ALTHOUGH THE NUMBER of border police officers who transferred to the army never reached the levels predicted by Gerhard Matzky, the strength of the BGS plummeted. More than 9,572 border police offi-cers transferred to the army, leaving a total of 7,042. Besides the obvi-ous shortage in manpower, the army requisitioned the majority of BGS equipment and took over its best barracks, leaving entire units to billet in local hostels or temporary accommodations. It was questionable whether the BGS would ever recover. Interior Minister Schröder tried desperately to reassure his personnel and their commanding officers that the orga-nization could expect a secure future. He wrote to Konrad Adenauer and implored him to publicly recognize the BGS as a way to boost the men's faltering morale. Adenauer did his part, and in an open letter to the organization, thanked its staff for their loyal service, but also reas-sured them that the nation still needed them. The chancellor affirmed that “even those who remain in the BGS will have to fulfill an important duty, which although it might be in other fields, cannot be considered less significant to the duties of the military … the living spirit in the BGS and their future work in the service of the Fatherland will continue up to the day in which a reunified Germany will thank you.”

Nevertheless, serious questions about the future of the organization remained. What purpose did a militarized police force serve now that the Federal Republic had an army? How would the Interior Ministry reach a new generation of young men and convince them to join an organization like the BGS? To be sure, recruitment had never been a significant challenge for the Interior Ministry, since there had always been more applicants than available positions. Yet the birth of West Germany's economic miracle and the declining postwar unemployment figures meant that the BGS now had to compete for candidates with the army in addition to the other career opportunities available for young men in both the public and private sectors. Since it faced many challenges and steep costs to rebuild the organization, why did the Federal Republic keep the BGS rather than transfer its duties to state security agencies?

LIFE MAGAZINERANA SPECIAL ISSUE in 1954 titled “Germany: A Giant Awakened,” which included a cover photo of the iconic Neuschwanstein castle in Bavaria. Inside, an article and a series of pictures by legendary twentieth-century photojournalist David Douglas Duncan highlighted a BGS company rounding up “bandits” during a training exercise. In one of the photos, border police officers wearing camouflage with machine guns at the ready have a group of civilians lined up against a wall. The pictures had all the appearances of and indeed evoked the anti-partisan operations of Nazi Germany's military security forces. Images and actions have meaning. Yet if the date and captions were removed, one could easily confuse these images of the BGS with similar photos of Nazi counterinsurgency operations on the Eastern Front.

Did it really matter that border police officers were trained to carry out military-style assaults? After all, what harm could there be in preparing its men for the possibility that they might face invading East German or Soviet armed forces at the Inner-German border? The point is not to say that West Germany became an illiberal regime because it trained its border police officers like soldiers, but rather to highlight the ways in which proceeding in this manner stood in contrast to its democratic ideals and postwar commitment to demilitarization. The government also under-mined its credibility by claiming one thing in public while doing precisely the opposite in practice, giving the impression to many observers that it had formed an army disguised as a police force. If the BGS really was a law enforcement agency and nothing else, as the Interior Ministry often proclaimed, then it should have left fighting wars to the Bundeswehr or NATO. The sociologist George E. Berkley has argued that “nothing is more vital to the creation of a democratic policeman than education.” Although the BGS never fought the hypothetical wars they spent years training for, why risk the negative consequences of police militarization that proved so disastrous to Germany's first experiment with democracy? Training is thus a useful category of analysis because it lays bare the organizational tensions between continuity and change—between those who recognized a need to move away from past models and proponents of maintaining the status quo

THE INTRODUCTION IN THE 1955 edition of Text and Reading Book for Political and Civics Education in the Federal Border Police, states: “The foundations of human morality and thus also of the state-political education are founded in the West on the Christian religion and its culti-vation by the Christian Churches.” On the face of it, the strong empha-sis of religion in a textbook intended to teach police officers about politics and civics seems unusual. The police in democratic states are supposed to be impartial and apolitical when enforcing the law. With no official state church, West Germany's Basic Law and Federal Constitutional Court pro-moted religious neutrality. Yet the Federal Republic's stance on religion did not adhere to the same strict separation of church and state found in American constitutional jurisprudence. According to the legal scholar Donald Kommers, “Because it provides for peoples spiritual needs, the church is crucially important to the life of the state and society.”

