in 1930, when Maxim Litvinov replaced Chicherin, Dirksen made no secret of his dislike for Litvinov, who he charged was not really a follower of the Rapallo policy as Chicherin had been and also was a Jew. However, Dirksen argued in his memoirs that Litvinov's "anti-German" foreign policy inclinations had little influence on Stalin until 1933. In 1930–31, Dirksen negotiated a set of long-term credits for German businesses willing to sell machinery to the Soviet Union. Despite's Dirksen's best efforts, German-Soviet relations did not develop as well as he hoped. Stresemann had often used the threat of Germany leaning east towards the Soviet Union as a way of getting concessions from Britain and France in his campaign to revise the Treaty of Versailles, and by the early 1930s, the Soviets had grown tired of the way in which the Germans used the threat of friendship with them for their own purposes. Moreover, by the early 1930s, the German Protestant middle classes were gripped with the fear that the German Communist Party would use the great unemployed masses made available by the Great Depression to stage a revolution. That caused much of the Protestant middle class in 1930 to start to vote for Nazi Party as the "party of order" to crush Marxism in Germany. In 1930, German Foreign Minister Julius Curtius warned Dirksen that as long as the Kremlin supported the Communists and as long as the German middle classes were obsessed with the fear of a communist revolution, which Curtius complained to be fanned by a hysterical campaign in the conservative German press, which vastly exaggerated the dangers of a communist revolution in Germany, the Reich had to keep a certain distance from the Soviet Union. Furthermore, Curtius noted that reports, which were true, that the Volga Germans suffered terribly because of the policies of forced collectivisation, imposed by the First Five-Year Plan, made it politically toxic for Germany to get too close to the Soviet Union. Dirksen still saw the Soviet Union as a "counterweight to the West" and urged Curtius not to turn back completely on the eastern pivot. He wrote that the main enemy was still Poland, and the Soviet Union was useful as a potential ally against Poland. Hitler inspired a fierce maternal love in older, upper-class women, and in the 1920s, the "Hitler Mothers" emerged. They were older women, invariably from a well-off background,