Black Reichswehr

Black Reichswehr ( _de. Schwarze Reichswehr) was the name for the illegal paramilitary formations during the Weimar Republic, which were raised to evade the restrictions imposed by the Versailles Treaty.

The Versailles treaty restricted the numbers of the German army to 100,000 men, as well as forbidding aircraft, heavy artillery, submarines, capital ships, tanks and chemical warfare capacity. A military commission was appointed by the Allies to maintain these restrictions. The Reichswehr under Hans von Seeckt evaded these prohibitions through a variety of measures, initially hiding stores of weapons and munitions and trying to maintain production capacity by camouflaging it as civilian, but also by making political arrangements with Soviet Russia continuing the cooperation that had existed after the treaty of Brest-Litowsk.

In a wider sense, freikorps like the Sturmabteilung (SA) or the Organisation Consul also belonged to the Black Reichswehr, although those weren't commanded directly by the official Reichswehr.

In August 1920, Enver Pasha, working as a liaison between Germany and Soviet Russia, proposed that Germany provide information regarding the Polish military. On the Soviet side, the RSFSR selected Viktor Kopp, to work with the Germans. He established offices in Berlin, Tallinn, Riga and Kaunas. Kopp's cover was the repatriation of POWs, but his real responsibility was improving German and Soviet relations. Kopp was successful in getting a number of Soviet-German joint ventures started. Soviet supporters for this secret partnership included Lenin and Stalin. German supporters were von Seeckt, von Blomberg, Rathenau and others.

The Rapallo Treaty of 1922 was an important milestone in this cooperation. The most significant result of the Rapallo was the German-Soviet military cooperation in which the Germans were granted rights to military bases on Soviet territory. The advantages accrued to the Germans were the development and testing of prohibited technologies, as well as trying and tactics suitable for them; training and evaluating an experienced cadre of specialists. The Soviets were allowed support to help train their Army as well as technical know-how. The combined training and testing was performed in three bases: of armor in Kazan, of aviation in Lipetsk and of chemical warfare in Tomka. An added bonus was achieved by taking the officers in the Soviet Union off the active list, allowing the Reichswehr to employ more officers than the mere 4,000 allowed by the Versailles Treaty.

A minor crisis occurred in 1926 when the German Social Democrats realized that Soviet weapons were used to kill their supporters. British papers published articles regarding the German-Soviet cooperation. However, the German communists managed to throw enough doubts on the matter and the media coverage died. When Hitler gained power in Germany this cooperation was terminated. It is estimated that more than a 1,000 Luftwaffe pilots were trained through this cooperation. Heinz Guderian spent some important years in Kazan while Valerian Kuybyshev was trained in Germany.