Whereas combat veterans trained border police officers like soldiers, teaching them to use infantry weapons and preparing them to fight wars, Protestant and Catholic chaplains tried to instill moral behaviors they thought would arm the men for policing a democracy. They did this through the medium of professional ethics courses, first during basic training and then in a series of ongoing seminars where attendance was mandatory. To be sure, this approach revived a Weimar-era practice, where the churches administered pastoral care and ethics training to Germany's state police forces. Although the National Socialists banned this practice during the 1930s, Germany's Christian churches and their clergy came with their own moral baggage from the Third Reich. Historians have shown that both the Protestant and Catholic churches supported National Socialism, even though the state persecuted some of its members for speaking out against its racist policies. During the postwar period, many of the Wehrmacht's chaplains returned to their pastoral work, and several of them later joined the BGS. Omer Bartov and Phyllis Mack have argued that the postwar clergy behaved as if it was “their self-proclaimed task to restore the moral order in German society.” This is precisely what BGS chaplains attempted to accomplish through professional ethics, and it allowed them to obfuscate the role of their institutions in the perpetration of Nazi crimes.

THIS BOOK BEGAN as a project to explore Germany's democratization through an analysis of the Bundesgrenzschutz, a militarized border guard that over time evolved into Germany's modern national police force. Over the course of researching, writing, and revising the final draft, many of the historical issues it raised about the Federal Republic's law enforcement institutions re-emerged as topics of current events. In the United States, journalists often invoked Germany's police as an ideal model for de-militarizing and reforming America's police departments, citing stark differences in the levels of police violence between the two countries. Yet propping up Germany's police as a model for law enforce-ment without also recognizing its own problematic legacies forms another layer of the success narrative this book set out to question. In the after-math of George Floyd's brutal murder by Minneapolis police officers, for example, the New York Times published an article citing Germany as a country that got policing right and learned from its mistakes. According to the article's subtitle: “In the postwar era, Germany fundamentally rede-signed law enforcement to prevent past atrocities from ever repeating. Its approach may hold lessons for police reform everywhere.” For support, the article claimed that in postwar Germany “the privacy of citizens was rigorously protected, and the police and military were strictly separated,” neither of which is really true.

As my analysis of the BGS has shown, the Federal Republic struggled, and still does, with the question of how to tame its coercive forces of legitimate violence. As the government tried to weigh how to keep citizens safe without eroding the rule of law in the process, it faced some of the same challenges and considered similar authoritarian responses that corrupted its police institution in 1933. During its response to domestic terrorism in the 1970s, for example, border police officers recorded the personal data of unsuspecting individuals and transmitted it to the Federal Republic's intelligence agencies. Moreover, the BGS established a top-secret telecommunications unit, Group-F, which clandestinely monitored West German citizens without their knowledge or consent, and concealed its existence and activities from parliament for almost forty years. The true scope of its surveillance operations is still largely unknown, because its records remain classified.

GSG 9's DRAMATIC RESCUE of the hostages aboard Lufthansa Flight 181 did not end the Federal Republic's ongoing struggle against terrorism or the questions its responses raised about the ethics of secu-rity in a democracy. The success of GSG 9 was tempered by the failure of West Germany's security forces to locate and rescue Hanns-Martin Schleyer before he was murdered by the RAF. Former Interior Minister Hermann Höcherl investigated the failed attempt to find Schleyer and in his final analysis, recommended more coordination between the Federal Republic's security agencies. Six weeks after Colonel Wegener and his men returned in triumph, however, the BGS faced accusations that the government's security policies had gone too far. Border police officers assigned to the Munich Airport detained Bundestag Deputy Eckart Kuhlwein (SPD) during a routine pre-boarding security check. His com-plaints about his treatment renewed the public debate about the nature of the government's collection of personal data from travelers, and, more important, which agencies it was sharing it with. Interior Minister Werner Maihofer, who replaced Genscher when he became Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1974, faced problems of his own over invasive security policies. In 1977, Der Spiegel revealed that he had authorized a secret wiretapping operation against nuclear physicist Klaus Traube, whom he suspected of having ties to the RAF. When he failed to produce evidence linking Traube to the RAF, Maihofer resigned. Gerhart Baum, a liberal member of the FDP, replaced him.

Baum brought a new approach to the post of Interior Minister, and his progressive policies were a moderating influence on the BGS. The 1972 revisions to the Border Police Act had set the organization on a path towards modernization and in the years that followed led to greater integration of its personnel with West Germany's state police forces. Because of these reforms, by 1973 the BGS reached and exceeded its full strength of 20,000 men for the first time in its history. The Interior Ministry no longer needed conscripts to maintain adequate staffing. The passage of a new Personnel Structure Act in 1976 equalized the pay, benefits, and training of border police officers with their state police colleagues. Moreover, the Federal Republic's state police forces now hired twenty percent of their recruits from the BGS, providing its members with greater career incentives and better prospects for advancement.

