Nothing to Be Ashamed Of

The new German army was taking such care not to look like the old one that a serious question arose. Would it be able to develop a fighting spirit? Concerned by such matters, West Germany's Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss last year permitted the German General Staff, banned after two world wars, to come quietly back to life. It bore a new name: the Fuehrungsstab, or "leadership staff."

Last week, laying the cornerstone of a German West Point in Hamburg to train future officers of the leadership staff, Defense Minister Strauss decided to put in a good word for the old blood-and-iron ways. "Free of false prejudice and erroneous ideas of collective guilt," said he, "our Bundeswehr can now assume a new attitude toward the tradition. German soldiers need not be ashamed of this tradition. Follow the ageless tradition and the old ideals--selfless service, honor and bravery, linked to the needs of our time."

His words did not mean that German militarism is stirring again: the new General Staff college is rising in Hamburg, historically one of the least martial-minded of German cities. And the college's chief is no monocled martinet such as the late great General Hans von Seeckt, who built the Reichswehr after Versailles, but an infantryman who rose to major general's rank fighting on the Eastern Front. Yet there are signs that the postwar German attitude toward the military is changing.

For one thing, Germans are now fond of seeing war movies. German exhibitors discovered that even U.S. war films, depicting Germans as hateful Nazis, went over big. Now German-made films are going in for World War II dramas. Battling from the outset against impending doom--for after all, Germany lost the war--their heroes always turn against the villainous Gestapo or otherwise show that, deep down inside, their hearts belong to the Hitler Resistance, before riding off in tank, sub or Stuka to their Valhalla.

In Rommel Calls Cairo Monty won at El Alamein, even though the Afrika Korps knew his battle plan; the wicked Gestapo had branded it a plant. In The Green Devils of Monte Cassino the Germans held the abbey five months against heavy Allied attacks because their parachutists needed that time to bring its art treasures to the safety of the Vatican. In U-47, dashing Submariner Guenther Prien plunks his torpedoes into the British battleship Royal Oak at Scapa Flow, but when his deck officer shouts "Hurrah!", whispers: "Shut up; 2,000 men have just died aboard that ship."

Such ingenuous twists quell the qualms of oldsters, but younger German audiences laugh uproariously at blended-in newsreel shots showing goose-stepping Brownshirts heiling their Fuehrer.

Young Germans have accepted military conscription without much murmur, but also without enthusiasm. Strauss has silenced those Germans who yelled "Bellhops" at his parading recruits by junking their first U.S.-style uniforms, with Eisenhower jackets and laced shoes, and presenting his countrymen with the sight of soldiers in tightly belted tunics and clumping leather boots and officers in the old familiar Wehrmacht-style high-peaked caps.

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