3 - Lessons of the Eastern Front
The Wehrmacht Legacy and the Remilitarization of Germany
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 October 2011
Summary
We don’t want war and we will do everything to prevent it. But precisely in order to seize the imperialists’ lust for war adventures in the heart of Europe, we have to create our own strong national armed forces…. If the imperialists were to instigate the Third World War, then this war must and will become the tomb not only of several Western European capitalist countries but also world imperialism.
Walter Ulbricht (1952)After Germans’ experiences with the totalitarian regime of the Nazi period, after the world’s experiences with totalitarian Soviet Russia since 1944 … one thing should be the common conviction of all Germans: totalitarian states, particularly Soviet Russia, do not acknowledge law and liberty as the principal factors in the coexistence of peoples and nations; they acknowledge only one decisive factor: power.
Konrad Adenauer (1950)No other political topic dominated the inner-German debates of the 1950s like the controversial issue of Germany’s remilitarization(s). Hardly half a decade after the end of World War II, the re-creation of German armed forces was back on the agenda on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The legacy of the Wehrmacht cast contrasting shadows on these debates. Hitler’s army had suffered its greatest and most costly defeat in the war against the Soviet Union while simultaneously facilitating and participating in the Nazi mass murder on the Eastern Front. Yet the way the two Germanys faced this past in the course of the remilitarization debates could not have been more different. While in the GDR the war against the Soviet Union became a constant theme, in fact, an obsession in political propaganda and military indoctrination, it was almost entirely absent from official discourses over rearmament in the Federal Republic.
One crucial factor shaped the political cultures in each country and infused the debates on remilitarization: the fear of a new war. In the East, the SED fostered and sustained fear of another “Barbarossa” in a third world war, with a relentless campaign aimed at proving that the West was following in Hitler’s footsteps. This campaign culminated in the building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961, a “measure” that allegedly had saved Europe from the brink of war. On the other side, West German political culture was permeated by a constant fear of “Bolshevism,” and Soviet expansionism, it was believed, sought to spread the communist revolution around the world. Mutual angst derived from each set of rational security concerns in light of each side’s historical experiences – German aggression against the Soviet Union, Soviet domination of East Germany and East-Central Europe – and from irrationally exaggerated hostilities generated in the Cold War spiral of verbal and actual violence.
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- Legacies of StalingradRemembering the Eastern Front in Germany since 1945, pp. 106 - 130Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011