PDGS - Seminar Governance, Security and Military Institutions in Democracies - Image of the Wehrmacht in Federal German Society and in the Tradition of the Bundeswehr

Image of the Wehrmacht in Federal German Society and in the Tradition of the Bundeswehr(1)

Occasional Paper #3

Donald Abenheim

August 1999

Introduction

The collapse of the Soviet civil-military system in 1989-91 has led to the enlargement of Euro-Atlantic democratic civil-military relations and military professionalism in central and eastern Europe.(2) Since 1990, this process has featured prominently in the reform of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, whose "Partnership for Peace" program has emphasized the need to place political ideals of security, defense and military service on a democratic footing in the sphere beyond the Elbe, Danube, Moldau and Vistula. Many participants in, and observers of, this process have tended to treat these events as sui generis, that is, as essentially being without precedent. While the details and certain key aspects of how the central and eastern Europeans have discarded the Soviet system of civil-military relations have surely been unique, the collapse of regimes and the re-orientation of civil-military fundamentals recalls earlier episodes of European military reform. Since Niccolo Machiavelli's proposals in the fifteenth century to re-organize the army of Florence, military reform has been more or less a constant feature of modern European history.(3) This generalization has been especially true for soldier-state relations in Prussian-German history.(4) Reforms began with the Hohenzollern Great Elector's reform of the Prussian army in the wake of the Thirty Years' War and continued through three centuries until German unification in 1990. Military reform played a key role in the fate of German soldiers in the wake of defeat in 1918.

This paper concentrates on the manner in which the citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) have handled the symbolic and professional legacies of defeat in the past half-century. By examining how political and cultural elites in the FRG thought about and acted upon the respective experiences of Germany's bid for world power, its defeat in 1918, its failed Weimar experiment, the Nazi regime, and another defeat in World War II, the paper seeks to draw out some "lessons learned" about how historical legacies can influence contemporary civil-military relations. The German case in this regard commends itself to further reflection and analysis in an English-speaking world, which has focused more on the causes and course of the two world wars than on their effects. The German experience may also be useful to reformers around the world who are interested in the impact of images and experiences of the past upon their contemporary civil-military debates.

Old Photographs And Old Questions Posed Anew

What images of word and film best capture the legacy of the Wehrmacht (German armed forces) in the Federal Republic? Is it the amputee in a dyed field blouse and cap making his way on crutches amid the rubble?(5) Could it be scenes circa 1946 of the senior military leadership on trial at Nuremberg or, of the last prisoners of war returning to Germany after their release from Soviet camps in 1955? Could it be the novelist Hans-Hellmut Kirst's depiction of barracks square brutality and farce in the novels Null Acht Fuenfzehn or of the dramatist Carl Zuckmayer's portrait of the air ace Ernst Udet's undoing in Des Teufels General? Perhaps, some people would choose the thrilling depictions of soldierly bravery and the technical mastery of the military art with Stukas on high and Panthers on the attack found in the illustrated veterans' magazine, Der Frontsoldat Erzaehlt?

While any one of these images might offer a point of departure, this essay begins with a reflection on a collection of photographs from the Second World War that, in the present decade, has aroused bitter emotions in contemporary politics.(6) A studio portrait of an anonymous young German soldier in his uniform contrasts with snap-shots of an execution somewhere in the rear area of the eastern front. In the former image, a young man in peaked cap and walking-out dress fixes his gaze purposefully beyond the portrait camera's lens. The second image reveals a group of German military and non-military personnel, as well as Russian civilians, transfixed by the shattered corpses that swing from the hangman's noose. The juxtaposition of images confronts the present with the dilemma of how German soldiers did or did not cross the ethical and professional frontier that separates a disciplined, regular army from becoming perpetrators of mass slaughter for genocidal purposes. The storm of ideological mass violence that swept this recruit from the photo atelier to the front and which, in all likelihood, brought death to him and to the victims of the executioner has left behind great emotional baggage even to the present day. The after-effects of this tempest have compelled those who survived as well as their heirs to consider the dilemma of how the second German democracy handled the legacy of national socialism and how the Federal Republic sought to reconcile military professionalism with the disasters of mass politics and the soldierly ethos. The debate that began in the mid-1990s about the so-called Wehrmacht exhibition represents the most recent episode in a long-standing process of addressing the past as concerns these issues.(7) At various times since 1949, civilians and soldiers have addressed the image of the Wehrmacht in Federal German society in connection with the transformation of the international system of states and the changing complexion of domestic society. In particular, the debate about the valid heritage of the Bundeswehr (Federal German Armed Forces) is only a subsidiary phenomenon of a general political and social self-examination of the past in German society that emerged with new energy since the European collapse of the communist system a decade ago.(8)

Continuities Of Democracy And Military Professionalism: The Political And Social Setting In The Beginning Of Debate, 1945-49

