Germany: Reluctant Giant

BBC World Service - The Documentary, Germany: Reluctant Giant

"The object of NATO as its first Secretary General, Lord Ismay famously put it, was to keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down, and huge efforts were made to steer postwar Germans away from any kind of militarism. It was a message West Germans seemed keen to absorb. While foreigners fed a culture of war films and comics might still assume Germans were militaristic robots, the reality was becoming very different. Historian James Sheehan.

‘Germany is a classic example of a civilian state, a state which recognizes with some reluctance that it needs a military, but thinks of its military very much the way most states think of their police force, right. It's a job that has to be done. But it is by no means central to the real business of the state. And I think in Germany, these civilian values and this persistent distrust of military institutions continues to be strong and in some ways has gotten stronger.’
Rather than traditional parades, you were more likely to come across Bundeswehr big bands at charity events, turning swords into swing, perhaps. Their modest uniforms were compared by some to bus drivers - a long way from traditional military show. And this conscript army taught its recruits like future newspaper editor Bertold Kohler [sp?], that they were not primarily fighters shaped by parade ground drill and blind obedience, but champions of ethical values and human rights.

‘The idea was not so much you don't want a fighter. But a citizen in uniform’

‘Uniforms themselves were meant to show that weren’t they? Very low key

‘Very low key and completely different from the Wehrmart uniforms of Hitler's army. In Western Germany, we wanted to show the others it was a completely different army, an army which doesn't praise the traditions and the forms of the former Army’

‘And that might be prepared to disobey orders if it's thought those orders were unjust.’

‘Well, actually according to the soldiers’ law, which is still valid, you're obliged to disobey orders if they are not in line with the law. This was one of the first things we were taught, you know, when we were young soldiers, you have to disobey orders. You know, like if you're convinced that they are against the law’…

‘In Germany for a long time, if you were a soldier, you could not really ride a train in your uniform, for example. You'd be approached by passengers calling you murderous… this instinctive German pacifism, which really isn't pacifism, the way that we know it from other countries, but is this knee jerk rejection of anything that has anything to do with the military'...

There is broader agreement among NATO's biggest spenders that a country as rich as Germany should spend at least 2% of GDP, a kind of NATO benchmark which Britain is reaching. Germany's been spending around 1.2%. There's no doubt that relatively low spending has sometimes had embarrassing consequences for the Bundeswehr.

‘There was an exercise. I think it was a NATO exercise, where, because there were no machine guns on the tanks, the German military had to use broomsticks that they painted black’...

Those opposed to increasing German military commitment hope international pressure can be resisted by using those old historical arguments. Are you sure you want Germans to have larger and better equipped Armed Forces again?…

‘You say that other countries wouldn't like Germany to be too strong. But I remember a Polish Foreign Minister coming here to Berlin a few years ago, saying, for the first time perhaps in Polish history, we don't fear a Germany that's too strong, we fear a Germany that's too weak.'...

Can the German model of a citizens’ army survive in an era of rapid reaction forces and smaller professional units?...

‘The kind of military that one needs in this age. That is that you don't need big conscript armies, what you need are relatively small, extremely cohesive units of special forces that can act quickly, can be deployed quickly. And this notion of the citizen in arms, which the Germans worked very hard to create, is, I think, not something that's appropriate for the kind of military that you need now.’


Looks like German experts need more National Education so they know that now you still need a robust, credible armed forces made up of overwhelming numbers of conscript soldiers to respond to terrorism and similar modern threats