Interwar Germany’s Secret Ally: The USSR
Dan Snow's History Hit
History Hit
4.7 • 13.7K Ratings
🗓️ 6 January 2020
⏱️ 26 minutes
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Summary
After the First World War the German Army was in crisis. Limited in the size and its equipment by the Versailles Treaty which ended the war, it was a shadow of the mighty force it had been in 1914. Help came from a surprising source. Soviet Russia.
Historian Ian Johnson explains to Dan how it was the Soviets who helped rebuild the German military machine before World War Two.
30% of Weimar Germany's defence spending took place in the USSR. 25% of German officers passed through camps in Soviet soil. This is the shocking conclusion reached by Ian Johnson who has trawled through the archives to understand just how much the German war machine owed to Soviet support. The cash strapped communists were happy to take German money in return for training areas, tank development labs and other activities banned by the Versailles Treaty.
The Soviets helped turn the Wehrmacht into a military machine that in 1941-2 came very close to toppling the Soviet state.
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| 0:00.0 | Hello History Hit listeners, as you are listening to this right now at this exact second I am |
| 0:05.8 | currently on an epic cross-country road trip of England. 600 miles and 1 million years of history |
| 0:14.4 | from the first humans through to Stonehenge, Dovercastle, Hastings up to Ironbridge in the |
| 0:19.3 | Black Country and to the northeast where I'm visiting a Cold War bunker in York. |
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| 0:47.4 | this week on Instagram and Twitter at the History Guy on both and then you can hear the whole thing as a |
| 0:52.1 | podcast series next week. Thanks and enjoy this episode. |
| 1:02.5 | Hello everyone. Welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. The school holidays are drawing to an end. |
| 1:08.9 | The vacation is drawing to an end and we're almost ready to go back to work. You looking forward to |
| 1:15.0 | going back to Kool-Zia. What's your favourite subject? Um, history. Of well done. It's time for |
| 1:23.0 | another podcast. This time we're looking at the relationship, the extraordinary relationship, |
| 1:27.7 | a Faustian bargain in which Germany sought to rebuild its military forces following the first |
| 1:35.0 | world war. The Treaty of Versailles, ban Germany from having heavy armor, limited the size of |
| 1:41.2 | its armed forces, banned certain weapon systems and yet Germany found ways around that by working |
| 1:47.5 | with an ally putting military facilities and training programs on foreign soil. That foreign |
| 1:54.1 | soil everyone was the good old USSR. Yep. The country with which Germany would have the mighty |
| 2:00.5 | showdown, the greatest and bloodiest conflict the world ever seen from 1941 to 1945 was in fact |
| 2:07.5 | the country that helped put the German military back on its feet. Pretty remarkable, Isaiah. |
| 2:14.2 | And here's talk about that subject is assistant professor of military history, Ian Johnson. He's |
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