In 1922 he became Foreign Minister: on which occasion he sought Lili Deutsch's solace, his mother's comfort, and the company of a pistol for protection. Writing before the Genoa Conference that concern for his personal safety was prescient of a foreboding for his own death. The insistence that Germany should fulfill its obligations under the Treaty of Versailles, but work for a revision of its terms, infuriated extreme German nationalists. He also angered such extremists by negotiating on 22 January 1922 Treaty of Rapallo with the Soviet Union, although the treaty implicitly recognized secret German-Soviet collaboration begun in 1921 that provided for the rearmament of Germany, including German-owned aircraft manufacturing in Russian territory. The leaders of the (still obscure) National Socialist German Workers' Party (German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, abbreviated NSDAP) and other extremist groups falsely claimed he was part of a "Jewish-Communist conspiracy," despite the fact that he was a liberal German nationalist who had bolstered the country's recent war effort. The British politician Robert Boothby wrote of him, "He was something that only a German Jew could simultaneously be: a prophet, a philosopher, a mystic, a writer, a statesman, an industrial magnate of the highest and greatest order, and the pioneer of what has become known as 'industrial rationalization'." Despite his desire for economic and political co-operation between Germany and the Soviet Union, Rathenau remained skeptical of the methods of the Soviets: