The Sunday Read: ‘Can Germany Be a Great Military Power Again?’

[0] My name is James Angeloz, and I'm a contributing writer to the New York Times magazine.

[1] This week's Sunday read is a story I wrote about Germany and its attempt to build up its military after a Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

[2] When Russia invaded Ukraine last year, the German chancellor, Olaf Schultz, called it a sightenbender.

[3] A turning point.

[4] Schultz went on to say that Germany would increase defense spending to more than 2 % of its GDP, and quickly spend 100 billion euros to bolster the Bundeswehr, Germany's armed forces.

[5] It was a tectonic shift for Germany.

[6] Germany is Europe's strongest economy, but for long it has spent relatively little on defense, and it has an ingrained skepticism of military power.

[7] Because of that, the state of Germany's military, to say the least, is deficient.

[8] We're talking about soldiers even lacking protective vests and backpacks.

[9] During the Cold War, West Germany's approach to the Soviets was to try to keep the peace by building economic relations.

[10] The theory was that close economic interdependence would lessen the chances of a nuclear apocalypse.

[11] But with the invasion of Ukraine, it became clear for Germany and other NATO -Metka.

[12] members, that this theory of interdependence had failed.

[13] Since the end of the Cold War, Germany had, more or less, disarmed.

[14] And it's been easy to do that, because its defense has been assured by the U .S. But now, what's at stake is whether Germany could ever defend itself, let alone help defend the rest of Europe.

[15] So here's my article.

[16] Can Germany be a great military power again?

[17] Read by Grover Gardner.

[18] This was recorded by Autumn.

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[21] Under a blazing July sun, Anna -Katrine Meister, prepared to fire a hector, and Coke G -36, the standard rifle of the German military, or Bundesphere.

[22] Dressed in fatigues, helmet, and bulletproof vest, she crouched about 20 yards from two human silhouettes, stand -ins for a hypothetical threat to the German homeland.

[23] Concentration, ordered her instructor, Oliver Mesmans, articulating each syllable.

[24] Mesmans, a former tank commander who is now a sergeant in Germany's reserves and an electric guitar teacher by trade, stood with a supportive hand on Meister's back.

[25] Don't wiggle around so much, he urged.

[26] Thumb away from the breach block.

[27] Meister, who is 34, works in human resources for a tech company near her home in Lower Saxony, where she serves on the local council as a member of the center -left Social Democratic Party.

[28] The closest she had ever come to firing an assault rifle was at a carnival shooting gallery.

[29] Now, as blasts from adjacent firing areas rang out, Meister took a few breaths to steady herself.

[30] She set her rifle's sights to just above the sternum of her fictional enemy, having been instructed by Mesmans to aim higher to account for the gap between the scope and the barrel and pulled the trigger.

[31] Shockwaves reverberated off the walls of the shooting range and four shells landed in the gravel near her feet.

[32] Clouds of sunlit dust rose from the mound of sand behind the target.

[33] Now she's awake again, one of the trainers called out with a laugh.

[34] Meister had been doing well for a novice, but this time she pulled the trigger too fast between shots, resulting in errant fire.

[35] In the end, she hit the enemy's chest 16 times.

[36] She needed 18 hits to meet the goal set by her instructors.

[37] Her short lapse of concentration had cost her.

[38] A few dozen of Meister's new comrades in arms watched from beyond the shooting area, Like Meister, they were civilians with no previous military experience, and had come to this military base in Neenberg, a medieval town in Lower Saxony, to train for homeland protection units in the country's reserves.

[39] My generation, I always say, is a bit like a generation without war, Meister told me between exercises.

[40] Of course, there were conflicts like in Kosovo, but we were.

[41] were still relatively young, and we grew up in such a safe, ideal world.

[42] But this is now changing.

[43] Not everyone in her age group wanted to embrace this change, she conceded.

[44] I would say many of them lean in the direction of being pacifists, she said, but you can only be a pacifist if you have this safe ideal world, and we don't have such a world.

[45] Although no one on the said so explicitly, the threat Meister and her comrades were preparing to counter emanated from Russia.

[46] When Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and then instigated a separatist war in Donbas in eastern Ukraine, German military planners began to consider the suddenly not -so -far -fetched possibility of a large land war in Europe, one that would require German soldiers to defend European territory.

[47] Following Russia's full -scale invasion of Ukraine in February last year, those fears grew more acute.

