In 1924, the German Karl Bartenbach was hired as an expert by the Finnish Defence Ministry, to work for a state office for designing and building warships for the nascent Finnish Navy. Bartenbach was one of the most experienced German submarine officers of WWI, and he had led the German Flanders U-boat flotillas in the British Home Waters since 1915, eventually as Führer der U-boote commanding nearly 30 submarines after 1917.
The man who hired Bartenbach, and for whom Bartenbach would design submarines and armored coastal ships in the 1920s was the then commander of the Finnish Navy, Gustav von Schoultz. A former Russian Navy officer, he had been assigned as a Russian liaison to the Royal Navy, and in this capacity for example took part in the Battle of Jutland, after going on the record to exhort the British Admiralty to "engage in greater offensive undertakings".
While von Schoultz was the leader of the Finnish Navy in the twenties, he was considered by the British as one of their greatest allies in the Finnish defence community, based on his WWI-period contacts and cooperation with British officers and his brief service in the Royal Navy itself after the Russian Revolution. Von Schoultz was very supportive of building Finnish submarines (in 1926-30 as the chairman of the Finnish Navy League, the main pressure group for creating a strong navy). On the other hand, the submarines created for the Finnish fleet under the tutelage of Bartenbach would significantly advance German submarine construction in the interwar, especially the CV-707 (Saukko) that became the direct prototype of the German Type II coastal subs.
In the late 20s von Schoultz, who was of German stock and was married to a German woman, was essentially smoked out of the navy during a campaign by the German-trained "Jäger" officers aimed against soldiers in the Finnish armed forces who had been members of the Russian Army and Navy in WWI.
I guess the interwar period was quite rife with such historical ironies in the newly independent states.