1 - The Shadow of Weimar Political Violence in the Making of West Germany’s BGS

Summary

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.