German rearmament
German rearmament was a policy and practice of rearmament carried out by Germany from 1918 to 1939 in violation of the Treaty of Versailles, which required German disarmament after World War I to prevent it from starting another war. It began on a small, secret, and informal basis shortly after the treaty was signed and was openly and massively expanded after the Nazi Party came to power in 1933.
Under the Weimar Republic, the early steps towards rearmament began with support for paramilitary groups including the Freikorps and Citizens' Defense, although the government banned most such groups by 1921. Secret cooperation between the German military and Soviet Russia began in 1921 and grew to include training in and manufacture of weapons banned by the Versailles Treaty. In 1926, military leadership revealed its previously secret programs to the civilian government and with its cooperation embarked on two large-scale rearmament programs designed to create a 21-division army by 1938. The poor economic conditions of the time, however, seriously limited the results prior to the Nazi assumption of power in 1933.
Rearmament under the Nazi regime became considerably more aggressive. The programs and their financing remained secret until 1935, at which point Adolf Hitler announced them openly. The European states that had fought Germany in World War I reacted primarily through attempts to appease Hitler; many American corporations were involved in Germany's rearmament programs through ties to German companies.
History
Weimar Republic
Overview
Germany's defeat in the First World War and the peace terms of the Treaty of Versailles shaped the thinking of the leadership of the Weimar Republic's armed forces, the Reichswehr. The treaty's disarmament provisions were intended to make the future German army incapable of offensive action. It was limited to 100,000 men with 4,000 officers and no general staff; the navy could have at most 15,000 men and 1,500 officers. Germany was prohibited from having an air force, tanks, poison gas, heavy artillery, submarines or dreadnoughts. A large number of its ships and all of its air-related armaments were to be surrendered. The military's leaders saw the greatly reduced army as an interim stage and a starting point for a larger military force not subject to restrictions.To achieve the goal of rebuilding the military, the Reichswehr leadership was prepared to violate the Treaty of Versailles, which was also a law of the Republic. The illegal measures they took included providing Freikorps units and local Citizens' Defense groups with military training and equipment; establishing the Black Reichswehr; creating secret funds such as were uncovered in the Lohmann Affair; disguising state intervention in the armaments industry ; planning secretly for ramping up the German arms industry ; conducting secret armaments research in cooperation with the Kaiser Wilhelm Society; continuing the banned general staff under the cover name Truppenamt; and cooperating militarily with the Soviet Union to gain fundamental tactical and technical knowledge. Until the beginning of the 1930s, however, the extent and efficiency of the measures remained relatively low.
Early programs
The first steps towards rebuilding Germany's fighting forces came with army and government use of paramilitary forces. In the early years of the Weimar Republic, the paramilitary Freikorps grew rapidly with the support of the republican government and its first Defense minister, Gustav Noske. The Freikorps units, often deployed in place of or to supplement regular army forces, were used primarily against communist uprisings. The strength began to wane after Hans von Seeckt became Chief of the Army Command in March 1920. He saw them as a sign of rebellion and limited the support they received from the government. Under pressure from France, which feared the building of an unofficial army outside the Versailles limits, the Freikorps were officially banned in May 1921. Seeckt decided then that the Reichswehr no longer had enough men available to guard the country's borders and formed the Black Reichswehr. It was an extra-legal paramilitary formation that was secretly part of the German military and had the support of Chancellor Joseph Wirth. Even though the Black Reichswehr grew to a strength estimated at 50,000 to 80,000 men, it never went into action and was disbanded in late 1923 following the failed Küstrin Putsch, which involved some of its members.Units of the Citizens' Defense were formed in early 1919 to provide quick reinforcements against leftist revolutionary forces through the recruitment of small groups of civilians. It was supported and supplied by the government, the Reichswehr and the Freikorps. Because of repeated demands by the Inter-Allied Military Commission of Control to eliminate the Citizens' Defense, the government banned it on 24 May 1921. Many of its former members joined various "proto-Nazi" groups, as was also the case with the Freikorps and Black Reichswehr after they were banned.
Germany's secret rearmament program in the Soviet Union began in 1921 when the Ministry of Defence, with the approval of General Seeckt and the knowledge of Chancellor Joseph Wirth, established a Special Section R for the purpose. Initially it involved "armaments ventures" and camps for German soldiers in the USSR to train in the use of weapons forbidden by Versailles. In November 1922, not long after the Treaty of Rapallo between Germany and Soviet Russia was signed, the Soviet government and the Junkers Aircraft Company began to work together to build aircraft for Germany. Starting in 1924, German pilots were secretly trained at the Lipetsk fighter-pilot school on Junkers, Heinkel, and Dornier aircraft. The cooperation expanded in 1926 to include the manufacture of poison gas and the establishment of a tank training school near Kazan, but due to the hesitation of German companies to invest in projects in the Soviet Union, the new ventures did not progress very far. Government financing was hidden under phony budget headings and monitored by a high-ranking committee.