Elements of continuity in the struggle to extract historical truth about the soldier indoctrinated in national socialism follow quite naturally from the evolution of military professionalism and from the consolidation of democracy in modern Europe. Such issues concern more than merely central Europe. As historians such as Klaus Juergen Mueller and Michael Geyer have suggested,(9) in the first half of the 20th century the failures of democracy, mass politics, and the military brotherhood brought disastrous consequences for soldier and civilian alike. Thus, this story refers to 20th century civil-military relations as much as it does to contemporary German history. Germans have consistently used the unceasing debate about the image of the Wehrmacht as a means to address more general civil-military issues in politics and society.(10)

Furthermore, any understanding of the legacy of the Wehrmacht in Federal Germany exists in connection with the evolution of Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung (mastery of the past) as a general political and social phenomenon amid the changing character of German democracy. The early phase of this phenomenon has recently been given insightful treatment by Norbert Frei, who suggests that the founders of the early Federal Republic, rather than simply tolerating a restoration of the poor Weimar functionaries and Nazi fellow travelers, sought to fashion a workable policy of democratic integration from the civil-military mistakes of 1918-45 and from the political and social exigencies of the moment.(11) Between 1919-1933, Germany had suffered from catastrophic civil-military relations and the rise of ideological camps within the body politic that grew more balkanized and antagonistic as time passed. The effort after 1948 to correct the failings of the first republic by a policy of democratic inclusion emerged amid the stresses of the first years of the Cold War, and sparked opposition and controversy from the outset among those who worried about a neo-Nazi and militarist revival. Under the eyes of the occupiers, policymakers belonging to the young democracy in Bonn confronted a disastrous situation of physical ruin and general bitterness for which no easy answers seemed possible. The failure of republican forces after 1921 to nurture an army in a democracy stood as a warning that a failure to reconcile soldiers with the new Basic Law would surely have fatal consequences again. (12)

The Federal Republic had to address several concerns regarding the millions of veterans of the Wehrmacht: a) their democratic integration; b) their enfranchisement in society; and c) the provision of social welfare that had been forbidden by the occupiers' doctrines of control. In the first instance, as Frei notes, the government had to distance itself from the ongoing attempt by the victors to re-educate, de-nazify, and punish millions of Germans, among whom were tens of thousands of professional soldiers. The occupiers' intention to initiate educational and psychological reform directed at all younger Germans, as well as to purge millions of party members from public life and civil society had reached its climax in the general attempt to punish the worst perpetrators of the regime at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal and its subsequent trials.(13) Soldiers figured prominently as defendants in these trials. Military officers received damnation, scorn, and reproach for the failures of the regime and for defeat in war. Such sentiments affected rather less the common soldier, who at the time might be thought to be as much as a victim of the regime, as the actual political/racial victims themselves. The offensive strategy of de-militarization, de-nazification, de-cartelization, democratization, and collective guilt had generally passed the culminating point by the time the FRG was born in the spring of 1949. The broad sweep of such strategy called forth a wave of worrisome public resentment against the victors and against their methods.

Two Images Of The Wehrmacht In Politics And Society, 1949-55

Thus emerged at the outset the two antagonistic images of the Wehrmacht, which simultaneously form central continuities within this process of historical examination: On the hand, the Wehrmacht as a semi-criminal or criminal organization, replete with a highly compromised senior leadership and a suspect officers corps; and on the other hand, there rose as a reaction to this first image; b) the view of the military as a reservoir of Prussian-German patriotic, soldierly professional virtues that in certain key aspects had not been wholly corrupted by the national socialist regime. Indeed, the army had, at a crucial moment, offered the most significant resistance to the Nazis possible in July 1944. While this analysis probably contains elements of oversimplification, this bi-polarity is useful for analysis. The implications associated with these conflicted images have endured in one form or another into the present.(14)

The image of the Wehrmacht as a semi-criminal organization serves as the point of departure. While lawyers, professors, doctors, judges, and clerics all made common cause with the nationalist socialists and committed professional misdeeds and crimes, from the outset in the years from 1945 until 1949, it was the professional soldiers who were singled out side by side with the Nazis for having brought defeat to eighty million Germans after prolonging a needless war. Since national socialism had grossly inflated the traditional prestige of the soldier by means of an attempt early in the regime to erect the Third Reich upon the dual pillars of party and army, it was perhaps natural that there would be a backlash against the privileged group: the military. Six of the regime's twelve years had been during war-time in which the small cadre of officers who had sharpened their skills in the Reichswehr were dwarfed in the national socialist people-at-arms that the Wehrmacht became at the height of the war. The radical vortex of total war killed an increasing number of Germans. Once defeat was apparent in 1944-45, professional soldiers formed an easy and logical target of the resentment, guilt, and anger of these millions. The war ended the existence of a unitary, monolithic Wehrmacht, if such a thing ever existed at all.

Whereas the dictates of demilitarization following the defeat of Germany by the allies had led to a general prohibition on all things military, by 1949-50, the Adenauer government and the NATO allies recognized that. The congruent needs of German sovereignty and of alliance strategy required the rearmament of the Federal Republic.(15)

This realization prompted a phase wherein veterans groups sprang into existence, the political right re-emerged in Germany, a handful of ex-Wehrmacht officers planned for a German contribution to Euro-Atlantic defense amid pacifist hostility, and memoirists and military pamphleteers produced a flood of literature on the last war of varying quality and purpose. Herein did the contrarian answer to the Nuremberg verdict and to re-education fully establish itself from its sources in various quarters in German society. The diverse adherents to the contrarian image of the Wehrmacht pursued overlapping goals while being united in their desire to cleanse the tarnished image of the soldier.