[48] The German Chancellor, Olaf Schultz, told Parliament that the attack marked a Zeitendenda, a historic turning point for Europe and Germany.

[49] There could be no doubt that Putin wanted to build a Russian empire, Schultz said.

[50] Germans must therefore ask, what capabilities do we need in order to counter this threat?

[51] He announced, among other measures, a 100 billion euro fund to bolster the German military.

[52] The plan, if implemented, would represent the largest absolute jump in German military spending since World War II.

[53] Parliamentarians gave Schultz a standing ovation.

[54] That level of support would have been almost unthinkable before the invasion.

[55] In Germany, skepticism of the merits of military strength has enabled a long post -Cold War process of disarmament.

[56] As a result, Germany is a historic anomaly in the heart of Europe, an economic leviathan, but a military minnow.

[57] Now German leaders are vowing to transform the country into a military power capable of taking responsibility for Europe's security.

[58] The question is whether they, and a hesitant German society, can follow through on this promise.

[59] Across much of the world, soldierliness is considered a virtue and fighting for one's country a natural way to serve it.

[60] Less so in Germany, where the use of military power often raises uncomfortable associations with the country's Nazi past.

[61] The fact that German soldiers have repeatedly been implicated in high -profile cases of right -wing extremism has not helped ease this discomfort.

[62] In recent years, such cases of extremism have been particularly prevalent among commandos in the German army's special forces, the Commando Special Kstalka, or KSK, In December, members of Citizens of the Reich, a fringe group of conspiracy theorists, were accused of planning a bazaar if potentially violent coup to overthrow the government and install a prince.

[63] Several former Bundeswehr soldiers, and one active member, were among the alleged plotters.

[64] Russian propagandists were clearly trying to hit a nerve when they responded to Germany's current plan, by suggesting that the country was returning to Nazism.

[65] How could this end, a Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria V. Zakharova, said in June.

[66] Alas, this is well known from history.

[67] This was a far -fetched line of attack.

[68] Despite a radical right minority, Germany is largely defined by its aversion to extreme nationalism and militarism.

[69] But it was also a familiar one, When the Bundeswehr was created in 1955, largely in response to American and British concerns about a potential Soviet invasion of West Germany, its officer corps consisted almost entirely of old Wehrmacht officers, including former SSmen.

[70] Soviet leaders at the time portrayed the rebirth of the German military as fascist revanchism and the return of Hitlerism.

[71] Resistance to rearmament also came from a substantial swath of the war -weary West German population, fearful as many are now that it would provoke the Russians.

[72] The Bundeswehr nonetheless grew with the help of conscription to include nearly 500 ,000 soldiers, becoming one of the largest militaries in the NATO alliance during the Cold War.

[73] It was the Russian threat that led to the resurrection of the German military during the Cold War.

[74] It's once again the Russian threat that may lead to its revitalization.

[75] Meister and her fellow trainees see joining the reserves as their democratic duty, and the officer running the training program in Nienberg told me that interest in the reserves rose sharply in the days following Russia's invasion.

[76] But many Germans don't share that enthusiasm.

[77] and the war has not led to a boom in recruitment for the Bundesphere as a whole.

[78] Still, there are signs that a historic shift, the growing acceptance of the need to wield military power, is taking root in Germany.

[79] On the base that day was Frank Eustselveig, a member of the conservative Christian Democratic Union and then vice president of the Lower Saxony State Parliament.

[80] Mr. Helweig, who wore a pin of the Ukrainian and German flags on his lapel, has long advocated for a more robust German defense.

[81] Now, he said, people were finally coming around to his point of view.

[82] What we've had was really almost a pacifist attitude, whereby some have said, do we actually need the Bundeswehr, he said.

[83] There are also a lot of people who would no longer be willing to pick up a weapon at all.

[84] I believe that the invasion on February 24th and what we have experienced since show that it is not so simple after all.

[85] He added, I believe a lot is now changing in the population.

[86] We have come back to reality.

[87] On September 12th, Christina Lombrecht, Germany's defense minister at the time, addressed the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin and declared that Germany must be willing to become a furingsmacht, or leading power within Europe.

[88] She acknowledged that this might seem alien to Germans, but that this uneasiness obscures something quite essential, namely that Germany de facto leads even when it does not want to.

[89] Located at the center of the bloc, and with the European Union's biggest economy and largest population, Germany has an inescapable influence on Europe's stability and security, even as it has often tried to avoid the role.