ON NOVEMBER 20, 1951, while BGS units fought the coffee wars, Adenauer travelled to Paris to sign a draft of the European Defense Community (EDC) Treaty. French Premier René Pleven and the archi-tect of the Schuman Coal and Steel Plan, Jean Monnet, outlined the terms of the new treaty. If ratified, the EDC would have given the Federal Republic its first chance to have armed forces since the end of the war, but only as part of a larger supranational European army. Rearming under a French plan, however, proved unpopular among West Germany's veteran soldiers, who had recently proposed their own plan calling for twenty-five divisions led by German officers. But for Adenauer, establishing a new army in any form was a chance to gain more sovereignty. The day he initialed the draft of the proposed treaty, he confided in his memoirs that: “On this day the Federal Government was beginning to speak with its own authority in association with the Western World.”

These proceedings should have had no immediate effect on border policing. Article 11 of the treaty exempted the police forces of signatory nations from its terms. But now that the rearmament of West Germany appeared inevitable, members of the BGS believed the government would call upon them to staff the new army. Since the majority of its personnel and their leaders had come from the Wehrmacht, it seemed like the logical next step. Some of the men claimed that the government had promised to make them soldiers once the new army was formed. For Interior Minister Robert Lehr and his successor Gerhard Schröder, the creation of German armed forces caused an existential crisis. What did the future hold for the BGS now that West Germany had a new army?

Although members of the BGS assumed they would be instrumental in founding the army, military veterans in Adenauer's proto-defense ministry, the Blank Office (Amt Blank) had other ideas. These veteran offi-cers intended to build an army free of the burdens and traditions of the recent past. Many of those in the Blank Office considered the BGS to be a force of reactionaries that might reject the new beginning they had envisioned.

BY ITSLEGAL DEFINITION, the Bundesgrenzschutz was a law enforcement agency. Its jurisdiction was restricted to a space within thirty kilometers of West Germany's frontiers, and its size was limited to 10,000 men. In reality, however, the Federal Republic's conservative government never intended to use the force they envisioned for border security. Instead, border security was a convenient justification that enabled Adenauer and his second Interior Minister, Robert Lehr, to establish a militarized civil guard they could deploy against West Germany's internal enemies. They believed and argued that the survival of the democratic state depended upon its ability to use decisive force. Adenauer, Lehr, and others in the Interior Ministry approached domestic security based on their experiences of political violence and revolutionary chaos during Germany's interwar years. Although grounded in the reality of their experiences, they also exaggerated these fears to convince the Allied High Commission that building a federal police force was urgent to the survival of the Bonn Republic. West Germany had neither an independent army nor a centralized police force. The government created the BGS to fill this void and in so doing, set the tone for its militarized organizational culture for decades to come.

Border Security: A Solution Searching for a Problem

When it was founded in 1949, West Germany lacked the monopolization over legitimate coercive violence that sociologist Max Weber has identified as fundamental to the modern state. Allied armed forces provided for national defense and its state police agencies handled criminal activity. The Allies intended to gradually transfer more autonomy to the new West German government, but they were reluctant to relinquish their controls over internal security and policing. Because of the crimes perpetrated by Nazi police forces during the war, the Allies believed the West Germans needed more time to accept and practice democracy before being given full control over civilian law enforcement. Against this backdrop, Chancellor Adenauer began seeking a security force he could use to defend the state against its internal political enemies. He complained to the Allies that his government was weak and in grave danger of being undermined or overthrown by communist revolutionaries. To be sure, he never invoked the threat from right-wing radicals in his descriptions of the revolutionary violence his nation allegedly faced.

