Kapp putsch, leaving the Weimar government in the lurch, he did act decisively to crush a putsch attempt on the night of September 29, 1923. For several years, a clandestine group within the military known as the Black Reichswehr had been murdering Germans who cooperated with the Inter-Allied Military Control Commission, a body established by the victors in World War I to inspect and oversee German disarmament. Now a Black Reichswehr leader, Major Bruno Buchrucker, captured several forts on the outskirts of Berlin, the first step toward a coup d’état. Seeckt ordered the official Reichswehr to put down the attempt. Buchrucker capitulated after only two days. He was tried, fined, and sentenced to prison.12 General Seeckt used this opportunity to disband the Black Reichswehr, rather than lose control of it.
The Reichswehr’s intrigues proved minor in comparison to the two large-scale violent uprisings that Stresemann next confronted. One came from the Right, when Adolf Hitler launched his notorious Beer Hall Putsch. The other emerged from the Left, when the Soviet Union’s leadership instigated what it hoped would be a communist seizure of power. Moscow’s attempt to topple Stresemann’s regime and spark a revolution across Germany left Stresemann in a bind. For the remainder of his time in office, he would need to maintain extreme vigilance against a repeated Soviet threat while at the same time cooperating with the Russians to help gain leverage against Britain and France. His most immediate concern in 1923, however, was simply to survive.
On August 23, 1923, the Politburo met to discuss opportunities for fomenting a German revolution. Leon Trotsky was the most enthusiastic, believing that Germany’s time was imminent. Grigory Zinoviev was only slightly less optimistic, assuming that the revolution might still be months away. Their expectations resulted in part from the popular German resistance to the French invasion of the Ruhr earlier in the year. Stalin, in contrast, doubted that a revolution would succeed, but he had not yet consolidated his power within the group. Years later, he would use the fact that he had been right to discredit his rivals. But in the fall of 1923, Trotsky and Zinoviev held greater sway. Karl Radek, the Communist International (Comintern) member most knowledgeable about Germany, also believed that the German masses were not yet prepared to take the requisite action in support of a revolution, but he did not express his full concerns at the Politburo meeting. Heinrich Brandler, who led the KPD, tried to resist the push for immediate uprisings, but during a series of meetings in Moscow, his reluctance withered. Under pressure, Brandler consented to the ill-conceived plot.13
On paper, the scheme must have seemed plausible. Using the Soviet embassy in Berlin as cover, Moscow smuggled money and advisors into Germany to help organize the coming assaults. The Politburo charged the Soviet Ambassador to Germany, Nikolai Krestinski, with overseeing the secret funds.14 The Soviets covertly shipped weapons from Petrograd to Hamburg, which were then off-loaded by Communist Party longshoremen. These party members stored the weapons in areas under their control. The entire operation was to be overseen by Radek. Meanwhile, Brandler was instructed to ally with Social Democrats of Saxony and organize 50,000 to 60,000 workers to serve essentially as armed paramilitary units, warding off the expected attacks from the Right. Brandler asked Moscow to send an appropriate expert to coordinate the revolution’s military aspects. Peter Skoblevsky, who served as a general during the Russian Civil War, arrived to take charge of all armed operations.
Spotting the signs of increased agitation, the Prussian police began cracking down on the KPD in late August. They raided the office of the communist newspaper, the Rote Fahne (Red Flag), and soon thereafter raided the Party’s headquarters. They had a warrant for Ruth Fischer’s arrest, but she was not to be found. Fischer, along with Brandler and other top communists, were already in (or heading toward) Moscow, making plans for the coming seizure of power. Trotsky distrusted Fischer and preferred that she remain in Moscow during the revolution, but Zinoviev opposed him on this point. As a compromise, Fischer was permitted to return to Germany, while her colleague Arkady Maslow was forced to stay behind and endure an investigation of his past performance within the Party.
