In November 1934, at the Soviet embassy in Berlin, Hitler's War Minister Werner von Blomberg raised a glass of sparkling Crimean wine in a toast: "Never shall we forget what the Soviet army did for Germany. I drink to the well-being and to the future of the great and glorious Soviet army, to faithful comradeship in arms, today and in the future!" The toast marked the end of the military-training deal which Germany and Bolshevik Russia secretly made after World War I. Germany had needed arms and space to train; Russia, know-how. Both had got what they wanted. By 1934 Hitler was ready to junk the deal, make his own arms and planes. By June 1941 the Nazi-Soviet war doused Blomberg's hope of "faithful comradeship in arms."
But last week the hope was glowing again. Soviet Russia was building the nucleus of a tough new German army in the Eastern Zone of Germany.
"The Only Life." On the drill fields the old Wehrmacht close-order commands crackled out: "Die Augen—links! . . . Das Gewehr—über!" Officers of the Bereitschaften—or "ready squads," the soft name for the new army—wore gaudy Wehrmacht epaulets. Recruits were dashing and proud in well-tailored blue uniforms with mirrory leather belts, spanking black boots.
Said one young German soldier to a friend: "Damn it, you feel like a man again when you hear those commands! You say to yourself, 'Pull yourself together, get it right.' I'm not a Communist, but this army is the only life today."
A youth who goes into the Bereitschaften is paid 345 marks a month, about double the pay of a skilled worker. In the Communist army he also gets his clothes and 150 cigarettes a month.
Since summer a brisk recruiting campaign has been going on and upper-teenagers, already indoctrinated by Communist youth groups, have flocked to the colors. In Jena, Leipzig, Rostock, Halle, along the whole belt of Wehrmacht barracks in Eastern Germany, discipline and fanaticism are forging the cadre of an army. Former Nazi officers, retreaded in Russia, drill stiff bearing into formless figures.
From reveille at 6 until retreat at 5, the recruits take general combat training—map-reading, technology and basic tactics in classrooms; firing-range practice and maneuvers in the field. In the evening the political commissars explain: "The People's Democracy considers the officers of its People's Army as the guarantors of peace . . . Your strength must force the Western imperialists to evacuate Germany."
This propaganda, the study in the classrooms, and the brisk hard exercise in the field have expert supervision: they are directed by German Communism's ablest and most famed soldier-of-fortune.
General Gomez Returns. In 1937 a German Communist, fighting in Spain, wrote in his diary: "The general is a gigantic man. His eyes lie deep in his massive face. His nature is jovial—but I suspect that the joviality can fall like a mask and the features can grow taut."