It's a question that a lot of people in Germany are suddenly asking themselves: How could we make ourselves so dependent on Russian energy supplies?

If you are looking for answers, you have to go back more than half a century, deep into German post-war history.

It is a saga of secret diplomacy, hopes, wars, threats - and last but not least, multi-billion dollar deals by German industrial groups and banks.

Generations of German chancellors and business leaders have contributed to it.

1959

Marcus Theurer

Editor in the economy of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.

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In the beginning there was Oldenburg: for the first time in West Germany, a large city switched its gas supply completely from town gas, which is made from coal, to natural gas.

It was mined in the region and had a significantly higher calorific value.

From Oldenburg, natural gas conquered German homes as a source of energy.

Around the same time, 300 kilometers to the south in the Ruhr area, the bosses of the steel companies Hoesch, Mannesmann and Thyssen sensed a promising new sales market: In the Soviet Union, huge newly discovered oil and gas deposits were to be tapped.

Despite the Cold War, the industrial barons began to deliver the necessary steel tubes on a large scale, 600,000 tons were produced for the Russians in the next three years.

German companies helped

1962

In the Federal Chancellery in Bonn, Konrad Adenauer had trouble with Washington.

In view of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which shortly before had almost led to a nuclear war between the two superpowers at war, US President John F. Kennedy pushed for a halt to German tube deliveries to the Soviet Union.

The United States even obtained a corresponding NATO decision.

Adenauer bowed to the pressure and imposed a tube embargo that ended business for the time being.

German industrialists campaigned for trade to resume.

A key figure was the entrepreneur Otto Wolff von Amerongen, for many years chairman of the Committee on Eastern European Economic Relations, the most important German hub for trade with the Soviet Union.

The economy pursued a kind of subsidiary foreign policy.

Industrialists like Berthold Beitz, the doyen of the Krupp concern, received private audiences with the Soviet ruler Nikita Khrushchev.

In 1966 industry had reached its goal: Ludwig Erhard, Adenauer's successor in the Chancellery, lifted the pipe embargo.

1969

In January, Economics Minister Karl Schiller sent his young State Secretary Klaus von Dohnanyi to Moscow to prepare a big deal.

Bonn hoped for cheap energy supplies through new pipelines, Moscow for foreign exchange earnings.

The Prague Spring the year before, when Russian tanks had crushed the liberalization policy in the socialist sister state of Czechoslovakia, was no obstacle for the federal government.