[90] Scholars have referred to Germany as a reluctant hegemon and point to what they call a leadership avoidance complex.

[91] While this reluctance has a great deal to do with Germany's Nazi past, it would be naive to think that this entirely explains it.

[92] Germany has long occupied an exceptionally comfortable place in the world.

[93] It has an export -dependent economy, selling its cars and machines far and wide, and many tanks and submarines, as one of the world's largest arms exporters.

[94] But when it comes to countering perceived security threats, whether the Islamic State or Putin, it has allowed allies to take the lead.

[95] German leaders sent troops to Afghanistan, but largely avoided referring to it as a war, even as German soldiers engaged in ground combat there for the first time since World War II.

[96] Germany's aversion to military power has been sustained by one glaring fact.

[97] Its defense is guaranteed by the world's preeminent superpower, the United States, within the framework of NATO.

[98] President Donald Trump, who tended to reduce foreign policy to questions of who was ripping off whom, was particularly obsessed with what he saw as German defense freeloading, calling Germany delinquent on military spending.

[99] But it wasn't just Trump.

[100] Every recent U .S. administration tried and mostly failed to get the Germans and other European allies to strengthen their militaries and meet the NATO defense spending target of 2 % of gross domestic product.

[101] A gold Germany has long undershot.

[102] Even as Putin's rhetoric and actions became increasingly bellicose, a mantra of Vandul or change through trade continued to define Germany's foreign policy toward Russia.

[103] Economic interdependence with Russia, the thinking went, would encourage Russian democratization, or at the very least a rules -based international order that precluded acts of aggression.

[104] It was also good for business.

[105] By 2015, Putin's imperial ambitions were becoming increasingly clear, yet German officials backed the new Nord Street, 2 pipeline that would bring Russian natural gas to Germany directly through the Baltic Sea, bypassing existing pipelines in Ukraine.

[106] Nord Stream 1 running the same route opened in 2011.

[107] The Germans pursued the project, despite warnings from U .S. lawmakers, who feared that German dependence on Russian gas gave Putin leverage.

[108] Those lawmakers, along with leaders of Eastern Europeans, countries who were increasingly alarmed by Putin's aggression, also worried that the new pipeline would compromise Ukraine's security, isolating it and depriving it of lucrative transit fees for transporting gas from Russia to Europe.

[109] Revenue from German fossil fuel purchases helped the Kremlin finance a military expansion.

[110] At the same time, German military spending as a portion of GDP remains.

[111] near a post -World War II low.

[112] Leaders of Eastern European countries like Poland and Ukraine, which have endured the great geographic misfortune of being sandwiched between Germany and Russia and suffered immensely under both Hitler and Stalin, grew exasperated with Germany's approach to Russia.

[113] Even as far back as 2006, Poland's then -defense minister, Radoslovsikorsky, likened plans to build the first Nord Stream pipeline to the 1939 Molotov -Ribbentrop Pact, the non -aggression agreement between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union that divided Eastern Europe into spheres of influence.

[114] Poland has a particular sensitivity to corridors and deals above our head, Sikorsky said at a security conference in Brussels.

[115] That was the 20th century.

[116] We don't want any repetition of that.

[117] As far as Germany was concerned, history had shown that soft power accommodation was more effective than hard power intimidation.

[118] Vandl was in many ways an extension of West Germany's Cold War Ostpolitik, a policy of rapprochement with Russia put in place by the social democratic government at the end of the nuclear war.

[119] Though West Germany then maintained a robust military to deter a Soviet invasion, West German leaders came to believe that economic interdependence was crucial to preventing an apocalypse.

[120] In a now familiar pattern, pipelines were built to bring Soviet natural gas to Germany.

[121] Over the years, American presidents expressed concern that Germany was becoming too dependent on the Soviets and providing revenue for their military.

[122] But in Germany, Ostpolitik was seen, especially on the political left, as instrumental in ending the Cold War.

[123] When Russia invaded Ukraine in February, the failings of German policy became clear even to Germans.

[124] Germany's army consisted of an aging force of about 183 ,000 troops.

[125] German soldiers lacked not only heavy weapons and ammunition, but also basics like protective vests, helmets, and backpacks.

[126] On the day of the invasion, Lieutenant General Alphonse Meiss, the head of the German army, one of three branches of the Bundeswehr, used his LinkedIn page to broadcast his frustration.

[127] The army that I am privileged to lead is more or less bare, mice wrote.

[128] This does not feel good.

