The first modest proposal, heard in late 1948, was to arm the West German police, on the ground that the Russians had already armed an East German police force. But this little tit-for-tat soon gave way to the call for twelve West German divisions. “The Germans are great fighters,” said Senator Thomas of Oklahoma in late 1949. “If the United States gets into a war, we shall need fighters.” “It should be enough,” said General Collins of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1950, “if we send arms. Our sons must not shed their blood in Europe.” Shortly thereafter, the New York Times put it in plain American: “America has the right to demand a dollar’s worth of fight for every dollar it spends.”
But the phoenix showed no disposition to rise from its ashes. The “war men” were tired, dead tired, of war, and General Eisenhower of NATO felt called upon to reassure them in 1950: “If the Allies were to rearm the Germans, they would be repudiating a whole series of agreements. It has been announced officially in Washington, London, and Paris that no such action is contemplated.” And so it had been. But the Germans were so tired, and so vocally tired, that the General was moved, as late as 1951, to inform Washington, London, and Paris that he wanted “no reluctant divisions in an army under my command.”
He was, however, going to get them. The West German Security Commissioner—there was, of course, no War Ministry—announced that Germany would conscript 300,000–400,000 men. (It was peacetime conscription which Woodrow Wilson called “the root evil of Prussianism.”) There would be, when the Germans (not to say the French) could be brought to accept the American “contractual agreement,” in addition to peacetime conscription, nine new Panzer divisions, and “the German contingent will dispose directly of its own air force” of 75,000 men and 1,500 fighters and fighter-bombers. This “German contingent” (the Security Commissioner did not need to add) would be as strong as the forces with which Hitler attacked the West in 1939, and (the Security Commissioner did not add, but the Pleven Plan did) the national units of the European Defense Community would be, “in the beginning,” under national, not international, control.
A few months after the beginning of hostilities in Korea, the American, British, and French foreign ministers took note—without expressing their own views—of “the sentiments expressed in Germany and elsewhere in favor of German participation in an integrated force.” The sentiments were not confined, either in Germany or elsewhere, to governmental or militarist circles; in America, Walter Lippmann, writing in the very conservative internationalist New York Herald Tribune, was convinced that “Germany as a nation can be brought willingly into a Western coalition only if we can prove to them that we have the military power and that it is our strategic purpose to carry the war immediately and swiftly beyond the Vistula River.” (It would not be the first time that the war had been carried immediately and swiftly beyond the Vistula River; the last time, Hitler did it.) And in Germany the very conservative nationalist Stuttgart Zeitung thought that “it is very probable that Great Britain’s value to America as an ally will soon sharply depreciate. This would be tremendously important for us Germans…. If Anglo-American friction increases and Britain’s position becomes weaker, we may expect that America may assign an increasing importance to Germany’s role on the Continent.”
After the 1953 elections in Germany, the Adenauer Government had enough power in Parliament to override the German Supreme Court’s unwillingness to find that German remilitarization was permitted by the Constitution forced upon Germany by the victorious Allies of 1945. (The same thing was happening in Japan, where the new Constitution forbidding militarization forever had actually to be amended.) German industry, said General Hays, the Deputy United States High Commissioner, would be able to start turning out armaments “within six to nine months of receiving orders,” and in 1953 Krupp of Essen, the company that built the Nazi war machine, displayed its new line of vehicles, complete with turret emplacements. “Once the go-ahead is given,” Foreign Aid Director Stassen told the United States House of Representatives Appropriations Committee in the fall of 1954, “you will see one of the fastest jobs of building an army in modern history. The necessary equipment, most of which will be furnished by the United States, is well on the way.”
Meanwhile, everything had been changed in the “Coca-Cola Zone” of West Germany. What was left of the American engine for re-education and reorientation was thrown into reverse, to serve the campaign for a new German Wehrmacht. The still-wet picture of the Curse of Militarism was turned to every wall, and the not-yet-dusty old masterpiece of the Defense of the Fatherland was rehung. Much could still be said, and done, against Communism. But not much could be done any more about the re-education of the Germans. Their re-education had been based too heavily on the theme that militarism had been the cornerstone of German totalitarianism, German war, and German ruin.
There were hitches here and there. At a fracas in Frankfurt in 1952 the German police picked up a flying squad of the Bund Deutscher Jugend, whose specialty was breaking up Communist, Social Democratic, and neutralist meetings. A few weeks later Minister President Zinn of the State of Hesse announced that the BDJ had been “created and financed by the United States” and that, on United States orders, it had set up a “technical service” to go into action in case of Communist invasion. This “technical service” was composed of one to two thousand former German officers up to the rank of colonel, all of them over thirty-five years of age. (Bund Deutscher Jugend means “German Youth League”). Many of them were former Nazi SS men. (Mere membership in the black-uniformed Schutzstaffel had been condemned at Nuremberg as criminal.) The “technical service” was being trained, with all kinds of light weapons, in a disguised lumber camp maintained by the United States in the Odenwald. (The penalty, under the Allied Control Law, for arming Germans was death and was still in force.)
What most exercised President Zinn—a Social Democrat—was the “technical service’s” list of West German “unreliables” to be “removed.” The list included fifteen Communists—and eighty Social Democrats, including the entire national leadership of the latter party. It included, in addition, the only Jewish member of the German Parliament. The “technical service,” said President Zinn, cost the United States taxpayers $11,000 a month. HICOG—the United States High Commission for the Occupation of Germany—knew nothing about it. Neither did General Eisenhower of NATO or President Truman of the United States or, of course, Chancellor Adenauer of Germany.
But everybody else knew something about it. The “technical service” was maintained by the United States Central Intelligence Agency, created by the United States National Security Council with a rumored budget of $500,000,000 completely concealed in the departmental appropriations of the United States Congress. “One would like to assume,” said the pro-West Frankfurter Rundschau, “that the secret American sponsors knew nothing of the assassination plans. However, their support of a Fascist underground movement is bound to produce distrust of American officials. We refuse to fight Stalinism with the help of Fascism.”
It was only a hitch, of course. And the Germans had been taught to have short memories. Still—. Two years later, in the hullabaloo that attended the disappearance of Dr. Otto John, “West Germany’s J. Edgar Hoover,” it developed that John, who reappeared in East Germany, did not like Nazis and had been having trouble with the Süddeutsche Industrieverwertung, or South German Industrial Development Organization. The Development Organization was, as it developed, a barbed-wire-surrounded compound of 30 acres in the dreamy Bavarian village of Pullach, in the American Zone. The Development Organization was developing a spy network of 4,000 agents in the Soviet Union. The cost of the development, according to the moderate, right-of-center Paris-Presse of August 27, 1954, was six million American dollars a year. And the Director of the Development was former Brigadier-General Rheinhardt Gehlen, Nazi intelligence chief in the Soviet Union during the second World War. His new job, said the Paris-Presse, was “to carry on for the United States the work he had begun for Hitler.”
It was only a hitch, of course, but such hitches are mortal to mewling idealism. The Germans had been taught to have short memories, but there were a few whose memories carried them all the way back to the former German captain who persuaded the Allies to let his “Freedom Movement” have a few rusty old guns to repulse the Communists in Bavaria after the first World War. The captain’s name was Röhm, Ernst Röhm. Could it have been the same Captain Ernst Röhm who founded the National Socialist Party?