GERMANY & RUSSIA

Greymouth Evening Star, 9 October 1928, Page 7

GERMANY & RUSSIA

ALLEGED MILITARY TREATY.

(Times Cables.) (By Cable—Press Assn.—Copyright.)

LONDON, October 8.

‘‘The Times’s” Berlin correspondent reports that Kunstler, a Socialist member of the Reichstag, has given the paper “Vorwaerts” details of alleged secret German-Soviet military arrangements, negotiated in 1922-23, including the establishment of a Junkers aircraft aero-engine works in Soviet Rusisa.

Kunstler says that everything . and everybody was given a code designation. Thus Junkers works were the firm “N.N.” The German Ministry of Defence was “the special group.” Aeroplanes were “cases.” “Vorwaerts” publishes the key, and also quotations from letters written to Professor Junkers and others by a “mixed commission” sent from Moscow in December, 1921. If Kunstler’s disclosures are genuine, they confirm a version hitherto current, but never clearly established, .says “The Times’s” correspondent, who points out that when the question of the relations between the Reichswehr and Red Army came up in the Reichstag two years ago, it was admitted that Junker’s-activities in Soviet Russia had the German Government’s official backing, but the Government then gave assurances that its relations with Junkers had long since been dissolved. The Nationalist newspapers, declaring the whole disclosures ancient history, accuse Kunstler of treason in publishing them, and regret that his Parliamentary immunity protects him from prosecution.