In this connection, a distinction must be made between: a) those who defended the military in the past war to secure their own pensions;(16) b) those who sought to reconstruct military professionalism on a democratic basis within the FRG and NATO;(17) and c) those who, as in dark times past, grasped at the catalogue of military virtues and soldierly honor to shield their own actions or misdeeds, as well as d) those who employed personalities and institutions of military professionalism and valor as a symbol of radical right-wing politics.

These stands were linked with a specific period of time that extends from the era of the Korean War (1950-53) until the rise of détente after the closure of the inner-German border and the Cuban Missile Crisis (1961-63). During this period certain culpable ex-Nazis seized upon the Adenauer government's policies of democratic inclusion to escape punishment within what the chancellor's critics condemned as either a restoration or a general ethical and moral amnesia about past violence. Such amnesia or numbness only began to be replaced by a more assertive, questioning German civil society in the ferment of the early 1960s.(18)

Image Of The Wehrmacht In The Early Years Of The Bundeswehr: Cold War Caution, Inclusion And Contradiction, 1950-65

The military founders of the Bundeswehr were without exception veterans of the Wehrmacht; moreover certain figures had served in the old armies before 1918 and in the Reichswehr.(19) Their military biographies comprised great moments of military professionalism as well as the subsequent decadence and corruption of military ideals in the maelstrom of mass politics, total warfare in the machine age and pseudo-scientific ethnic cleansing. These scholars had participated in military deeds of enormous self-sacrifice and great skill and seen soldiers and civilians alike abuse such sacrifice and expertise. Furthermore, many leading civilian political figures of the Adenauer era, who played a leading role in the construction of the new army, had also served in uniform, mostly in the era 1933-45, although some had served earlier as was the case with the socialist Kurt Schumacher.

Once policy makers applied this collective experience to the task of simultaneously building a durable democracy and an efficient army, the result became seen as a kind of synthesis between the dual, conflicted images of the Wehrmacht that had emerged in the era 1944-50.(20) This synthesis was symbolized by the democratic civil-military reforms of the Basic Law (1954-57), by the body of laws affecting military service, and by the reformulation of the soldier's ideals of service, command, morale and obedience that after 1953 became known as Innere Fuehrung.(21) In the realm of the international system, the combination of new German combat power with the integrated military structure of NATO represented a departure from past German strategy and military practice which rejected the essence of the Wehrmacht in national socialism. For their part, allied soldiers were quick to-forgive-and-forget. This policy was obvious in Dwight Eisenhower's statement of honor for the German soldier of 1951. He offered this declaration upon becoming Supreme Commander Allied Forces, Europe to neutralize the opposition to alliance with the West that remained among many German embittered over their social ostracism, re-education and the Nuremberg and Landsberg verdicts.(22)

The civil-military reforms and democratic fundamentals of the 1950s, which arose, in part, from the clash of images over the Wehrmacht legacy, have proven far more effective and durable than one might have expected at the time. Four decades ago, this reform seemed tentative and incomplete, and due to the pre-1945 experience of soldier and the state, prone to a disastrous ending as in the era 1929-33.

The new civil-military ideal of the citizen-in-uniform could not disavow entirely the military careers of those who stood to arms to defend the FRG within the ranks of NATO.(23) In addition to young men with no prior service, the first officers of the Bundeswehr, who entered service in 1955-58, included a strong contingent of company and field-grade veterans of the Wehrmacht. The Bundeswehr emerged as an army-without-pathos whose soldiers still had a sense of their own honor and professional ethos despite all that had happened around them. The Nazis, in particular, had taken the cult of military brotherhood that became a political force after 1918, to new extremes. These extreme measures began with Joseph Goebbels' historical exaggeration and political manipulation during the 21 March 1933 opening of the Reichstag in Potsdam and ended in 1945 with the color extravaganza film of Prussian kamikaze virtues in Kolberg. Such excesses would have no place in the West German military. Similarly, any allegiance of the new army to the German military's past appeared to critics of the Bundeswehr as signs of a militarist or neo-Nazi revival. At the same time, however, men-at-arms honored their fallen comrades, respected their former commanders, and, most important avoided the blanket condemnations of the military ethos that became the norm throughout society.

In response to the question of lineage, honors and the maintenance of tradition with the Wehrmacht, the Reichswehr and the old armies, the leadership of the Bundeswehr adopted a policy of "wait and see" amid the general attempt at democratizing civil-military relations.(24) Civilian and military proponents of change were primarily concerned with the reformed institutions of command, morale and obedience, which had to consolidate in the midst of a rapid, turbulent military build-up in the years of crisis from 1956 until 1963. Within high councils of the civil and military leadership, as well as among the legislative and academic advisors to the Ministry of Defense, individuals thought about a declaratory policy on military tradition. The most intractable aspect of this issue remained the legacy of the Wehrmacht. Contradictions and frictions on this account constantly emerged amid the enduring clash of the dual images of the soldier indoctrinated in national socialism described above. A statement of policy on military tradition only emerged many years later. At the same time, however, senior defense decision makers had to train new troop units under the gaze of impatient NATO allies; furthermore, they had to adjust their ideas about strategy to thermonuclear combat, while they survived the Cold War crises from 1956 until 1963 that allowed Germans few options for survival and prosperity.

