3 - Who Wants to Be a Soldier? The BGS and West Germany’s New Army

Summary

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.