The Faustian Bargain: Secret Soviet-German Military Cooperation in the Interwar Period

The Faustian Bargain: Secret Soviet-German Military Cooperation in the Interwar Period

Two short decades before the Second World War, Germany was an utterly defeated country. The victorious Allies demobilized the German Army, occupied Germany’s industrial heartland and forbid the production or purchase of aircraft, armored vehicles and submarines. Yet by 1941, Germany possessed an army of 4.2 million and some of the world’s most advanced technologies. How did Germany rearm itself so effectively and quickly despite the limitations imposed by the Treaty of Versailles?

The answer lies before Hitler came to power. Beginning in 1922, the Soviet Union and the German Army reached a secret agreement to cooperate militarily. They built secret facilities within Soviet Russia where they jointly tested tank and plane designs, trained officers and experimented with chemical weapons. This vast secret rearmament program would allow Germany to develop the technologies and tactics essential for the next world war. In return, the Soviet Union received vital military, technological, and economic assistance. At its core, this interwar exchange was a wager upon which the coming war depended.

This talk, co-hosted by the Centre for Grand Strategy and the Sir Michael Howard Centre, will preview the author’s forthcoming book with Oxford University Press.

Ian Ona Johnson is the Associate Director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale University, where he also teaches in the Department of History. He received his PhD in military history from the Ohio State University in 2016. He is the editor of a forthcoming book, The White Nights: Pages from a Russian Doctor’s Notebook (Bowen Press Books, Fall 2017), and author of the soon-to-be released The Faustian Bargain: Secret Soviet-German Military Cooperation in the Interwar Period (Oxford University Press, Fall 2018).