ON A COLD, DAMP April morning, BGS Major Kurt Andersen was star-ing through his field glasses scanning forest trails near the town of Simmerath on the German-Belgian border. Andersen was the command-ing officer of “Operation Martha” codename for the deployment of BGS units against smugglers peddling coffee, butter, and stolen prop-erty through the Eifel Forest near Aachen. “Operation Martha,” the first major deployment for the new BGS, must have revived a certain sense of familiarity for Andersen and the men under his command now back in the field carrying weapons less than six years after many of them had fought in the war. At fifty-four years of age, Andersen had extensive expe-rience leading men in field operations. The Federal Republic represented the fourth German political regime to which he had sworn an oath of allegiance. In 1915, he enlisted in the Kaiser's army and fought with a machine-gun company. When Germany's armed forces surrendered in 1918, he joined the Iron Brigade, an ultra-nationalist Freikorps (free corps) paramilitary unit that continued to fight communist forces in the Baltic states. In 1919, he became a member of the Prussian Schutzpolizei and served the Weimar Republic as a law enforcement officer in the cities of Elbing-Marienburg, Dortmund, and Düsseldorf. In 1935 he enlisted in the Nazi Wehrmacht and led a Luftwaffe anti-tank unit in combat on both the Eastern and Western Fronts. Captured by the British in 1945, he spent three years as a POW at the maximum-security Island Farm Camp Number 11 outside Bridgend, South Wales before being repatriated to Germany in 1948.

Major Andersen's notable service record was not exceptional. Known in organizational lore as “men of the first hour,” he and his colleagues were the veteran soldiers and police officers who founded and led the BGS in 1951. The organization they made, however, was not the civilian law enforcement agency Adenauer, Lehr, and others at the Interior Ministry had promised the Bundestag. Instead, they created a militarized force steeped in the doctrines of counterinsurgency warfare and into which they imported their years of experience fighting Germany's wars.3 Many of these men had recently fought in Wehrmacht and SS anti-partisan units or served at the front with militarized Ordnungspolizei (Order Police— OrPo) battalions.

THEFEDERAL REPUBLIC's new Program for Internal Security faced an extreme test just thirteen days after the revised Border Police Act took effect. Eight Palestinian terrorists from Black September attacked the Israeli team during the Olympic Games in Munich. The attackers killed weightlifter Yossef Romano and wrestling coach Moshe Weinberg while holding the rest of the athletes hostage at their Olympic Village quarters. The terrorists threatened to kill the hostages unless Israel released 234 Palestinian prisoners; they also demanded that the Germans release jailed RAF leaders Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof. In the words of ABC Sportscaster Jim McCay “The Olympics of serenity have become the one thing the Germans didn't want them to be, the Olympics of terror.” The attack caught the Federal Republic's security services and their leaders completely by surprise. Interior Minister Genscher's high hopes for a spirit of cooperative federalism were crushed by the bureaucratic gridlock reflected in the blundered rescue attempt and murder of all the Israeli athletes.

Although scholars have focused extensively on Germany's first Olympic Games since the Third Reich, and their tragic ending in particular, the involvement of border police officers in these pivotal events is missing from most of these accounts. To be sure, one of Genscher's main justifications for revising the Border Police Act in 1972 was to use the BGS as a reserve that could support the state police in national emergencies just like the attack in Munich. Border police officers had proven their usefulness during nationwide manhunts that helped state police forces capture the RAF's leaders. The violence perpetrated by the RAF in the years leading up to the Olympics convinced West Germany's politicians to support Chancellor Willy Brandt's call for more Internal Security. Yet at a time when they needed them most, Genscher and Munich Police chief Manfred Schreiber kept the BGS sidelined. Instead, they sent Munich Police officers who lacked the proper weapons and tactical training to carry out a high-stakes hostage rescue operation.

Despite the Federal Republic's reputation as a successful liberal democracy, terrorism pushed it closer than it ever had been during the postwar era to an authoritarian national security state. Its militant democ-racy became more militant.

ONAPRIL 22, 1967, A PLATOON of heavily armed border police officers from West Germany's Bundesgrenzschutz (Federal Border Guard— BGS) arrived at Konrad Adenauer's home in the village of Rhöndorf on the Rhine. Three days earlier, the Federal Republic's ageing first chancellor had died in his sleep, and the men were there to escort his body in what would be the beloved old man's final journey to his former office at Bonn's Palais Schaumburg. The men, clad in military uniforms and steel helmets, looked more like members of Nazi Germany's Wehrmacht than law enforcement officers. As the bells of the local church tolled, nine officers solemnly emerged from Adenauer's home carrying his coffin on their shoulders. The crowd of spectators and reporters who gathered in the quiet neighborhood watched as the pallbearers carefully secured his flag-draped coffin to the open bed of an olive drab-colored BGS utility truck. A massive convoy of military trucks loaded with hundreds of rifle-wielding police officers escorted the makeshift hearse bearing Adenauer's remains. When the motorcade arrived in Bonn, the officers carried his coffin into the Palais Schaumburg's large cabinet room, where it was guarded by an “honor watch” consisting of the chief officers from each of six BGS regional command centers.

