At the following Cabinet meeting on December 15, just one day before Scheidemann’s speech but a week after The Manchester Guardian’s exposé, Chamberlain reported that the IMCC would at last be fully withdrawn from German territory, thanks to Briand’s acceptance of German goodwill.24 The planned withdrawal date had been set for February 1, 1927, but in deference to Stresemann they reset the date to January 31, as this was the anniversary of the evacuation of Allied troops from Cologne and held symbolic value for the Germans.25
Chamberlain went on to assert that 99 of the 101 outstanding points not settled at Locarno had each been resolved. The remaining two issues involved what would today be called “dual use materials” and the disarmament of the Königsberg fortress. Both the British and French War Offices recognized the danger from the accumulation of large quantities of jigs and gauges. These devices could be used for commercial purposes, but they could also be used in weapons. As the minutes reveal, Stresemann’s word sufficed to allay any concerns. “Dr. Stresemann had, however, given an emphatic undertaking that there should be no accumulations.”26
The question of disarming the fortress proved more complicated. The Versailles Treaty stated in Article 180 that Germany’s system of fortified works along its southern and eastern frontiers should be maintained in its existing state. The British assumed that this referred to the state the fortresses were in at the war’s end. But the Germans devised a novel interpretation, insisting that the article meant that Germany could keep them up to date. Presumably the fortresses had the latest weaponry in 1918, and the Germans wanted them to have the latest weaponry now, in 1926. Though Chamberlain initially insisted on the British interpretation, General Paweltz, who was the German liaison officer to the IMCC, vehemently refused to agree. The talks might have foundered on this point, but then “Dr. Stresemann had insisted that the Germans had no offensive ideas and only contemplated the fortresses in their defensive capacity.”27 Again, Stresemann’s assurances were enough, and this provided the basis for renewed negotiations. In point after point, Germany was getting its way.
The day after Chamberlain informed the British Cabinet that the IMCC’s mission would soon end, Scheidemann delivered his stunning Reichstag address. But owing to the Christmas holiday, the British Cabinet did not reconvene until January. When it next met, the entire agenda was consumed by a single item: a crisis in China regarding the seizure of a British concession. In fact, each weekly Cabinet meeting that month centered almost exclusively on the China issue. Unlike normal meetings at which a variety of domestic and foreign affairs were discussed, the China crisis absorbed the Cabinet’s near-complete attention.
If the secret rearmament in Russia had been well-known to the British, then why did they not seize this opportunity to protest it? Governments are often hamstrung in their ability to object to a country’s actions when their objections are based on covert intelligence reports. No government wants to risk exposing its spies, sources, or methods. But once a public disclosure occurs, governments are free to make diplomatic protests at no risk. Scheidemann’s speech handed the British a perfect chance to do this. Chamberlain, for one, could have expressed Her Majesty’s Government’s deep disapproval of Germany’s violations and demanded they cease. Instead, the British said nothing.28
From the British perspective, German rearmament was rather modest at this stage. Knowing that some German rearmament was inevitable, the British were willing to ignore these relatively minor violations. However, Britain’s lack of response only hastened the pace of Russo–German cooperation. As the incisive German diplomat in Russia, Gustav Hilger, observed in his post–World War II memoirs, after the Scheidemann affair German activities inside Russia rapidly expanded. More German officers than ever before came to Moscow, Hilger wrote, though greater efforts were taken to camouflage their identity.29
Some limited German rearmament was viewed as a positive development given concerns over a potentially resurgent Russia and the growing communist movement. But if the British truly feared a Russian resurgence, then the last thing they would have wanted was German aid to the Red Army. The Reichswehr was actively training Russian officers, teaching pilots, and establishing a school for instruction in tank warfare. German industrial plants agreed in some cases to give the Red Army one-third of the planes produced on Soviet territory. For Britain, however, a moderately rearmed Germany might also one day serve as a counterweight to France.
The British Foreign Office pursued a parallel policy of tacit acceptance toward internal as well as external German violations. Cabling from Berlin, British Ambassador Ronald Lindsay offered a lengthy assessment of the many militaristic Bunds operating inside Germany, the groups to which Scheidemann had referred in his Reichstag address. Lindsay attributed a fundamental nature to the Germans, who, when assembled in a group of more than one, adopt a “combative nature.” He asserted that the German “. . . becomes peculiarly aggressive in combination with others, and that he cannot conceive of co-operation except as directed against something or somebody.” Despite these putative national characteristics, Lindsay concluded that the upsurge in militarism and covert training of young men by ex-officers should not be a cause for concern. He argued that the only reasonable course available was to “. . . secure a promise from the German Government that they will observe the clear stipulations of the Treaty of Versailles on this point.”30 In other words, trust the German government and hope that rearmament would not lead to aggression.
In fact, there was little that Britain and France could do to prevent German rearmament. If Britain had come down hard on German violations, the Germans might have proceeded with rearmament at full speed and Britain would have likely been unable to halt it. This in turn would have revealed Allied weakness.
