Page 41 - The Chief Culprit

18 y e Chief Culprit

Stalin understood that the new war would not only be an air war, but a tank war as
well. erefore, he gave particular attention to preparing German Panzer corps. In 1926, near
the Soviet city of Kazan, a tank school for the Reichswehr was created. German tankers wore
Soviet uniforms there. Stalin fully equipped future German Panzer generals: he gave them
tanks, fuel, ammunition, transport, housing, repair facilities, and a gigantic well-guarded
weapons range—to create, to invent, to test. Kazan became the birthplace and alma mater
of German armored divisions. e best Panzer generals of the Wehrmacht Heer (the German
army) were bred and trained there. In Kazan they mastered the art of modern warfare; later,
they led tank units to Warsaw, Paris, Belgrade, and Athens, to the shores of the English
Channel, the Adriatic Sea, and the Atlantic Ocean.
It is critically important that engineers constantly work on improving weapons. A break
of even ten years carries irreversible consequences. Old engineers and designers either leave
for other branches of industry or retire, without passing their experience and knowledge to
the new generation. In a few years a twofold problem arises: on the one hand, a technology
lapse, on the other hand, the absence of competent and experienced engineers who could
bridge this lapse. Fifteen years separate the end of World War I and Hitler’s coming to power.
Stalin’s merit before Hitler’s Germany lies in that he did not allow Germany to fall behind
its enemies in technological and scientific advancement. Stalin bridged the gap between the
retiring generation of engineers from the Kaiser era and the newly ascending generation of
the ird Reich. Stalin’s efforts secured the transfer of all amassed scientific and technologi-
cal potential, knowledge, and experience from the retiring designers to the newly starting
creators of military equipment and weapons.
e development and production of chemical weapons (poisonous agents such as mus-
tard gas) were set up on the premises of the firm Bersol in Ivashchenko (now Chapaevsk)
near the Soviet city of Samara. e daily output of mustard gas, which sadly earned its fame
during World War I, reached 3.3 tons, and the daily output of the deadly poisonous gas
phosgene was 2.6 tons. at made a total of 5.9 tons per day, which meant over two thousand
tons per year. Joint testing of chemical weapons was conducted on two training ranges: one
called “Tomka,” near the city of Volsk in the Saratov region, and another, “Podosinki,” which
is today Kuzminki, a district of Moscow. It was there that in 1926–1927 the first joint Soviet-
German chemical weapon tests were conducted.
It was not enough to train personnel and perfect models of weapons. One also needs
military factories that will produce these weapons. Here as well the Kremlin leaders already,
at the end of the 1920s, showed full understanding, and came to the aid of the German war
industry. An agreement was worked out about the creation in Russia of production facilities
for the German war industry, masked as Soviet-German enterprises. e Junkers deal was the
first such enterprise. In 1922 the firm began constructing metal planes and plane motors.
Beginning in 1924, the factory already had begun to produce several hundred planes per year.
Following Junkers were Friedrich Krupp (cannons, shells, and tanks), BMW (tank motors
and plane motors), Bersol (poisonous gases), Karl Walther (rifles), and others.
Stalin prepared Germany for a second world war. Without Stalin’s help, Germany could
not arm itself and destroy Europe. Obviously, when arming Germany, Stalin was not plan-
ning that all this would be used against him.