3rd Herd said:
Flanker,
try adding your source information. For example the military collaboration which had began in the 1921 with the setting up Sonder-Gruppe R. was still peaking in the early 1930s.As direct Soviet German Military exchanges 1932 "saw multiple educational exchanges and large scale participation in joint exercises" according to Storm of Steel: The Development of Armor Doctrine in Germany and the Soviet Union, 1919-1939 by Habeck. Germany on September 15th of 1933 discontinued the operation of the three secret Reichswar bases as "collaboration was terminated not because it was no longer mutually beneficial, but because collaboration was no longer able to maintain itself as a purely military operation independent of current Russo-German relations".(Stein)
The last quote seems to repeat exactly what I said before but in a very-very sophisticated way.
The school trainings ended by 1933 for political reasons.
What are these political reasons?
Nazi's coup d'etat in Germany.
Many people make a big error trying to mix Germany of 20s, which was called Weimar Republic and was a democratic socialist state, and Nazi's Germany of 30s which was a quite opposite thing.
USSR and Weimar Republic had a lot of common political and economics interests, so it is not surprising that they collaborated and this was beficial for both of them.
More particularly, these common interests arose from non collaborative attitude of Western states.
As for sources, there is a bunch of declassified Soviet documents as well as many german sources. Like the one I mention below.
As for your minimizing of the training efforts, according to Vercamer and Pipes " by 1933, over 1,200 Luftwaffe pilots had been trained at Lipetsk."
That is simply not true. A pure speculation.
The Lipetsk school trained about 120 pilots and 100 pilots-observers.
I would recommend to use more reliable sources.
Here is first-hand information from of a high-ranking Luftwaffe officer involved in the trainings:
Helm Speidel
http://www.ifz-muenchen.de/heftarchiv/1953_1.pdf
page 29, 30
In the realm of armoured warfare from "1926 till 1929, at least 146 officers finished the training school at Kama. The most famous "cadet" was Von Kleist."(Parada) The end result of this training saw "forty - three air force officer s "graduating" from the Lipeck camp in 1928, twenty became Luftwaffe generals, while a good dozen of the forty army officers from the Kama school also made it to generals rank."(Zeidler)
Your sources seems to be contradictory. So 40 or 146 officers?
To avoid any further speculations, here is a quite complete list of the staff trained at the Kama tank school:
http://www.meissler.de/militaer/wuensdorf_lehrgang.shtml
As you can see, there is no 146 officers, no Guderian in there, and even no Kleist.
The last one is particularly ridiculous.
You can check the official biography of Kleist to make sure that :
1. He had never studied in USSR
2. By that time he had already got a high officer grade, high enough to keep his nose out of thank schools
There are many sources, here is a link:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/GERkliest.htm
After the war Kleist was Staff Officer with the 13th Cavalry Regiment (1920-23), Instructor of Tactics at the Cavalry School at Hanover (1923-26) and Chief of Staff of the 2nd Cavalry Division (1927-28) where he replaced Gerd von Rundstedt. He then served as Chief of Staff of Wehrkreis III (1928-31) and in 1932 was promoted to the rank of major general.
A couple of hundred of pilots and tank officers trained in USSR is nothing comparing to at least 2000 officers trained secretely in Germany itself by the beginning of 30s.
The overall impact of these trainings was absolutely insignificant for the whole German army.