The policy of military tradition that slowly emerged during the beginning of the Bundeswehr filled the pantheon of the new army. The soldiers of 1944 were seen as honorable because they fulfilled their duty to fight at the front out of patriotism and self-sacrifice and because one could hardly have excluded them without devastating consequences for needs of policy and strategy.(25)

Thus, within the context of the Cold War, the Bundeswehr adopted an image of the Wehrmacht and military tradition that reflected the overall political and social trends of the time, but which also contained obvious contradictions that became more problematic as events moved on. For instance, the deeds of the Landser and of the anti-Hitler general staff officers in the headquarters of the Replacement Army and of Army Group Center seemed difficult to reconcile in fact. In essence, however, the policy regarding the symbols, lineage, honors and traditions of the former German armies reflected the spirit of democratic inclusion and anti-Weimar-era enfranchisement that had marked the first Adenauer years. The decree regarding military tradition published by the Ministry of Defense in the summer of 1965 fits this generalization with its exemplification of a catalogue of soldierly virtues and its reference to the Prussian reformers and the figures of the 20th of July.

The Negative Image Of The Wehrmacht Re-Emerges: Causes And Effects, 1963-82

From the vantage point of the century's end, the forces, which transformed the subject at hand, were already present in the waning years of the Adenauer cabinet (1959-63) and those of Ludwig Erhard (1963-66).(26) The existing factors of mentality, politics, and society undermined the conflicting images of the Wehrmacht that arose in the years 1949-63 and, eventually, allowed for a revival, entirely or in part, of the image of the semi-criminal Wehrmacht. The latter became a dominant feature of debate on the subject from the middle 1970s until the end of the 1990s. (27)

During the 1960s, German democracy was consolidated. The social and political cleavages that had been so obvious from the end of the 19th century until 1933 became a thing of the past or were catapulted across the iron curtain into the German-German struggle over the ideal form of state and society. The decade witnessed political and social stresses, especially in the latter half, but these phenomena differed in their essence and effect from those of thirty years earlier.

Simultaneously, a younger generation of Germans partook in the spirit of the age in the Euro-Atlantic realm and began to question authority on all fronts.(28) This phenomenon gained much energy from the rise of the New Left in West Germany, a trend that began after the SPD abandoned Marxism and embraced Atlanticism at the start of the 1960s. From 1948-1953, a policy of democratic inclusion was initiated, which sought to refute the re-educators and the Nuremberg verdicts. It eventually gave rise to powerful societal dynamics that made an ever more acute and focused Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung (mastery of the past) an unceasing feature of contemporary political culture. Throughout this period, events outside of Germany routinely intermingled with developments of society and ideas within the country.

The arrest in Argentina of ex-SS Obersturmbannfuehrer (LTC) Adolf Eichmann and his subsequent trial in Israel (1960-62) returned to public consciousness the mass murder of European Jewry in Hitler's New Order.(29) Perhaps the public had repressed the re-educators' and de-nazifiers' film documentaries of the death camps and had found its mental equilibrium with the legend that the allied bombings symbolized a crime just as heinous as Auschwitz. Now this collective memory slowly began to shake off public amnesia. Hannah Arendt's thesis of the banality of evil when applied to Eichmann's biography highlighted the fate of the rank and file in national socialism, a trend that only gathered force as time passed. Eichman's trial in Jerusalem was followed in 1964-65 by the debate in parliament about the statute of limitations for crimes committed under national socialism and by the trial of yet more Nazi rank and file in the guise of SS guard personnel from the Auschwitz camp, the largest trial of its kind in the FRG until then.

At the same time, the return of captured military records from the United States and the United Kingdom to Germany strengthened the interest of German language scholarship for the civil-military structures of Nazi Germany. Such historians as Klaus-Juergen Mueller and Manfred Messerschmidt corrected the image of the Wehrmacht in national socialism that had been offered by apologists, memoirists, military pamphleteers and nationalist politicians in the early 1950s.(30) The pioneering works of these men were followed in turn by scores of monographs and studies that uncovered a high degree of culpability on the part of the senior military leadership in the crimes of national socialism. These writings exposed new vistas concerning the nature of ideological war in the technological age and the twisted road to Auschwitz. Yet, at first, this scholarship had little impact on the public mind and remained unnoticed.

