Recuperating the German Soldier

ON 11 AUGUST 1950 a carefully selected commission composed of former German Wehrmacht officers convened at the behest of West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. They were charged with drafting a position paper on the possibilities for German rearmament — a subject that had been discussed in political circles since the earliest days of the Federal Republic but had gained new international support through the events of the Korean War. What emerged from the meeting was the so-called “Himmeroder Memorandum,” a top-secret document that outlined in roughly forty pages a series of political and psychological rationales for the restoration of the German military. The memo served as a foundational text for the German army, not only for its detailed discussions of military structure and planning, but also for its articulation of a new concept of soldiering. At the forefront of this latter effort was the young Wolf Graf von Baudissin, who would become a leading figure in the West German effort to rethink the German soldier’s function. During the Himmeroder discussions, Baudissin took the occasion to push for two concepts that would eventually define the ideal Bundeswehr participant: the principles of “innere Führung” (inner guidance) and “der Staatsbürger in Uniform” (the citizen in uniform). Both notions were meant to aid in the construction of a new form of German military, no longer reliant upon a Prussian code of absolute obedience and instead promoting a more democratic institution compatible with the preservation of civilian liberties.

The memorandum pursued a patently missionary project. In order to influence Germans’ negative perceptions regarding national defense, the study advised that the Federal Republic and its Western allies should take as its first priority a comprehensive project for the “rehabilitation of the German soldier.” Many of the suggestions offered by the commission appear to the present-day observer as part of an obvious effort to retouch the past and foster the myth of the “clean Wehrmacht,” notably the release of Germans convicted of crimes against humanity, as long as they had acted under orders and not violated laws preexisting the National Socialist state, and the cessation of all official disparagement of Wehrmacht soldiers including those drafted into the Waffen-SS.