ITHIN a humbled but by no means subservient Germany, the new Reichswehr shrank toward the size required by the terms of the Versailles treaty. The German establishment nominally complied with the demands of the Allies under the eye of the Interallied Control Commission actively pursuing violations it could detect. March 31, 1920, the date by which German military strength levels were to reach the 100,000-man figure, passed, however, with actual ration count at twice that. The agendas of the international conferences in the early postwar period were heavy with inquiries about German acquiescence in treaty terms. As the United States abandoned Europe to its ills and the League of Nations to its febrile warranties of the peace, France, obsessed with guarantees of its own security, looked to the exact enforcement of the stipulations, relying nervously on the support of Great Britain. The decreasing patience of British diplomacy with French demands on Germany became one of the hallmarks of the interwar period. German diplomacy, on its side, sought leverage wherever it could perceive gains to be made in the fissures that opened between the wartime Allies.1
In this strained atmosphere, German soldiers remained alert to any opportunity affording open or clandestine advantage. Denied the possibility of large-scale exercises to practice coordinated activity among higher headquarters, the Reichswehr had, for the moment, to make a virtue out of its small size. Gen. Hans von Seeckt set about realizing a cadre army, a Fuhrerarmee, in the German term, in which every noncommissioned officer would one day become a company or field-grade officer. It also became a maneuver army,
One dedicated to mobile tactics. Limited by the necessity to conceal many of its activities, the German military moved to fill its requirements on all fronts.2
Von Boetticher remained a part of the central planning cell, the very intellectual middle, of the new German establishment. Article 160 of the Treaty of Versailles, coming into force on January 10, 1920, outlawed the Great Staff. Under the new Chief of the Army Command (Chef der Heeresleitung) was a much-reduced planning element, the Truppenamt. Comprising four main divisions, this innocuously named Troop Office carried on the traditional work of the old staff: Operations and Mobilization (T-1), Organization (T-2), Foreign Armies (T-3), and Troop Training and Indoctrination (T-4). A Transportation Section (T-7) rounded out the organization, which, for reasons unexplained, had no T-5 or T-6.3 On June 1, 1920, Major von Boetticher became chief of T-3, officially the Army Statistical Section, or Heeresstatistischeabteilung, but also known as the Foreign Armies Office. Nominally responsible for professional evaluations of foreign armies, he was, in short, the new chief planning agent—and often the executive—for German Army intelligence operations. From his Berlin office, von Boetticher actually oversaw a host of open and clandestine activity. Vestiges of the Great Staff's functions involved in these pursuits in the past found their halting way to the T-3. New functions were incorporated; in recognition of what aircraft had become in the war, one section specialized in reporting on developments in foreign military aviation.4 At least one part of the old Imperial German intelligence organization sought out von Boetticher in sheer desperation.
Among the footloose remnants of the German Army was a fragment of the former Nachrichtendienst, the military intelligence service, now struggling for existence. On a grand scale, this bureau before and during the war combined espionage abroad and more prosaic military intelligence collection activities under Col. Walther Nicolai. Nicolai's erstwhile military aide, Maj. Friedrich Gempp, kept the rump organization barely alive in spartan Berlin offices abandoned after the war by the German Navy. With nine other men, two of them officers, Gempp embarked on the self-defined mission of protecting the army from agitators within its own ranks and from other vague, presumably hostile, influences. Without patronage, he also sought the protection of a larger army component and presently found a home in von Boetticher's T-3 section. The meager reporting that he could command came to von Boetticher.5 Gempp's appendage, christened obscurely as the Abwehr, would in due course take on a larger life of its own under an erratic naval officer, Adm. Wilhelm Canaris. During his service in Washington, von Boetticher would have reason to remember the Abwehr.
As the reception center for any military reports from abroad, von Boetticher's command suffered a marked handicap. The victorious Allies had hobbled this function from the start. The treaty had stripped the German establishment of the General Staff that assimilated military attache reports in the past. Another of the military clauses, Article 179, was held by extension to forbid the dispatch of any German attaches at all.6 The Allied peacemakers who had drafted it supposedly had in mind the case of Liman von Sanders, who trained and advised the Turkish armies that so embarrassed British and Australian landing forces at Gallipoli in 1915. The signatories of the peace understood the article to be consistent with the idea of disarming Germany as a precursor to world disarmament.7 As such, the right to dispatch attaches was an implicit issue in the continued German representations in the interwar period for equality with other powers. Von Boetticher's earliest work in the T-3 section contributed to a shadow system of attaches sent abroad. As chief of the section, he emphasized especially the analysis of the close relation between political imperatives and military thought in foreign staffs. Some German diplomats were willing to supply information from foreign posts, but without training or professional military backgrounds, their value as observers was limited. They usually sent home newspaper clippings without analysis. Disguised attaches thus sent out in contravention of the treaty went mainly to Mussolini's Italy and to Spain.8 With these men quietly deployed, and with the information coming in from Abwehr sources and the cooperation that von Boetticher could develop among traditional diplomats, the Reichswehr at least kept the institutional semblance of an attache system.
Centered in the T-3 office, too, was the administrative machinery for something far more ambitious. In what seemed an improbable concurrence of interests, Soviet Russia and Germany began a cautious approach to each other driven by economic necessity and their common status as pariahs in international circles of the time.
World History