Change during the middle and later 1960s in the international realm considerably altered popular understanding of contemporary history and the image of the soldier and the state in German democracy.(31) The new eastern policies of the Kurt-Georg Kiesinger and Wily Brandt cabinets brought relaxed tensions with the Warsaw Pact, which coincided with the steady disillusionment among the German left of the exemplary image of US state and society due to the Indo-China War. In all of this, the Bundeswehr formed a welcome target for criticism of the Bonn Republic and its tenets of capitalism, consumerism and nuclear Atlanticisim. If the Cold War were on the wane, why then have an army at all? Matters were made no easier by an enduring strain in German civil-military relations that ebbed and flowed throughout the decade in abuses of recruits in a paratroop regiment (1963), fights over the role of parliamentary oversight (1964), procurement scandals (1966), tensions between senior ministerial figures and high-ranking generals (1966), and a series of civil-military battles over the theory and practice of Innere Fuehrung (1968-71). The image of the Wehrmacht as well as that of the Reichswehr was seldom more than a subsidiary issue during the late-1960s. However, in such events as the controversial speech of Army Vice Chief of Staff Hans-Hellmuth Grashey wherein he described Innere Fuehrung as only a "mask," in the so-called Schnez Study (named for Army Chief of Staff Albert Schnez) which called for a reform of society to increase combat power, and in the series of conflicting semi-public statements about the image of the officer ("Lieutenant '70," and "Captains of Unna"), the image of the Wehrmacht lay pretty close to the surface. These now forgotten incidents allowed critics to conclude that traditionalist Wehrmacht veterans in Bundeswehr uniform were marching toward right-wing veterans organizations in the hope of returning some of the aggressive elan and dash of the old army to the utilitarian, drab army-in-a-democracy.(32)

This description of politics, society, and civil-military relations forms a backdrop to the rise of the social liberal coalition at the end of the 1960s. The aforementioned factors also played a role in German civil-military relations in the 1970s. This decade formed the link between now and then, that is, between the mentality and world view that held sway forty years ago and that of today. From late-1976 until late-1982, the Cold War compromise about the Wehrmacht, that is, the dual image of the soldier in national socialism in West German society, came undone as the cold war itself moved into its final phases. Towards the end of the 1990s, disputes of policy regarding the international and national economy, society and ecology led to conflict in a socialist-led coalition. Issues of policy concerning Germany's role in NATO strategy caused rifts in the ranks of the socialist government at the national and local level. The image of the Wehrmacht became ensnared in German civil-military relations which were more concerned with nuclear strategy in NATO than principally with the fate of an unreconstructed, highly decorated veteran.

The visit in the fall of 1976 of the Stuka ace Hans-Ulrich Rudel to a veterans association meeting at an air force base near Freiburg im Breisgau set off a debate about the role of the Wehrmacht that unfolded in the Bundeswehr, the cabinet, the Socialist Party, and among the Christian Democratic opposition.(33) In one form or another, this struggle lasted for six years, and it might be said, in fact, to have never ceased at all. Critics of the maintenance of tradition in the Bundeswehr objected to all symbolic and personal connections with the Wehrmacht.(34) The willingness among policymakers in the 1950s and early 1960s to allow certain continuities and contacts with the old armies gave way to a bureaucratic tendency to draw ever-sharper historical and ethical barriers to the world before 1945. The Rudel scandal and the following debate pitted such critics against a defensive minority, who were oriented to the mission of the soldier in combat, and who asserted that one should be able to honor military bravery in abstraction from an army's political purpose. Such distinctions, which might have been palatable in the depths of the Cold War as a reaction against re-education and Nuremberg, now became ever less so to a civil society that saw contemporary history in a different light.

The end of the decade witnessed increased interest in the German past, a feature of civil society that had not been present in the early years of the Federal Republic. To the surprise and perhaps dismay of some professors, historical exhibitions, publications and history-from-below projects spread across the West German landscape. As the 1970s ended, the past also materialized in the form of political strife at home and abroad. This combination of interest in history and political upheaval gave strength to critics of the Bundeswehr and put those who honored the memory of the Wehrmacht and its soldiers on shaky political ground. The scandal of 1979 regarding the wartime naval service of then Minister President of Baden-Wuertemberg, Hans Georg Filbinger, appeared to highlight the brutalities of give-no-quarter discipline for the average Wehrmacht soldier once the war was lost. The broadcast in the same year of an American "mini-series" about the fate of victims and perpetrators of what now generally came to be called the "Holocaust," galvanized public interest in this most aggressive and essential aspect of the Nazi regime. This television series thrust the "final solution" into the public mind to an extent far beyond that of Eichmann's trial in the early 1960s. Since the broadcast of the mini-series, the evils of pseudo-scientific mass murder and ethnic cleansing have remained within the general phenomenon of Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung. Indeed, the last spell of public amnesia gave way to heightened consciousness of repressed memories. Auschwitz subsequently became an omnipresent political symbol for more than merely the events that led the anti-Jewish boycott of 1933 to the Wannsee Conference of 1942 and beyond to the gas chambers and crematoria. A nuclear Auschwitz for all of Europe was a possibility because of a NATO strategy of armament with intermediate nuclear missiles. This image became an idee fixe of the German peace movement from 1979 until 1983, which in the earlier phases, took aim at the image of the soldier in the Bundeswehr. In particular, the maintenance of tradition and it symbols and ceremonies came in for protest. In 1980-81, violent opponents of the socialist government and its foreign policy seized upon public swearing-ins of the oath to advance their political goals via episodes of violence staged before the mass media.

