Suchergebnisse

For decades historians have raised the question wether outside forces figured in the purge of the Red Army which Stalin initiated in 1937 with the arrest and subsequent shooting of Marshal Tukhachevskii. It was unclear whether Heinrich Himmler's Sicherheitsdienst falsified certain documents in Berlin which were to prove Tukhachevskii's conspiratorial plotting against Stalin, and later passed these on to the Czechoslovakian head of state Edvard Benes. Should this have been the case, Stalin, having been given this information by Benes, would immediately have set about purging the ranks of his own army. Recollections by members of the Sicherheitsdienst, as well as Benes' memoirs, appear to verify this sequence of events. However, archival material recently made available in Prague and Moscow proves without a doubt, that the involvement of the Sicherheitsdienst was instigated by one of Stalin's agents. Indeed Benes, who in fact received information from Berlin regarding Tukhachevskii's conspiracy plans, did not make this known to Stalin until after Marshal Tukhachevskii had been put to death. Thus, the purging of the Red Army was an act Stalin had planned and carried out independently and can be seen as one more aspect characterizing his totalitarian regime. - (Josef W. Stalin, Edvard Benesch, Miachail N. Tuchatschewski). (Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte / FUB)