Soviet Russia’s dual policy of conducting traditional diplomacy on the one hand while supporting foreign revolutions on the other left diplomats and statesmen both frustrated and perplexed. The German Ambassador in Moscow, Count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, reported on his conversations with Soviet Foreign Minister Chicherin. The Soviets were anxious over the possibility of a Franco–German alliance that would leave Russia isolated. This fear would haunt Moscow throughout the interwar era. Yet if this were truly a Soviet concern, then Russian policy seemed contradictory. In the wake of ongoing Soviet support for communist upheavals in Germany, Brockdorff-Rantzau expressed the same confusion occurring across Western capitals. Just who was making Russian foreign policy: the government or the communist party?15
Diplomacy is full of duplicity, and the Ambassador’s conversations with Karl Radek illustrate this well. On September 27, Brockdorff-Rantzau complained to Radek about an article in the German Communist newspaper Rote Fahne in which Leon Trotsky called for a widening of revolutionary activity. Radek explained that Trotsky was merely referring to activity in Bulgaria. There was no reason for concern. Radek expressed confidence in the possibilities for greater German–Soviet cooperation.16 In actuality, Radek was not only aware of the imminent German communist uprising, he was in the midst of organizing it.
Fortunately for Stresemann, the October revolution was a total failure. German communists lacked both the popular support and the military sophistication to replicate 1917. Unable to obtain the support of German Social Democrats, Brandler called off the uprisings before they ever switched into high gear. Reichswehr forces moved into Saxony and thwarted any insurrection. Word of the cancellation could not reach Hamburg in time, where revolutionaries were crushed by police. Adding insult to injury, even the revolution’s military head, General Skoblevsky, was captured and imprisoned. Shortly after the communist uprising was aborted, Adolf Hitler set a right-wing coup in motion in Bavaria. Stresemann immediately issued a report to the heads of all German states. Hitler’s act of high treason would be countered with the full energy of the government. Stresemann survived both challenges, thanks in both cases to strong police and military actions, as well as his own decisive response. The lessons were clear. Stability was essential if a politically moderate government in Berlin hoped to continue.
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.
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.17 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.18 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.19
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.20 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.21 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.22 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.23 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.24
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.25 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.26 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.27 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.”28
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.29
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.30
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.31 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.32
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.33 He denied the existence of this relationship just six months later. On December 30, 1924, Stresemann told foreign journalists:
If there had really been any serious derelictions by Germany in the matter of disarmament, the leading French journals would long since have raised an outcry, and if, as is maintained, the German liaison officers had pursued a policy of deliberate obstruction, the German Government would long since have received a Note from the Allies . . . we possess no gas-masks, no aeroplanes, no artillery, and no tanks.34
Cooperation with the Soviets was intended to address precisely this deficiency. In the same address to reporters, Stresemann masterfully refuted Allied objections to the militarization of German police by invoking Stresemann’s own use of police to put down Hitler’s Munich Putsch in 1923. “What could I then have done if I had not had a couple of thousand police at my disposal, who could, in the event of danger, have protected the Wilhelmstrasse?”
There is no question that early in his tenure as foreign minister Stresemann knew about the Reichswehr’s cooperation with the Red Army. Brockdorff-Rantzau even informed him that the Reichswehr intended to cultivate the military relationship by funding factories inside Russia to produce tanks and poison gas. At the same time, he saw hints that the Soviets were just as anxious as the Germans to keep the matter under wraps. The Russian War Minister allegedly feared loose lips on the part of German generals.35 This and similar signals helped Stresemann to see that Soviet threats to expose their covert deals were probably mere bluffs. He could not be certain until matters reached a turning point.
Yet all the while that Stresemann followed, and indeed actively participated in, these covert military arrangements, he understood that Germany’s secret rearmament in Russia risked derailing the Western-oriented Locarno policy, on which he had staked his reputation and career.36 The aim of fulfillment was to reassure the West that Germany was committed to forging a cooperative peace. A pivotal part of that peace process required no provocative military measures by Germany. The Versailles Treaty stipulated that Germany could not possess an air force or a navy, and its army could not exceed 100,000 men. The covert rearmament, therefore, placed Stresemann’s very public policy in jeopardy.
From periodic embassy reports and through his own discussions with Soviet representatives, Stresemann could see that the Russians were clearly nervous too. Over the next two years, Stresemann would receive conflicting information. On the one hand, there were signs that the Soviets, just like the Germans, feared having their secret military connection exposed. On the other hand, the Soviets repeatedly threatened to expose that relationship themselves. Stresemann’s challenge was to determine what the key Soviet decision-makers actually desired most: military cooperation or the ability to extract concessions by threatening to disclose it. Was there a true signal amidst the noise, and, if so, how could he detect it?