The projectiles hurled at soldiers taking their solemn oath on city squares demolished whatever was left of the dual image of the Wehrmacht in the policy of the West German military. In response, the socialist government abandoned the policy of military tradition put forward a decade and a half earlier and proscribed symbolic and institutional links of any kind with the Wehrmacht. The 1982 guidelines on military tradition, which were among the final acts of socialist Hans Apel's defense ministry, brought a climax to the political struggle about the image of the Wehrmacht. The events of the early-1980s, however, were a prelude to yet further incidents and debate that have continued to the close of the decade and the end of the century.(36) For anyone who had reflected on the foregoing, one found a familiar set of arguments pro and contra as regards the soldiers of the Wehrmacht, the nature of military professionalism, the limits of military obedience, the honoring of martial virtues and the criminal acts of soldiers and national socialists.

In the interval, the international events during 1989 gave new energy to this traditional debate of Federal German politics. Momentous changes in politics and society increased interest in a literate public about the meaning of the past. The collapse of the Soviet system and the revival of war in Europe and nearby, in which organized violence for political ends of an especially brutal kind surprised and confused policy-makers, touched the German public mind very differently than did the events of fifty-five years ago. Germany had to come to terms with the experience of the German Democratic Republic as well as that of the Third Reich.

The end of the Cold War and unification of Germany, coincided with a general trend in the western world to view the Holocaust, as a far more central aspect of national socialism and the Second World War than had been the case in previous years. The enthusiastic popular reception in Germany of Stephen Spielberg's film of 1993 Schindler's List and of Daniel Goldhagen's volume of 1996 on German popular race hatred and the murder of Jews reflected this trend.(37) The foregoing overshadowed debate regarding why certain Bundeswehr barracks were named for former soldiers, who by modern criteria, had unacceptable political reputations. Events in the Balkans and in the realm of memory dominated by Auschwitz also overwhelmed the discussions of 1994 and 1995 of how to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the 20 July 1944 attempt to kill Hitler and the fiftieth anniversary of war's end.

Daniel Goldhagen's reductionist thesis of a uniquely German form of anti-Jewish sentiment, relied chiefly on the murderous progress of para-military formations of the Ordnungspolizei (Order Police) seconded by the Reichsfuehrer SS to cleanse ethnically rear areas of the eastern front.(38) In part, just as much as Goldhagen used the work of other scholars of the Holocaust, he also built on a body of historical scholarship that followed the lead of John Keegan in examining the face of battle from the soldier's perspective.(39)

Historical evidence that underscored the effects of political indoctrination and revealed the ideological contents of soldiers' letters further damaged the image soldier of the Wehrmacht. The search for historical truth was poorly served when political pressure groups of any kind--particularly extremists--seized upon the soldier's honor as a political weapon.

To be sure, the present debate also arises naturally from civil-military tensions in a united Germany, where German armed forces imbedded within a Euro-Atlantic framework face new tasks and missions quite different from the strategic world of the 1970s.(40) Just as events connected with diplomacy and strategy acted as a factor for and against the honor of the Wehrmacht and its soldiers in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, this dynamic is alive in the 1990s. The interpretation of the image of the Wehrmacht in the Bundeswehr now stands in the shadow of the Gulf War, the Somalian intervention, and the war in ex-Yugoslavia.(41) Discussion about war and soldiers leads one back to the Wehrmacht in the Balkans and forward to the NATO Stabilization Force in Bosnia and the Kosovo Force in Kosovo. This intertwined set of issues exists within a continuum, where those anxious about strategy and armies in a democracy use the past to speak of present tensions about the soldier and the state in Germany.

These civil-military exchanges have become the hallmark of a sound, effective German democracy in which Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung remains a controversial, but central feature. The most recent phase of contention surely has gained gravity from how the end of the Cold War era has accelerated the pace of political and social change in central Europe. The onset of the new era has thrown open to public scrutiny practically the whole record of mass politics, war in the machine age, and genocide in the 20th century. The sudden and unexpected unification of Germany and the reorganization of the European system of states heightened and sharpened many of the trends and phenomena identified above. The sense that things are in flux gives greater urgency to the desire to understand the causes and effects of catastrophic events. Each generation will take the evidence of the past and re-arrange information in a new, and, in this case, perhaps more critical light. Such a process is inevitable; plainly, German democracy would be a much worse state without such a phenomenon. Younger generations of Germans, entirely untouched by nearly all of what has been described here, are now free to reflect upon the perpetual dilemma of the soldier and politics represented by the studio portrait of a young recruit and by the snap shots he made of war's genocidal brutalities.