Britain and France also feared jeopardizing Germany’s payment of reparations. If the Allies raised too much fuss over disarmament violations, then Germany might refuse to continue its payments, the subject of greatest concern to Allied statesmen throughout the 1920s. Establishing how to extract those payments from Germany consumed more time and effort than any other issue of postwar politics. By 1926, it seemed as though a system, and a leadership, at last existed for the smooth transfer of money from Berlin to Allied capitals. One rather obvious clue to the French attitude came on September 17, when Stresemann met secretly with French Foreign Minister Briand in the town of Thoiry. The two ministers hoped to strike a deal: the return of French-occupied German territory in exchange for a one-time payment to France. At one point in their discussions Briand admitted that when his military intelligence officers presented him with documents detailing German violations of Versailles, he had casually tossed the files in a corner and ignored them.31 Although Briand was concerned about some of Germany’s attempts to rearm and remilitarize, those qualms were secondary to his desire for German reparations.
Given the limited scope for British and French action, their policy of tacit consent for rearmament was grounded in the hope that German behavior could be changed over time—a not unreasonable ambition. The timing of Scheidemann’s speech, the hopes invested in Stresemann as a peacemaker, and the West’s limited ability to impose meaningful penalties all combined to constrain British and French responses. Those constraints led to a tacit overlooking of Germany’s transgressions and Stresemann’s possible role therein. And Stresemann had every reason to expect that his Western counterparts were sufficiently constrained. He soberly judged their reactions while also observing the signals emerging from the East.
In contrast to the British, the Soviets were outraged, and for good reason. One of their best bargaining chips had just been whittled down. Though they could still conceivably threaten further exposures, two important changes had occurred in the wake of Scheidemann’s address. First, now that at least some of the secret arrangement had been made public, Soviet threats of exposing more details were unlikely to have a significant impact on Germany’s relations with the West. Second, the Soviets themselves re
vealed that they wanted military cooperation to continue without obstruction. The immediate reaction among some in Moscow was to abandon military cooperation with Germany altogether, but this was of course impractical. The relationship held too much value for both technological progress and international relations.
The day after Scheidemann’s speech, Schubert met with Krestinski. The Soviet Ambassador was in a highly agitated state. He wanted to know what the German Foreign Ministry intended to do about Scheidemann’s revelations. Schubert assured him that the Ministry had no intention of saying anything about it unless compelled to do so by the French press. In that event, they would make a partial admission and say that the whole affair simply belonged to a previous era. Krestinski was scarcely pacified. He felt that the best approach was to deny everything.32
The Soviet bluff had finally been called. Yet instead of retreating from the secret military relations, as they had threatened to do, they sought assurance that the arrangements would remain in place. At the start of the new year, Stresemann received the clearest signal yet that Moscow wanted to cooperate with the German government far more than it wanted to overthrow it. On January 5, 1927, Krestinski met with Stresemann and raised the issue of Scheidemann’s indiscretion. Although the scandal had faded from the news, Krestinski feared that it could be resurrected. The Soviet Ambassador understood from his conversations with Schubert and Herbert von Dirksen, head of the Foreign Ministry’s East European division, that if the German government were compelled to clarify the matter in public, it planned to claim that the arms shipments were from long ago and did not reflect any current military cooperation between the two countries. Krestinski explained that this would place the Soviet regime in a very uncomfortable position, as it had been denying the deal entirely. The Ambassador expressed the wish of his government that the German government consider the Soviet position as well as its own.
Stresemann tried to reassure Krestinski by declaring it unlikely that the Social Democrats would pursue the issue. Krestinski was not mollified. He said that the Second International (a worldwide association of socialist parties and trade unions) might draw attention to the scandal. In the end, he expressed the Soviet wish that both governments remain in contact regarding their mutual tactics for handling the matter.33
In effect, the Soviets were pleading with the Germans not to expose their duplicity. The Russians were scared of the consequences, and Stresemann knew it. The long pattern of Soviet threats to expose their secret arms deal had finally broken, and the Russians blinked. The fact that they were now intent on covering up the affair had to mean that the Kremlin valued German military and technical assistance more than it valued fomenting a German revolution. This in turn meant that Schubert was wrong. The costs of cooperation to Germany were indeed minimal, as Stresemann had surmised. The arrangement could continue without risk to Locarno and Germany’s broader Western policy. At a pattern break moment, the Soviets revealed their underlying drivers: the restoration of Russian might. It would clearly take years before Russia’s resurgence could rival Western power, and no one could know what that would eventually produce. But for now, that day was still far in the future. For at least the short and medium term, Stresemann had a pretty clear sense of his enemy’s drivers and constraints.