The German flag carrier Deutsche Luft Hansa, founded in 1926, used planes that were similar to military models current at the time, and the company's existence allowed for the growth of a domestic aircraft building industry and the training of pilots, both of which could be converted to military use in circumvention of the prohibition of Germany maintaining an air force. In 1930 Walter Dornberger was tasked with developing liquid fuel rockets for military purposes – a technology not mentioned in the Versailles Treaty – and under the Nazis he became involved in the V2 rocket program.
Government involvement
When Seeckt was dismissed as Chief of the Army High Command in October 1926, the new leadership under General Wilhelm Heye realised that only cooperation with the Reichstag would provide political safeguards for the desired rearmament measures. It marked a turning point in the relationship between the Reichswehr and the government, which it viewed with scepticism. On 29 November 1926, Minister of Defence Otto Gessler, accompanied by the heads of both the army and navy, announced to the cabinet of Chancellor Wilhelm Marx that the secrecy towards state leadership would be abandoned and that from then on, comprehensive information would be provided about the rearmament measures that had been taken. He told them that the army “must always be in a position to provide the core, the training battalion so to speak, of a modern army” and that “certain security measures going beyond the peace treaty” were needed. He added that "“the cabinet would then have to decide to what extent it wanted to support the measures politically” and promised that the Reichswehr would follow the program the cabinet decided on.On 6 December, the leadership of the Social Democratic Party, which was the largest party in the Reichstag but not part of the Marx cabinet, met with Marx, Gessler and Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann to protest the Reichswehr's secret rearmament and demand that it be discontinued. They presented materials of their own which detailed what they had learned and then threatened to disclose it publicly. Besides the Reichswehr's cooperation with Soviet Russia, the SPD had information showing that the Reichswehr had been working for years with right-wing paramilitary groups to create a disguised army reserve and that the Reichswehr had a network of district officers to work with it, had organized military sports training and secret weapons caches. Gessler agreed to review the material, but the SPD did not trust him to make a clean breast of the situation so that it could be brought under Reichstag control. On 16 December 1926, Philipp Scheidemann of the SPD delivered a speech in the Reichstag condemning the secret cooperation with domestic right-wing groups and with the Soviet army. The reaction to the speech outside the SPD was overwhelming negative and had few consequences except for a rearrangement of Marx's cabinet. It shifted to the right, and Gessler remained minister of Defense.
Formal armament programs
In a cabinet meeting on 26 February 1927, General Heye, who had been convinced by the arguments of Colonel Kurt von Schleicher, the High Command's liaison in the Reichswehr Ministry, proposed to form a committee which would include the states and political parties in order to reach agreements on the secret rearmament. Chancellor Marx agreed, saying that the cabinet would have to bear the responsibility of financing the measures. Hermann Müller, his successor as chancellor, followed the same course.After almost two years of preparatory work, the First Armament Program was approved by the Chief of Army Command on 29 September 1928 and adopted by the Müller cabinet on 18 October. The aim of the program, which for the first time integrated the entire material rearmament plan of the army into a five-year program, was limited to emergency armaments for a 16-division army with a limited weapons stockpile. The goal was to be achieved by 1932 at a cost of 350 million Reichsmarks. The original plan for a 21-division army was rejected for economic reasons. The army received the lion's share; the navy received around 7 million Reichsmarks annually. The 350 million RM were covered in the budget by means of a secret fund with the full approval of all parties in the government. A State Secretaries' Committee was founded to approve the budget. It consisted of one representative each from the Bureau of Auditors, the Defense Ministry and the Finance Ministry. It was not under the oversight of the Reichstag.
The results of the first program were not impressive. In the spring of 1931, the army had only ten tanks, all of them still undergoing testing, and no anti-tank guns or two-centimeter machine guns for use from tanks that had gotten beyond the development phase.
With the appointment of Wilhelm Groener as the new minister of Defense in January 1928, the armaments effort gained momentum, since Groener had the political, economic and military expertise to lead it. The Second Armament Program, which formed the basis for rearmament in Nazi Germany, was adopted in the spring of 1932. At a cost of 484 million Reichsmarks, the plan was to establish a 21-division army along with the necessary equipment, weapons and ammunition, plus a six-week stockpile. The air force, which was included for the first time, was to receive 110 million RM and consist of a total of 150 aircraft. Because of the difficult economic conditions under the Great Depression, the program was designed for five years. A modification in November provided that a total of 570,000 men should be actively under arms by the spring of 1938. Since it was a tightly calculated program designed for a maximum of armaments, it proved to be particularly sensitive to the economic situation, with the result that Groener was forced to request an additional one billion marks from the government over the five years. The financial picture was further exacerbated by the price dictates of some armaments companies. A handful of them had a virtual monopoly, since under the Treaty of Versailles only a small number of companies were allowed to manufacture armaments.
A retrospective view of armaments policy in the Weimar Republic shows clearly that long-term and comprehensive arms planning did not begin with the National Socialists' rise to power but rather with the Republic's two armaments programs.