CANARIS, QUOTED BY LAHOUSEN, SECRET DEBRIEFING TO BRITISH INTELLIGENCE 1946 1 As Germany and the Soviet Union became more and more embroiled in an intelligence duel in Spain, Soviet and German agents were increasingly pitting their wits against each other in other parts of Europe. The relationship between the German army and the Soviet military inevitably continued to deteriorate. In barely ten years, it had gone from fulsome cooperation to mutual suspicion, reinforced by Hitler’s denunciation of the secret training treaty of 1926 and his unwinding of all the former Chief of the General Staff, von Seeckt’s, careful networks of cooperation.2 The two biggest armies in the world had been forcibly separated and arranged in opposite camps. But it remained one of Hitler’s obsessions that his army had never abandoned the policy of secret understanding with the Russian army that had prevailed in the Weimar republic under the inspiration of von Seeckt. Hitler was haunted that the two armies would preserve a sympathy that would one day turn them against their respective regimes.