(1) The research for this essay was generously supported by the U.S. Agency for International Development, whom this author wishes to thank. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not represent those of the U.S. Government.
(2) See: NATO Office of Information and Press, eds. NATO Handbook: 50th Anniversary ed. (Brussels, 1998), pp. 59ff; Jeffrey Simon, NATO Enlargement and Central Europe: A Study in Civil-Military Relations, (Washington, 1996); Donald Abenheim, "The German Soldier and National Unity," in After the Wall: Eastern Germany since 1989, Patricia J. Smith ed. (Boulder/Oxford, 1998), pp. 257-279.
(3) For instance, see Hans Delbrueck, Die Geschichte der Kriegskunst im Rahmen der politischen Geschichte, 4 vols. (Berlin, 1920ff.); Michael Howard, War in European History (Oxford, 1976); Peter Paret, Clausewitz and the State (New York/Oxford, 1976); John L. Lynn, ed. Tools of War: Instruments: Ideas and Institutions, 1400-1871 (Urbana/Chicago, 1990).
(4) See: Gordon A. Craig, The Politics of the Prussian Army, 1640-1945 (New York/Oxford, 1964); Gerhard Papke, et al eds. Handbuch zur deutschen Militaergeschichte, 1648-1939, 6vols. (Munich, 1979); Karl Volker Neugebauer, ed. Gruendzuege der deutschen Militaergeschichte, 2 vols. (Freiburg, 1993).
(5) See: Klaus Honnef et al eds. Ende und Anfang: Photographen in Deutschland um 1945 (Berlin, 1995); Dagmar Barnouw, Germany, 1945: Views of War and Violence (Bloomington/Indianapolis, 1996); Karl Hoche, In diesem unserem Haus: eine Geschichte der Bundesrepublik in ihren Bildern (Duesseldorf/Zuerich, 1996).
(6) Hanes Heer et al eds. Vernichtungskrieg: Verbrechen der Wehrmacht, 1941-1944 (Hamburg, 1995), pp. xiv-xv. This is the edition of essays to supplement the catalogue of the Wehrmacht exhibition staged by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research. This exhibition became a source of civil-military controversy after 1995.
(7) See sources on exhibition also in note 5, above.
(8) See two German works: Ulrich Brochhagen, Nach Nuremberg: Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung und Westintegration in der Aera Adenauer (Hamburg, 1994); Norbert Frei, Vergangenheitspolitik: Die Anfaenge der Bundesrepublik und die NS Vergangenheit (Munich, 1996). On the general issue of society, culture, mentality and the legacy of war, see: Hermann Glaser, Kulturgeschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 3 vols. (Munich/Vienna, 1985); on these issues in society, politics and ideas as they pertain to scholarly elites until 1989, see: Charles Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust and German National Identity (Cambridge/London, 1988). Glaser updated his work as Deutsche Kultur, 1945-2000 (Munich/Vienna, 1997).
(9) Klaus-Juergen Mueller, Armee und Drittes Reich, 1933-1939 (Paderborn, 1989); Michael Geyer, "German Strategy in the Age of Machine Warfare, 1914-1945," in Peter Paret ed. Makers of Modern Strategy, 2d ed. (Princeton, 1986) pp. 527-597.
(10) These issues as they pertain to the era 1950-1986 are developed in this author's Reforging the Iron Cross (Princeton, 1988).
(11) Frei, Vergangenheitspolitik, pp.25ff.
(12) For the political radicalization of veterans groups in the era 1919-1933, see, for instance, Volker Berghahn, Der Stahlhelm, Bund der Frontsoldaten (Duesseldorf, 1966); James Diehl, Paramilitary Politics in the Weimar Republic (Bloomington/London, 1977).
(13) Frei, Vergangenheitspolitik, pp. 133ff.
(14) These ideas are developed in this author's Reforging the Iron Cross, pp.11ff., which in turn, relies on Hans Speier, German Rearmament and Atomic War (Evanston/White Plains, 1957) which still repays reading. Useful on this account from the end of the 1990s is Wolfram Wette, "Das Bild der Wehrmacht Elite nach 1945," in Gerd Ueberschaer, ed. Hitler's Militaerische Elite, Vom Kriegsbeginn bis zum Weltkriegsende, Vol. II, pp. 293-308.
(15) The best account of the armament of the Federal Republic and the first years of the new German military is found in Militaergeschichtliches Forschungsamt, eds. Anfaenge westdeutscher Sicherheitspolitik (Munich, 1982ff.) 4 vols. Also see this author's Reforging the Iron Cross, pp.47ff. and the synoptic overview in: Hans-Martin Ottmer, Die Entwicklung deutscher Sicherheitspolitik und die Geschichte der Bundeswehr, 1945-1992 (Bonn/Herford, 1992).
(16) Frei, Vergangenheitspolitik, pp. 69-99.
(17) Abenheim, Iron Cross, pp.47ff. On right-wing and radical right wing politics, see: Adolf M. Birke, Die Bundesrepublik Deutschland: Verfassung, Parlament, Parteien (Munich, 1997), pp.16ff; Rudolf Morsey, Die Bundesrepublik Deutschland: Entstehung und Entwicklung bis 1969 (Munich, 1987), pp.22ff, 173ff; Uwe Backes, et al eds. Politischer Extremismus in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Berlin/Frankfurt, 1993).
