Officers of the Wehrmacht as a model for the Bundeswehr?

Hardly anyone has reported it¹: On July 12, 2024, the responsible head of the “Operational Readiness and Support of the Armed Forces” department in the Ministry of Defence, Lieutenant General Kai Rohrschneider, amended the Bundeswehr “Traditionserlass” (Regulation on traditions) which had been in force since 2018, with an eleven-page “Amendment to the Regulation on traditions”². The “Regulation on traditions” deals with the question of what and who can and should be a role model for Bundeswehr soldiers. Probably in the spirit of his employer, who has been calling for a “combat-ready” Bundeswehr since the late summer of last year, which should be ready for a war against Russia in five years at the latest, the head of department no longer wanted to limit the Bundeswehr’s cultivation of tradition to an orientation towards the values of the Basic Law. From now on, the soldiers of the Bundeswehr would once again be able to refer to former officers of the German Wehrmacht, who had helped to build up the Bundeswehr during the Cold War, as “role models”.
  Point 3 of the eleven-page paper already states: “The ‘Zeitenwende’ triggered by Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, which violates international law, has increased the importance of armed forces” (all quotations translated by Current Concerns) ability to fight in war, which is largely derived from a high operational value and high combat effectiveness, also for the preservation of tradition. The aim is to strengthen “operational readiness and the will to fight”. Therefore, “greater attention must be paid to military excellence” and no longer just to “classic soldierly virtues (character) or achievements for the integration of the armed forces into society”.
  “The approximately 40,000 former soldiers transferred from the Wehrmacht [to the Bundeswehr] had largely proven themselves in battle”, it says in the “amendments”. This is followed by numerous examples of such new “role models” from all branches of the Wehrmacht. They had shown “military excellence” in the Second World War by being successful occupiers of foreign countries, fighter pilots with several hundred “aerial victories” or “highly decorated front-line officers”. All for Hitler’s Third Reich.
  The amendments were hardly discussed critically among the Bundeswehr soldiers themselves, as the Bundeswehr Forum chatroom shows. But for the editorial team of the Berlin daily newspaper “tageszeitung”, which is closely linked to the Greens and by no means peaceful, it was probably a step too far. The newspaper spoke out critically on 8 August and wrote on 14 August that her criticism had had an effect. At the Federal Press Conference on the same day, the spokesperson for the German Ministry of Defence explained that the “amendments” had been withdrawn.³ It reads: “The additional information has raised doubts about the value commitment of the Bundeswehr’s understanding of tradition. In order to dispel these and to underline a clear commitment to the central points of reference of the understanding of tradition, the stipulations on behaviour worthy of tradition and the Bundeswehr’s obligation to the liberal and democratic objectives of the Federal Republic of Germany, we have decided to suspend the complementary amendments with immediate effect.”
  So: all’s well that ends well? Not at all. In the Bundeswehr, right up to the ministerial level, there is a lust for war in many respects that should alarm every German – just as foreign countries that do not see themselves as vassals of the USA are actually alarmed. Here and there is influential opposition from Germany itself. Then the principle is applied: Two steps forward, one step back. You could also say: according to the Juncker method. This is a highly dangerous game of Russian roulette. That Chancellor Scholz has been talking since February 2022 about a “Zeitenwende” towards a Germany that is now once again warlike and is submissively following all the instructions from Washington (now again with new medium-range missiles from 2026); that German weapons are being supplied en masse to the war in Ukraine – in breach of the post-1945 tradition; that German soldiers are actively involved in this war; that a few months ago, senior German officers were quite openly planning to attack Russia with German medium-range missiles (TAURUS); that German tanks have now invaded Russia again, as in the German war of extermination against the Soviet Union ... What else has to happen before the majority of Germans wake up?  •

¹ An internet search revealed only two critical articles from the “tageszeitung” newspaper on 8 August, a critical article from the Perspektive website and a critical article from the Trotskyist WSWS. Only after the withdrawal of the “amendments” by the Inspector General of the Bundeswehr on 14 August did Deutschlandfunk, for example, also report on the same day.
² The amendments were not publicly accessible until 26 July 2024: https://augengeradeaus.net/2024/07/neue-akzente-fuer-den-traditionserlass-mehr-kriegstuechtigkeit-auch-in-der-traditionspflege/
³ https://augengeradeaus.net/2024/08/verteidigungsministerium-zieht-ergaenzung-zu-bundeswehr-traditionserlass-zurueck/ of 14 July 2024