Maybe if the Soviets hadn't brutally attacked an innocent country, and it so incompetently, Hitler might not have underestimated the Reds so badly and not attacked when he did. Maybe. Although I think Hitler based a lot of his low opinion of Soviet military capabilities on WWI (which he fought in), where France resisted to the end and the Russians collapse. Then in WWII France collapsed fairly quickly so he thought Russia would be even easier.
Another thing the Soviets could have done to reduce their risk to a German attack was to not help the German's rearm, and not supply them with oil that the Germans used to attack to the west and then later to attack the Soviets.
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...While Soviet-German military cooperation between 1922 and 1933 is often forgotten, it had a decisive impact on the origins and outbreak of World War II. Germany rebuilt its shattered military at four secret bases hidden in Russia. In exchange, the Reichswehr sent men to teach and train the young Soviet officer corps. However, the most important aspect of Soviet-German cooperation was its technological component. Together, the two states built a network of laboratories, workshops, and testing grounds in which they developed what became the major weapons systems of World War II. Without the technical results of this cooperation, Hitler would have been unable to launch his wars of conquest.
After World War I, the victors dismantled the vaunted German army, reducing it to only 100,000 men. The Treaty of Versailles further forbade Germany from producing or purchasing aircraft, armored vehicles, and submarines. These provisions highlighted the Entente’s hope that removing German access to modern technologies of war would force Germany to abandon its militarist past. To the contrary, those particular provisions further convinced the remnants of the German High Command that technological rearmament was essential to restoring Germany’s position. Few works since the opening of the Russian Archives have explored the Soviet-German military pact in its totality. None have focused on its technological aspects. In this article, I offer new conclusions on the subject, drawing from archives in Russia, Germany, the United Kingdom, Poland, and the United States. Of particular importance for this piece are the Russian State Military Archive (RGVA), the archives of the German corporations Krupp, M.A.N. and Daimler-Benz, the U.S. National Archive’s Collection of Foreign Records Seized, and Yale University’s Russian Archive Project.
General Hans von Seeckt, in command of the Reichswehr from 1920 to 1926, was eager to work with Soviet Russia, the only other European state equally hostile to the status quo. In 1919, Seeckt dispatched to Russia Enver Pasha, the former Turkish minister of defense then in hiding for his part in mass atrocities against Armenians in eastern Anatolia. Seeckt’s goal was to establish communications with the Soviet government to discuss the possibility of military cooperation. He was particularly eager to work against the newly revived state of Poland. German military leaders saw it as the “pillar of Versailles” — a French puppet designed to encircle Germany from the east. Its absorption of former German territory that included hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans further inflamed Berlin’s hostility.
Enver’s first mission ended disastrously when his plane crash-landed in Lithuania and he was detained by the new Lithuanian government. He was carrying sensitive materials from the German military that might have ignited calls in Great Britain and France for the occupation of Germany. Only a daring jailbreak by a junior German officer prevented Enver and the secret documents from falling into Allied hands. But the following year, he made the attempt again and succeeded. The Enver wrote back to Berlin that
Today I spoke with … Trotsky. With him there’s a faction that has real power, and also includes that party that stands for an understanding with Germany. That party would be willing to acknowledge the old German borders of 1914.
That meant the extinction of Poland. This was exactly the hope of the German officer corps.
Leon Trotsky, then head of the Red Army, saw cooperation with Germany against Poland as a central pole in Soviet strategy. He wrote that “Poland can be a bridge between Germany and us, or a barrier.” After the Red Army’s defeat in the Polish-Bolshevik war, it had become a barrier. Bolshevik leadership believed in 1920 that only with access to the industrialized economies of the West could the Bolshevik revolutionary regime survive. As long as the state of Poland existed, this mutual objective proved to be a lodestar, guiding Berlin and Moscow in parallel.