[129] In April, President Frank Walter Steinmeier, a social Democrat who served as foreign minister under Angela Merkel, and was an architect of Germany's Russia policy, admitted to mistakes.

[130] We held under bridges that Russia no longer believed in and that our partners warned us about, he told journalists in Berlin.

[131] We failed at building a common European house that includes Russia.

[132] Few countries have been as fundamentally shaken by the Russian invasion as Germany.

[133] Soaring energy costs are undermining German industries.

[134] Vandul has been discredited, calling into question not only Germany's past Russia policy, but also its current relationship with an autocratic China, Germany's largest trading partner, at a time when President Xi Jinping is consolidating power, and China is building up its armed forces and threatening military action against Taiwan.

[135] Germany's leaders are now frantically seeking new energy sources and arguing for the necessity of hard power.

[136] As part of his Zaytenvenda speech, Schultz vowed to meet the NATO defense spending target from now on, though his government has since been non -committal about when that might happen.

[137] In part, this is because of the entrenched bureaucracy that makes the process of spending money on arms glacially slow.

[138] Should German leaders deliver on their promises, Germany would become the third or fourth biggest military spender in the world.

[139] Before the war, such an increase would have been highly unpopular.

[140] But in a poll conducted for German public television, after the invasion, 69 % of Germans supported it.

[141] One day in June, I spoke with Germany's top -ranking military general, chief of defense, Haberhard Zorn, at the Defense Ministry in Berlin.

[142] Military leaders in the United States often project a certain swagger, with generals assigned nicknames like Mad Dog or Stormen Norman.

[143] That's not so much the case in Germany's Bundeswehr.

[144] wearing thin -framed glasses and short -sleeved service shirt, Zorn had the manner of a friendly corporate manager.

[145] In a conference room with a map of Ukraine stuck to the wall above the copier, I asked him if he believed Germans were embracing the idea that the country needs a capable military.

[146] I think it's coming back now, he told me. Even parties that were not necessarily always behind the Bundeswehr per se, even there, Realpolitik is now on the table, where people say, we need the armed forces.

[147] Much of the current period reminded him of his service during the Cold War, he said, particularly during the early 1980s, when the arms race was heating up and the threat of nuclear war still loomed.

[148] The questions in the population are similar, Zorn told me. What's the threat situation, he said, and what happens?

[149] if deterrence doesn't work.

[150] He went on, all of that is coming back again.

[151] The day of the Bundesphere is a bit like the German military's woodstock.

[152] Billed as a look behind the scenes, it was founded in 2015 to sell the idea of the military to the German people, and, though not explicitly, to win new recruits.

[153] Germany's defense ministry has plans to expand its force by roughly 20 ,000 soldiers.

[154] That will be difficult.

[155] In 2021, 17 .5 % of military posts above the level of enlisted ranks were vacant.

[156] The previous year, fewer than half of the 220 posts for jet pilots in the Air Force were occupied.

[157] Conscription in Germany, a relic of the Cold War, was suspended in 2011, so the Bundesphere has little choice but to make military service seem exciting.

[158] This year, the event occurred on a nearly cloudless Saturday in June in Varendorf, a town in Western Germany.

[159] When I arrived, a rock band in military uniform was playing a cover of Pink Floyd's Another Brick in the Wall before a sparse crowd.

[160] We don't need no education.

[161] We don't need no thought -conduble.

[162] control, droned the singer with a slight German accent.

[163] Beyond the stage, there was an array of German military equipment, an armored infantry fighting vehicle, an armored reconnaissance vehicle, decontamination equipment.

[164] Above it all, fluttered Germany's tricolor flag with the federal coat of arms, a black open -winged eagle.

[165] I walked over to a tent belonging to the Zentrum Inner Fuhrung, a civic education center in the Bundesphere that teaches soldiers the concept of inner leadership.

[166] That concept, which dates to the founding of the Bundesphere, is the ethical bedrock of today's force.

[167] Soldiers should be led not by a furor, but by their own moral compass.

[168] They can refuse orders that violate higher principles.

[169] Though the concept was intended to mark a clear break with the Nazi past, the men who conceived it served in the Vermacht.

[170] Many went on to perpetuate the myth of a clean Vermacht, the false narrative that the force was innocent of Nazi crimes that held sway through much of the 20th century and is sustained today by the radical right.

[171] In the tent, a soldier in fatigues posed a series of questions about inner leadership to a group of civilians, who tapped answers into their phones and then watched the results on a screen.

