German rearmament

German rearmament (Aufrüstung, German pronunciation: [ˈaʊ̯fˌʀʏstʊŋ]) 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.

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 (Einwohnerwehren) 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 (Montan-Schema [de]); planning secretly for ramping up the German arms industry (Statistische Gesellschaft [de]); 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.

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.