secretly directed third parties working for it to buy back those subsequently devalued bonds at rock bottom prices. As a result, only 15% of German debt was held by foreign sources in the late 1930s. Soviet great purges in 1937 and 1938 made striking an agreement with Germany even less likely by disrupting the already confused Soviet administrative structure necessary for negotiations. In the portion of the purges involving the military in 1936 and 1937, over 34,000 officers were purged in a campaign against a "fascist-Trotskyite conspiracy", including 45% of the most senior officers. While many officers were later reinstated, those that were convicted were shot and political officers, 73 per cent of which had no military experience, were introduced into the Red Army. The purges led Hitler to believe that the Soviets were militarily weak. Castigated former lead economist Kondratiev was one of those executed in the purges. His harangued German economist counterpart, Schacht, would face similar treatment many years later, winding up in a Nazi concentration camp after being accused of being part of the July 20 Plot to assassinate Hitler. Economic reconciliation was hampered even further by political tension after the Anschluss in mid-1938 and Hitler's increasing hesitance to deal with the Soviet Union. Soviet exports to Germany fell to 47.4 million Reichsmarks in 1937 (approximately one fifth of the 1934 total) and 52.8 million Reichsmarks in 1938. In short, the important trading relationship between the countries that existed in the 1920s essentially collapsed with Hitler's rise to power. German northeastern European imports from 1934 to 1939 were as follows: {| class=wikitable |- ! !!SovietUnion ||Polandand Danzig ||Finland ||Estonia ||Latvia ||Lithuania |- style="text-align:center;" | align="left"|1934||223.0 ||78.1 ||42.3 ||8.2 ||21.1 ||15.1 |- style="text-align:center;" | align="left"|1935||201.7 ||75.5 ||41.4 ||13.0 ||31.1 ||2.0 |- style="text-align:center;" | align="left"|1936||93.2 ||74.0 ||46.1 ||13.8 ||33.2 ||9.1 |- style="text-align:center;" | align="left"|1937||63.1 ||80.7 ||70.1 ||23.7 ||45.7 ||17.2 |- style="text-align:center;" | align="left"|1938||47.4 ||109.4 ||88.6 ||24.0 ||43.5 ||27.6 |- style="text-align:center;" | align="left"|1939||52.8 ||140.8 ||88.9 ||24.3 ||43.6 ||27.8 |- |colspan="13"|*German Imports in millions of Reichsmarks |} Even with vastly decreased trade between the countries, Germany was still among the top three importer nations for the Soviet Union and supplied between one third and two thirds of Soviet machine tool imports vital for industrialization. Trade continued on the basis of short term clearing agreements. Germany had supplied 54% of Soviet imports of machine tools from 1929 to 1933, and 53% of