As Stresemann strove to stabilize relations with the West, the Soviets grew increasingly fearful of being isolated. If Germany drew too close to Britain and France, then Russia would be facing a hostile coalition of great powers across the continent. The Soviets’ fear of this scenario drove their behavior. If they could not prevent Germany from joining the League of Nations, it was essential that they gain at least some form of security agreement with Berlin. For the moment, they sought to disrupt Stresemann’s Western strategy by any means at their disposal. One tactic they employed was to threaten to expose their two countries’ covert military arrangements. In essence, they had the power to blackmail the Weimar regime.
Soviet pressure had been gradually increasing as German relations with the West improved. Moscow had no wish to see Germany join the League of Nations, which would tie Germany tighter to the West. To forestall German entry, the Soviets employed both carrots and sticks. American military intelligence had been following Russo–German relations and managed to penetrate the Serbian representative37 in Berlin, who in turn had close contact with Soviet Ambassador Krestinski. According to an unnamed source, sometime prior to July 15, 1925, Krestinski wielded the stick. He threatened to expose the secret clauses of the Soviet–German agreement, which provided for “a camouflaged development of German armament on Russian territory.” The best carrot he could muster, however, proved insufficiently enticing. If Germany remained apart from the League of Nations, the Ambassador promised Soviet assistance in undoing the Polish Corridor as well as Polish occupation of Danzig. The Americans subsequently learned that the Germans would continue their military cooperation with the Soviet Union.38 The report continued by detailing German naval and aircraft developments inside Russia, as well as their work on poison gas. Although American officials knew at least some details surrounding Russo–German military cooperation, Stresemann and the Reichswehr could not know exactly how much the Western powers knew, and they were not eager to have any aspect of the relationship publicly revealed.
In the lead up to Locarno, Soviet Foreign Minister Chicherin intensified his efforts to block Stresemann’s cooperation with the West. Just prior to Stresemann’s departure for Locarno in October 1925, Chicherin, along with Ambassador Krestinski, visited Stresemann in Berlin, seeking reassurances that Russo–German military cooperation would continue. Specifically, Chicherin wanted to know that Germany remained committed to dismantling the Polish borders created at Versailles. Implicit in both Chicherin’s comments and the timing of his visit was a not so subtle threat: the Soviets could expose their two countries’ collaboration at any time.
A Russian indiscretion would be more than just an awkward moment. Coming on the eve of Stresemann’s coveted summit with Britain and France, it could wreck his Western strategy. Though Stresemann was not willing to break off talks with the Western powers, he tried to mollify Chicherin by assuring him that the secret military arrangements between their two countries would continue and that there would be no guarantees of Polish borders.39
The conversation was tense. The German Foreign Minister not only needed to keep quiet on the extent of German–Soviet military relations, but also had to combat Soviet-inspired efforts to spark communist activities inside Germany. Stresemann had not forgotten Moscow’s attempts to overthrow his government in 1923. He reminded Chicherin of Zinoviev’s duplicity during that affair and pointed out that Zinoviev continued to agitate for revolution in a recently published speech in Rote Fahne. Soviet meddling forced him to assume that the German labor unions were being infiltrated and dominated by communists. The unions, he complained, did not shy from expressing their intention to change the leadership of German parties. They boldly called for continuing the struggle for world revolution.40
Chicherin played the standard Soviet card. Zinoviev was merely the mayor of Leningrad, not a high-ranking member of the government. He could not be controlled. Stresemann retorted that he would object just as much if the mayor of London called for revolution inside Germany. How would you feel, Stresemann asked, if the mayor of Munich called for anti-revolution inside Russia?