(18) On these themes within West German politics and society generally, see: Hans-Peter Schwarz, Die Aera Adenauer, 1949-1957; 1957-1963 in Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, vols. 2 & 3, Theodor Eschenburg et al eds. (Munich, 1981).
(19) Abenheim, Iron Cross, pp.47ff; also see Ulrich de Maiziere, In der Pflicht: Lebensbericht eines deutschen Soldaten (Herford/Bonn, 1989); Hans-Joachim Harder et al., Tradition und Reform in den Aufbaujahren der Bundeswehr (Herford/Bonn, 1985).
(20) Abenheim, Iron Cross, pp.88ff. For a skeptical view on this account, see Wette, "Wehrmacht-Elite," cited in note 16.
(21) Abenheim, Iron Cross, pp.88ff. See, also, Bundesministerium fuer Verteidigung (BMVg) eds. Handbuch Innere Fuehrung: Hilfen zur Klaerung der Begriffe (Bonn, 1957); Hans-Joachim Reeb, et al eds. Innere Fuehrung von A-Z: Lexikon fuer militaerische Fuehrer (Regensburg, 1991); BMVg, eds. Zentrale Dienstvorschrift 10/1: Innere Fuehrung (Bonn, 1993).
(22) Abenheim, Iron Cross, pp. 69-71.
(23) These ideas are generally drawn from this author's Iron Cross, pp. 105ff.
(24) Abenheim, Iron Cross, pp. 105-164.
(25) Abenheim, Iron Cross, pp. 165-224. Speier makes this point most clearly in his Atomic War, p.31.
(26) Abenheim, Iron Cross, pp. 202ff. On the decline of the Adenauer regime and the change in society and mentality, see Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, Die Bundesrepublik Deutschland in der Aera Adenauer, (Darmstadt, 1988) 2d ed., pp. 223- 250.
(27) Klaus Hildebrand, Von Erhard zur Grossen Koalition, 1963-1969 (Stuttgart/Wiesbaden, 1984).
(28) Hildebrand, 1963-1969; Abenheim, Iron Cross, pp.227ff.
(29) Hans-Peter Schwarz, Die Aera Adenauer, 1957-1963, pp.204-216; Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York, 1963); Richard Evans, In Hitler's Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape from the Nazi Past (New York, 1989).
(30) Klaus-Juergen Mueller, Das Heer und Hitler: Armee und NS Regime (Stuttgart, 1969); Manfred Messerschmidt, Die Wehrmacht im NS Staat: Die Zeit der Indoktrination (Hamburg, 1969).
(31) Abenheim, Iron Cross, pp.227ff.
(32) Abenheim, Iron Cross, pp.227-255.
(33) Abenheim, Iron Cross, pp.256ff.
(34) Abenheim, Iron Cross, pp.270ff.
(35) Abenheim, Iron Cross, pp. 270-289.
(36) Evans, Hitler's Shadow; Maier, Unmasterable Past.
(37) Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York, 1996);a German discussion of Goldhagen's ideas is: Julius Schoeps, ed. Ein Volk von Moerdern? (Hamburg, 1996); a suggestive and useful critique of Goldhagen is Norman Finkelstein & Ruth Bettina Birn, A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth (New York, 1998).
(38) A useful treatment of the SS/police relationship is Friedrich Wilhelm, Die Polizei im NS Staat (Paderborn/Munich/Vienna, 1998).
(39) John Keegan, The Face of Battle (New York, 1976).
(40) The impact of unification on the Bundeswehr as concerns the former East German military is analyzed in this writer's work cited in note 2; of further interest on the East German military is Klaus Naumann, ed. NVA: Anspruch und Wirklichkeit (Hamburg/Bonn/Berlin, 1996); a progress report on this subject and on the German role in the Bosnian Stabiliization Force (SFOR) is: Han-Peter von Kirchbach, Mit Herz und Hand: Soldaten zwischen Elbe und Oder (Frankfurt/Main/Bonn 1998); the changes in German defense policy from 1989 until 1994 are visible in BMVg, eds. Weissbuch zur Sicherheit der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und zur Lage und Zukunft der Bundeswehr (Bonn, 1994).
(41) A critical analysis of united Germany's greater role in extra-central European security is: Wolfgang Michal, Deutschland und der naechste Krieg (Berlin, 1995); an account of a uniting Germany in the Gulf War of 1990-1991 is: Michael J. Inacker, Unter Ausschluss der Oeffentlichkeit: Die Deutschen in der Golf Allianz (Bonn/Berlin, 1991); the view of the former Chief of Staff of the reform of the Bundeswehr in the 1990s is: Klaus Naumann, Die Bundeswehr in einer Welt im Umbruch (Berlin, 1994); of further interest by, and for German soldiers, are these volumes on civil-military relations of the 1990s: Joachim Weber, ed. Armee in Kreuzfeuer (Munich, 1997); Heinz Karst, Die Bundeswehr in der Krise (Munich, 1997); Gerd Schultze-Rhondorf, Wozu Noch Tapfer Sein? (Graefeling, 1998); Domink A. Faust, Vetrauenskrise in der Bundeswehr (Graefeling, 1998), an insightful monograph on German security, defense and civil-military relations as seldom offered by an American is: John Duffield, World Power Forsaken: Political Culture, International Institutions and German Security Policy After Unification (Stanford, 1998).