At the Treaty of Rapallo in April 1922, Germany and the Soviet Union normalized relations for the first time, the first blow against the postwar order. The following summer, the Reichswehr and Red Army held a series of secret summits during which they crafted the framework for military cooperation. At first, Hans von Seeckt envisioned German military-industrial firms moving banned production and research to the Soviet Union. His staff earmarked considerable portions of the Reichswehr’s “black funds” — financial resources hidden from the German government — to subsidize these programs. To accommodate German firms, Lenin personally supervised the establishment of a concessionary system whereby German corporations could take over and modernize existing Soviet industrial plants under the close supervision of Soviet officials. Under the auspices of this program, German firms took over shipyards, factories for aviation, artillery, grenades, and rifles, chemical weapons plants, and other critical facilities. German businesses expected to profit from these ventures, but also hoped to find a new home for military experts, technical testing, and production in banned fields. Seeckt envisioned these factories one day supplying the reborn German army in a future war with France. The Soviets, in turn, hoped to increase their military industrial production cheaply, gain access to German technology, and train hundreds of new engineers.
Most of these ventures failed in the difficult economic circumstances of early Soviet Russia. The most important of these arrangements, a massive Junkers aircraft production facility outside of Moscow, failed to live up to either sides’ expectations, although it did become one of the most productive aircraft facilities in the Soviet Union. In December 1926, after massive financial losses, the owner of Junkers owner leaked details on the German program in Russia to members of the Reichstag, Germany’s parliament. On December 3, 1926, the scandal became public when a seven-line headline appeared in the Manchester Guardian, proclaiming: “Cargoes of Munitions from Russia to Germany! Secret Plan between Reichswehr Officers and Soviet[s]. STARTLING DISCLOSURES…” The German government, largely ignorant of ongoing Reichswehr efforts in the Soviet Union, fell in disgrace after a vote of no confidence in the Reichstag.
The scandal seemed to undo the grand hopes the German and Soviet militaries had invested in cooperation. But instead, the Soviet-German military relationship took on new life. Beginning in 1925 and growing rapidly after the Junkers scandal, the two militaries established a series of secret military bases at which German and Soviet officers lived, studied, and trained side-by-side. Teams of engineers and scientists worked on new weapons systems and reverse-engineered American, British, and French military equipment. Two of these bases were devoted to chemical weapons production, one to aviation training, and one to armored warfare. These bases helped to modernize the Red Army and played a central role in developing the military technologies that would enable the rebirth of the German military under Hitler .
The first cooperative base to open was a flight school located at Lipetsk, a city some 500 kilometers southeast of Moscow. Beginning in 1924, the Soviet Air Force invited German pilots to the Lipetsk Air Field to participate in flight training. A year later, the Soviet Air Force transferred the facility to the German military, although part of the agreement required the Germans to train Soviet officers and mechanics at the facility. In 1927, after the Junkers scandal, Lipetsk expanded massively in scope. Nearly 1,000 German pilots, observers, mechanics, and engineers would live at Lipetsk during its period of operation. They would become the core of the Luftwaffe when it reemerged in 1935. In addition, the Soviets and Germans sent many of their top test pilots to Lipetsk to fly their newest designs. All seven aircraft manufacturers in Germany secretly sent their prototypes — most of them violations of Versailles — to Lipetsk for testing. More important for the future were the intellectual exchanges that occurred there. The Germans borrowed Soviet concepts such as paratroopers and the dive bomber from the Red Air Force. The Red Air Force, in turn, learned tactical and operational lessons from German instructors, copied German designs, and — when unsatisfied with technical cooperation — stole design blueprints from their German partners...
warontherocks.com
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Its funny that for someone so famously paranoid Stalin trusted the nazis so much. Also that the the USSR's previous leader Lenin reportedly said "The capitalists will sell us the rope with which to hang them." (Although whether he actually said that is disputed), and then the Soviets prepared and supplied the army that caused so much devastation inside the Soviet Union. |
