Now that the Russian army is also penetrating Ukraine and the chance of a speedy ceasefire, let alone peace, during the day, I wonder when Europe President Zensky provides military help with which he can drive Putin out of his country. Germany in particular will have to take the lead in this, including by delivering Taurus rockets to KYIV. But although the new Chancellor Friedrich Merz is a relief compared to his predecessor, he responds as carefully when it comes to those rockets.
That ambivalent attitude is based on a combination of guilt about the Nazi crimes on the territory of the Soviet Union during the Second World War and an age-old paping with the ‘Russian soul’, who, according to writers such as Vladimir Nabokov and Anton Czechov, is primarily an excuse to make a pot.
I also read in the clearly written about that German ‘love’ for everything that is Russian Germany’s Weimar Republic and Bolshevik Russia. Partners in Secret Military Rearmement from 1919-1939 Van Herman Unger, a Hague connoisseur of Russian military history. For example, he shows how international diplomacy in those years was constantly misled by the German army command, which was secretly building a modern attack army.
Much has been known about German-Russian military cooperation. The starting point is the Treaty of Rapallo (1922), in which Germany recognized the new Soviet Union, which in turn renounced the reparations that the German government owes Moscow. But to date there is a persistent debate or ‘Rapallo’ also contained secret military clauses.
All official documents of that treaty were taken to Moscow by the Red Army in 1945 and are in a closed military archive. After 1945, the Germans were able to effortlessly deny those secret military clauses. Otherwise, in addition to their violation of the Versailles peace provisions, they should also admit that they have helped build the Red Army with the military-technological knowledge they deliver. After all, love came from two sides.
Unger has now encountered the dissertation of the Russian historian Sergej Jermatjenkov, who did have access to military archive and there discovered two military partnerships, which were closed shortly after signing ‘Rapallo’. These treaties show that military cooperation has been very extensive. Without the help of the Soviet Union in the years prior to 1933, Hitler would never have even been able to start a big war six years later and to conquer almost the whole of Europe.
In the second part of his clarifying book, Unger focuses on the way in which the large four – the US, the United Kingdom, France and Italy – dealt with the Bolshevik rulers after 1917. It shuffled me about the future, because the contradictions within those big four show clearly parallels with the present. It makes me desire a new Churchill of Clemenceau, who immediately realized with whom they had in Moscow.