fiance of the disarmament clauses of the Versailles
treaty and of the Interallied Commission of Control
which had been sent to Germany to see that they were
enforced.
The treaty itself helped him in his policy. For in
carrying out the provisions which laid down a reduction
of the Reichswehr from 500,000 to 100,000 officers and
men, Seeckt was able to ensure that the new army was
an elite which could at short notice be expanded, privates
becoming NCOs, NCOs officers, and officers generals. The
commanders were almost to a man offieers of the former
General St~ff. From this elite all elements had been
removed who would not conform to Seeckt's own political
and military philosophy. Democrats were strictly taboo.
In any case, Seeckt did not rigidly enforce the 100,000
limit demanded by the treaty. In addition to the Free
Corps, he also had under his orders the so-called 'Black
(or disavowable) Reichswehr', a force of about twenty
thousand men camouflaged as non-military Labour
Battalions. They were provisioned by the Reichswehr
and paid by it. And it was from the official Reichswehr
that the 'Black Reichswehr' received its orders. Its main
task was to fight the undeclared war against the Poles
in Upper Silesia.
To preserve the secret of its existence from the Control
Commission, the 'Black Reichswehr', with Seeckt's
blessing, had revived the secret tribunals of the medieval
Femegerichte courts. These sentenced to death men and
women suspected of having betrayed German secrets to
the Allies. The result was a series of brutal murders.
Seeckt himself, in a confidential letter to the President
of the Supreme Court in Berlin, admitted the existence of
the 'Black Reichswehr' and the Femegerichte. He pleaded
that they were necessary. Normal methods of justice,
Seeckt maintained, could not be applied, and 'the members of the Labour Battalions are justified in holding
that the interests of the country demand that traitors
should be dealt with summarily'.
Flirting with the bear
So long as the Interallied Control Commission remained in Germany there were many fields of military activity
that remained closed to the Reichswehr, however carefully they might camouflage them, however many potential traitors might be shot down. Seeckt began to look
around for .a power which had a similar interest to
Germany's in defying the Allies. There was only one:
Bolshevik Russia.
The Reichswehr-with the knowledge and approval of
Defence Minister Gessler - entered into negotiations
with Russia as early as 1921. The purpose of the negotia-
68
tions was to conclude an agreement which would both
enable the German army to build, train, and experiment
with weapons forbidden to it under the Versailles treaty,
and would also give the Red Army the benefit of German
military techniques and manufacturing processes.
A Reichswehr-sponsored 'Corporation for the Furtherance of Trade Enterprises' was formed, ostensibly to promote import and export trade with the Soviet Union,
in reality to build various military installations including a poison gas factory near Kuybyshev together with a
chemical warfare research establishment, factories for
the manufacture of shells at Tula and Leningrad and for
building armoured vehicles and tanks at Kasan, an aircraft plant at Fili near Moscow, and an airbase at Lipezk
near Voronesh for testing aircraft and training pilots.
The air base at Lipezk was the most important of the
joint Russo-German enterprises. Between 1925 and 1935
(when Hitler's abrogation of the Versailles treaty made
this clandestine collaboration with the Russians superfluous), Lipezk trained no fewer than 120 fully proficient
German fighter and bomber pilots, in addition to gunners,
radio operators, and ground staff-an invaluable nucleus
around which to build up the future Luftwaffe. In addition, Lipezk was the first testing-ground for Germany's
new war planes, which were designed in Germany itself.
But apart from these military consequences, the
negotiations between the Reichswehr and the Red Army
prepared the ground for the dramatic diplomatic revolution known as the Treaty of Rapallo in which in one
morning's work the Russians and the Germans, until
then regarded as the pariahs of Europe, turned the tables
on the all-too-complacent victors of Versailles.
The eternal wrangle over Germany's reparations payments had caused the powers to call an economic conference at Genoa (10th April-19th May 1922) at which
twenty-eight powers met in conference, among them the
Soviet Union, although the great powers had not yet
granted it recognition. The great powers, France in
particular, wanted the USSR to acknowledge the debts
incurred by the Tsarist government. If the Soviet Union
did that, they promised to allow her to make a claim for
reparations against Germany. This claim on the Germans could then be ceded to Britain and France and
would be accepted in settlement of the Tsarist debts.
For the Germans the prospect was disagreeable in the
extreme. If it came to pass, not only would the burden
of reparations be substantially increased but the old
Triple Entente between France, Great Britain, and
Left: Architects of Rapal/o-the Russian statesman Georghi
Chicherin (left) with the German diplomat Ago von Maltzan
69