As Stresemann and Chicherin battled back and forth, the meeting, which had begun at 11 in the evening, dragged on until 1:30. Ambassador Krestinski, exhausted by the discussions and the late hour, occasionally nodded off. Talk turned to Poland, and Stresemann refused to agree to any anti-Polish alliance. At mention of the League of Nations, Stresemann had to pacify Chicherin that Germany had no intention of forging a secret alliance with the West against Russia.41 Eventually, the meeting adjourned. The fear, threats, and innuendos that had charged the air had dissipated, but only slightly. The following day, as Stresemann prepared to leave for Locarno, Stresemann rejected Chicherin’s attempts to agree on a formal secret alliance.42
Stresemann did not succumb to Chicherin’s carrots, though he did take seriously the sticks. He pursued cooperation with the West, brought Germany into the League of Nations, and deflected Soviet threats by continuing talks on a separate Russo–German agreement. The historian Peter Krüger has argued that caution, above all else, characterized Stresemann’s foreign policy. While this may be true on the whole, with respect to the secret rearmament, Stresemann proved more risk-accepting than some of his colleagues.43 The Foreign Minister believed that he could extract more concessions from Britain and France by preserving the threat of closer cooperation with Russia. If this policy succeeded, it offered a means for restoring Germany’s place among the great powers. By dealing with both Russia and the West, Germany could revise both the military as well as the economic aspects of Versailles. Stresemann therefore had to continually balance relations precisely. He resisted Soviet pressure to keep Germany apart from the League, yet he maintained military collaboration for as long as he thought the West would permit it, even as his deputy, Karl Schubert, grew increasingly uneasy about the risks.
At this stage just prior to Locarno, it was useful to keep the extent of Russo–German cooperation ambiguous. Britain, France, and America all had intelligence reports on the nature of Germany’s covert rearmament, but they lacked a complete picture. As it turned out, those secret dealings with the Soviets did not greatly trouble any of those three Western powers. They were willing to ignore it in the hope that they could prevent future German aggression by binding it to the evolving security agreements such as Locarno and the League. What made the possible exposure of Russo–German rearmament matter, of course, is that Stresemann did not know for certain that the Western powers would look the other way. This was something he had to learn over time as he developed a sense of his Western counterparts.
What Stresemann understood was that the Soviets needed German assistance even more than Germany required Soviet ties. For Germany, the actual military advantages were small, though the relationship with the Red Army did help to placate the Reichswehr. Politically, however, threat of closer cooperation with Russia enhanced its leverage with the West. Stresemann perceived a second political benefit to the relationship. Maintaining ties, active communication, and some cooperation with the Soviet regime helped the Wilhelmstrasse to keep a more careful watch on Soviet efforts at domestic German agitation. Schubert stated this view frankly to the American Ambassador, Jacob Gould Schurman, on April 7, 1926. Germany, he explained to Schurman, had a far better chance of combating communism at home if it had good relations with Russia abroad.44
For Russia, in contrast, its collaboration with Germany provided two crucial advantages. First, the collaboration meant access to German technical know-how, which Stalin hoped would help to modernize Russia’s tank and tractor industry, as well as develop the Red Army.45 Second, cooperation with Germany staved off Russia’s political isolation.
More than this, Stresemann also recognized a crucial caveat in the Soviet Union’s dual policy of fostering traditional international relations on the one hand while exporting revolution on the other. He saw that the Soviet leaders’ commitment to revolutions was context dependent, not fundamental to their nature. It could change as circumstances necessitated. The Soviets were not to be trusted, but they could be allies of a kind. Unlike Winston Churchill, who railed against the Bolshevik disease and urged against British dealings with Moscow throughout the 1920s, Stresemann adopted a more flexible view. Each new interaction reinforced his sense that Soviet behavior was not consistently revolutionary. Toward the close of December 1925, Chicherin seemed changed. He visited Stresemann in Berlin for a two-hour conversation. Chicherin explained that when he arrived in Berlin, nearly 100 representatives of the Berlin labor councils were waiting to greet him. He gave a short speech because he knew he had to. Chicherin emphasized that he had not come to Berlin to meddle in German domestic affairs. He said not to place any significance on this event. He had not planned it and had made efforts to keep it out of the press. All of this gave Stresemann the impression that Chicherin was sincere. There was a relaxed feeling in their discussions, and Stresemann concluded that the Soviet representative might now be less fearful of German policy.46 That same month, Leon Trotsky was ousted from the Politburo. Perhaps a shift was underway, one that augured well for the coming year.
Throughout 1926, Stresemann was receiving signs that Kremlin leaders valued cooperation with the German government more than they wanted to overthrow it. Zinoviev was sacked as head of the Leningrad Soviet, and by July he too would be removed from the Politburo. In October, there was a new head of the Comintern.47 Again, Kremlinologists inside the Wilhelmstrasse could not be certain what these signs meant with respect to Russo–German relations, especially since they did not prevent Moscow from continuing to threaten exposing their two countries’ military dealings.