All of these senior officers were veterans of the Nazi Wehrmacht and its security forces. Standing prominently at the head of Adenauer's coffin was BGS Brigadier General Otto Dippelhofer, a veteran SS and Field Gendarmerie officer who led police battalions on the Eastern Front. Next to Dippelhofer stood BGS Inspector Heinrich Müller, a veteran of Rommel's Africa Corps and an instructor at the Third Reich's War Academy. Behind them stood Brigadier Generals Willy Langkeit and Detlev von Platen. Langkeit was a tank officer who commanded the Grossdeutschland and Kurmark divisions on the Eastern Front; von Platen was a member of the Nazi General Staff and commanded Army Group Center in Russia. The Interior Ministry had planned to limit displays of militarism during the funeral services, preferring instead to emphasize the Federal Republic's place among the Western democracies that made up the postwar Transatlantic Alliance.

ON APRIL 19, 1967, after years of declining health, Konrad Adenauer passed away at his home in Rhöndorf on the Rhine River. The chancellor's death struck a chord with senior BGS commanders, who fondly recalled his tireless advocacy and promotion of their organization. But as the chancellor was laid to rest, the Federal Republic, and the BGS in particular, which the press began calling Bonn's “problem child,” faced new challenges. In 1966, the booming economic miracle that came to define the Adenauer era finally came to a grinding halt during West Germany's first postwar recession. As a result of the economic crisis, Adenauer's successor Ludwig Erhard resigned and his government collapsed. Facing significant budget cuts, the BGS struggled to overcome staffing shortages still lingering after many of its personnel transferred to the army in 1956. Despite spending millions on recruitment, the organization never reached its authorized strength of 20,000 men. Moreover, the federal government was mired in an ongoing political debate over emergency legislation that contributed to the extra-parliamentary opposition (APO) crisis and student protests that rocked West Germany in the late 1960s. State and local police forces were pushed to their limits dealing with the crowds, and many of them responded violently against the demonstrators.

During the crisis of the late 1960s, many border police officers lost faith in the organization and complained to their unions that it needed to be modernized. In 1962 the revised compulsory service law enabled men to waive mandatory military service if they elected to serve at least eighteen months in the police instead. The change, however, only offered a short-term solution to the staffing issues, since most of the men that took advantage of it left when their terms expired or transferred to the state police, which offered better career and promotional opportunities. Candidates had no incentive to remain in the BGS, because the state police or other civil service professions did not give credit or offer incen-tives for their experiences guarding borders. By the end of the 1960s, the BGS continued to struggle against complaints that it was really just an army posing as a police force.

ON NOVEMBER 10, 1965, BGS Lieutenant Colonel Hans-Jürgen Pantenius delivered a lecture on the 1944 Warsaw Uprising to a group of his fellow commanding and junior officers in Bonn. The Bundestag had recently passed controversial legislation that designated border police officers as military combatants in the event of an attack on the Federal Republic. The lecture was supposed to provide its leadership cadre with a case study for urban combat in conjunction with the pub-lication of a new “street fighting” manual. Pantenius, a decorated vet-eran of Nazi Germany's motorized infantry units who also held a PhD in history, fought in Poland, France, and the Soviet Union. At Warsaw he commanded Infantry Regiment 690 of the 337 Volksgrenadier Division attached to General Smilo Freiherr von Luttwitz's 9th Army. Although he arrived in the city after the main resistance ended, he remained as an instructor at the Wehrmacht's “Combat School for Street and Fortress Fighting” established in Warsaw's Mokotów district. He trained the Wehrmacht and SS units stationed there that hunted down and massa-cred the remaining Polish resistance and then destroyed what was left of Warsaw. He told his audience that Warsaw suffered during the orig-inal German invasion of 1939, but “compared with the destruction of German cities in 1943 and 1944, this damage was not significant.”

A discussion about Nazi Germany's brutal suppression of Polish resistance and criminal destruction of Warsaw as some sort of tactical model for democratic civilian police officers is troubling on many levels. In the twenty years since the Third Reich collapsed, several high-profile criminal cases such as the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials and the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem highlighted the crimes Germany's armed forces perpetrated during the war. So why revive such a terrible example of Nazi violence as some form of lesson, unless as an instruction for what not to do in a democracy? What could the Federal Republic's border police officers possibly glean from a discussion about the wanton destruction of an entire city? To be sure, the 1960s ushered in a paradigm shift in postwar mem-ory culture, where West Germans began focusing more on Holocaust victims rather than their own wartime suffering.