Although attacks and disinformation about Germany persisted in the Russian press over the early part of 1927, they did not seriously derail relations. Meanwhile, within the German parliament, the Social Democrats formed an investigative committee and the government attempted a cover-up. Schubert cabled Brockdorff-Rantzau that although the head of the Reichswehr did not want to make any admissions, Schubert thought that some statement would be necessary.34 Brockdorff-Rantzau wired back advising the Foreign Ministry not to admit to anything in the hearings, as that would embarrass key individuals in Moscow who were clinging to their denials. Chicherin was even charging that the allegations were British provocations.35
Eager to ensure that no further disclosures would occur, Chicherin’s deputy, Litvinov, contacted the German Foreign Office about continued military cooperation. The Soviets wanted to obtain a clear understanding on the furnishing of the training school in Kazan, which Germany had been financing by cooking the books. In May of 1927, Stresemann, along with General Heye and War Minister Gessler, met in the Foreign Ministry to discuss the Soviet request. With only some qualifications, Stresemann endorsed the arrangement. By August, Stresemann cabled the embassy in Moscow about the presence of Germans at the training school in Kazan. As far as Stresemann was concerned, “We have no concerns about the continuation of this program.”36 With Stresemann’s blessing, Russo–German military cooperation henceforth intensified.
Stresemann’s Own Drivers
If Stresemann recognized the Soviets’ underlying drivers and constraints by scrutinizing their behavior during pattern breaks, then could his foreign counterparts have done the same to him? What did Stresemann actually want? His pursuit of rearmament has left historians without a consensus on his underlying motivations. Some historians conclude that Stresemann’s policies of overt cooperation and covert defiance of Versailles demonstrated an aggressive inclination, one that inadvertently helped lay the groundwork for Hitler’s later war.37 More recent historians take the opposite view, insisting that Stresemann actively strove for European amity. They assert that his support of covert rearmament was merely a political necessity.38 In the view of these scholars, Stresemann actually sought to check or restrain the Reichswehr’s rearmament plans. Henry Kissinger once called the problem of divining Stresemann’s true intentions “one of history’s unsolved riddles.”39 Historians are still divided in their judgment, and if historians cannot agree on how to assess this important figure, what chance did Stresemann’s contemporaries have of accurately assessing him?
Stresemann was a controversial figure in his own time. He may be even more of one today. The earliest interpretations of Stresemann, those written in the years shortly after his death in 1929 and those just after World War II, depicted the foreign minister as a cooperative, sober-minded statesman, working toward peaceful resolution of post–World War I conflicts.40 Within a decade following the end of World War II, however, some historians, Hans Gatzke most prominently among them, fervently challenged the more positive prior interpretations.41 Gatzke saw the foreign minister as a cool, calculating nationalist, bent on German revanchism. Other works then echoed this view. Recently that interpretation has been challenged in a probing biography by the Oxford scholar Jonathan Wright.42 In Wright’s account, Stresemann sought to revise Versailles but to do it peacefully. Four years later, Wright’s view was complemented by Patrick Cohrs, whose impressively researched study of 1920s European diplomacy cast the Foreign Minister in a similar light.43
Naturally, this revision of Stresemann’s reputation has not gone unchallenged. Writing in the Journal of American History, Stephen Schuker argued that Stresemann’s intentions are best reflected in a letter he wrote to the German Crown Prince shortly before Locarno. In that missive, the Foreign Minister rather bluntly outlined his foreign policy objectives. These included (as cited by Schuker):
. . . freedom from Allied occupation; a reparations solution tolerable to Germany; the protection of the ten to twelve million ethnic Germans living under a foreign yoke; readjustment of the eastern frontiers; union with German Austria; exploitation of disarmament, Danzig, and the Saar questions at the League of Nations; and, in the background, though postponed until a future generation, the recovery of Alsace-Lorraine.44
Schuker questioned whether such robust ambitions could plausibly reflect a peaceful plan.45
Both Wright and Cohrs see this letter in a less incriminating light. Cohrs believes that Stresemann never sought revision through military means. “Crucially, Stresemann only envisaged territorial changes if they could be achieved in ‘agreement’ with Germany’s neighbours and did not jeopardize its accommodation with the Western powers.”46 Wright asserts, “All the evidenc
e suggests that Stresemann remained committed to peaceful revision . . .”47
For Gatzke and Schuker the letter reveals Stresemann’s true colors, but for Wright and Cohrs it merely indicates a nonviolent intention to restore Germany’s rightful place among the great powers of Europe while highlighting his political acumen for playing to his audience. Stresemann’s policies were therefore not two-faced but two-sided: win over the West through fulfillment and placate the German Right with modest bows to rearmament.
Still, Stresemann’s letter to the Crown Prince is not the only inconvenient evidence against his pacific intentions. More problematic is his reluctance to oppose rearmament. Stresemann’s biographer, Jonathan Wright, concludes that while the Foreign Minister believed in the utility of military force he objected to the Reichswehr’s pursuit of an independent policy and wanted to rein in the Reichswehr’s activities. But Stresemann never did so. Wright speculates that this was either because he did not feel strong enough to oppose them or because he was held back by his innate respect for the military and did not want to damage its morale. Wright notes that Stresemann was constantly worried that the rearmament would be exposed, and only after he saw the West’s minimal reaction to Scheidemann’s speech did he agree to continue the program in Russia. “Perhaps because of this lack of reaction,” Wright explains, “when General Heye asked for political authorization for continued cooperation with the Red Army in the training of pilots, a tank school, and gas warfare, Stresemann agreed.”48
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