2 - Men of the First Hour: Veteran Soldiers and the Police Organization They Made

Summary

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.