One irony of the covert cooperation was that by 1926 an arrangement was in place that strikingly resembled the plot of 1923. Arms were illicitly shipped from Russia to Germany and advisors were secretly being exchanged. This time, however, Russian arms were sent not to communist revolutionaries but to their nemesis—the very Reichswehr that had crushed the 1923 plot. The reversal from arming revolution to arming the Reichswehr represented a meaningful break in the pattern of Soviet behavior. Although the Comintern remained active, national interests were superseding ideology in Moscow’s relations with Berlin. Stresemann understood that this arrangement was not just mutually beneficial; it could also only be pursued and maintained by a Soviet government that was more concerned with its own survival than with the violent spread of its ideology. He further grasped that neither side in the arrangement desired that their dealings be fully exposed.
Stresemann’s deputy, Karl von Schubert, however, was growing increasingly anxious. During the Soviet-inspired uprisings of October 1923, a Russian general, Peter Skoblevsky, had been arrested and imprisoned. By May 1926, his trial had still not been held. Soviet officials offered to release more than forty Germans currently in Russian jails in exchange for General Skoblevsky’s freedom. One of the German prisoners, an engineer for the Junker corporation, had been engaged in the illegal production of war materiel inside Russia. The Soviets used this to pressure Berlin into giving up Skoblevsky. If Berlin refused, the implicit threat meant that the German engineer’s trial would publicly reveal what the Junker Corporation was manufacturing. The threat caused consternation inside the Foreign Ministry. Brockdorff-Rantzau urged the release of Skoblevsky.48 Shubert was eager to keep the Russians from exposing the secret arrangements. He was beginning to doubt the value of continued military cooperation in light of the risks. The Foreign Ministry agreed to release Skoblevsky, but Stresemann was not ready to end the arrangements with Moscow. Having Skoblevsky tried was an issue of no consequence to the Wilhelmstrasse. His release cost the Ministry nothing. There would have been no point in calling the Soviets’ bluff over this one case. Yet Schubert’s fears steadily mounted.
On July 9, Schubert strongly advised against Reichswehr participation in Soviet military maneuvers inside Russia. Such actions, he believed, could only raise unwanted suspicions in the West.49 On July 23, Schubert’s fears reached a tremulous pitch. The situation was dire, he wrote. The Western powers suspected that Germany was involved in a secret military alliance with the Soviets. He denied any such allegations. But if the truth emerged, he pleaded, “our entire strenuously constructed policy could be ruined.”50
Although Schubert was correct that their business with Russia was getting riskier, Stresemann held firm. In full knowledge of the dangers, he allowed and facilitated the transfer of weapons from Russia into Germany, in flagrant violation of his own assurances to the West that Germany was disarmed. On August 11, he noted that Brockdorff-Rantzau had informed him that 400,000 Russian-produced grenades were stockpiled on the sparsely populated Bear Island (Bäreninsel), soon due to be moved. Brockdorff-Rantzau expressed concern that if this shipment of weapons became known, it could severely compromise German foreign policy. The Reichswehr assured him that the chartered ships would be so carefully selected that no one would suspect a thing.51 Nothing could possibly go wrong.
As weapon shipments began to flow, so too did rumors. By year’s end, an event occurred that could easily have severed the two countries’ covert cooperation. It very likely would have, but Stresemann’s strategic empathy for his adversaries enabled him to keep a steady hand.
Despite Stresemann’s best efforts, the details of German rearmament could no longer remain secret. Remarkably, the disclosure came not from the Soviet government, as had often been threatened, but from within Germany itself. On December 16, 1926, Philipp Scheidemann, the ex-Chancellor and now head of the Social Democratic Party, stepped forth and delivered a stunning speech to the assembled Reichstag. In full view of foreign dignitaries, including American Ambassador Jacob Gould Schurman, Scheidemann detailed Germany’s covert activities inside the Soviet Union. His speech exposed the ways that Germany was violating the Treaty of Versailles—in stark contrast with Foreign Minister Stresemann’s prominent policy of fulfillment.52 The revelations would unleash dissension, bring down the government, and call German foreign policy into question. Yet unbeknownst to Scheidemann, it would also create a pattern break, one which Stresemann could use to his advantage.