[172] Which of the following terms represents not a universal value, but a virtue, the soldier asked.

[173] A boy in a camouflage cap looked up at his mother who was struggling to choose among the options, bravery, freedom, human dignity, and peace.

[174] Of the participants, 67 % chose human dignity.

[175] which was wrong.

[176] The correct answer was bravery.

[177] Participants received Bundesphere tote bags and other swag.

[178] Sitting outside the tent under a canopy, I found Major General André Bodaman, who was the commander of the Centrum Inner Furung.

[179] As the band played Neil Diamond's Sweet Caroline, Bodomond told me that the purpose of the center is to inculcate soldiers with values rooted in Germany's democratic society.

[180] In the end, soldiers risk their own lives or the lives of others or have to kill, Botomon told me. They have to know what they're doing it for.

[181] Of course, things don't always go according to plan.

[182] During 2021, 1 ,452 cases of suspected extremism were investigated in the Bundesphere, a vast majority of a right -wing variety.

[183] In one case, several soldiers in one platoon of a mechanized infantry training battalion that was part of a German -led NATO battle group in Lithuania sang a happy birthday song for Adolf Hitler.

[184] When this and other incidents were investigated, one soldier posted a photo of a Vermacht soldier on social media with a finger over his mouth, and the caption, Silence, don't blab, the enemy is listening.

[185] The Bundeswehr's leaders have said that they have a zero -tolerance policy for extremism and that these cases don't represent a systemic problem within the ranks.

[186] But for the Bundeswehr, they are a profound existential threat, undermining the idea that the modern military represents a clean break from the Nazi past.

[187] Germany is, of course, far from the only nation to attract extremists to its military, but in a country so averse to any semblance of militarism, it is perhaps not surprising that some of those drawn to combat would have views out of sync with the mainstream.

[188] This was certainly the case inside one company in Germany's elite commando force, the KSK.

[189] In 2020, Anagret Kramkarenbauer, then the defense minister, disbanded the company following a series of right -wing extremist in.

[190] incidents, including one in which soldiers were accused of giving each other Hitler salutes at a party.

[191] The KSK was then put through a series of reforms, and KSK commandos were required to take courses at the Zentrum -Inerifurung on subjects like character development and loyalty to the Constitution.

[192] In December, the KSK again came under scrutiny when police searched a KSK barracks and detained a master sergeant working in logistics who was suspected of taking part in the alleged coup planned by an organization affiliated with Citizens of the Reich.

[193] German media reported that two other soldiers previously associated with the KSK, including an ex -Kernel, were also part of the military branch of the organization.

[194] The plotters with known KSK connections were in their 50s and 60s, according to German media reports, and German officials say they don't reflect the future of the force or the effectiveness of current reforms.

[195] But the scandals haven't helped with recruitment of new commandos.

[196] Many KSK posts are currently unfilled, according to a confidential defense ministry document obtained by the German media in June.

[197] The force is, of course, keen to change this.

[198] Shortly after I spoke to Bodomon, a uniformed M .C took the stage and played a short video on the KSK.

[199] As soaring music played, soldiers in tactical gear pointed guns at the camera, ran through woodlands, and trudged through snow -covered hills.

[200] Well, there's something to talk about, the MC said when the video ended.

[201] He then introduced a KSK soldier of two decades named Andi, a wiry man in fatigues who told the crowd that he was responsible for personnel regeneration.

[202] Andy gave a short sales pitch that excluded any mention of the forces' recent troubles.

[203] We travel all over the world to the Arizona Desert for parachuting, to the Arctic, training, and all these vehicles with these special features.

[204] teachers.

[205] You can see them at our tent.

[206] After Andi spoke, people gathered to hear Lombrecht, Germany's defense minister say a few words.

[207] She took the stage to a smattering of applause and praised the soldier's creativity in dealing in recent years with tight financial margins.

[208] The last few months had provided a painful lesson, she said.

[209] If we want to continue to live in this free and secure situation, we must also be prepared to militarily defend these values that we stand for.

[210] Six months later, on January 16th, Lombrecht resigned.

[211] She had come under fierce criticism from Germany's conservative opposition for failing to bolster Germany's military fast enough and for a series of embarrassing public missteps.

[212] Early in her tenure, Lombrecht, just weeks before Russia's February 20, 24th invasion of Ukraine, announced that Germany would send Ukrainians 5 ,000 helmets.

[213] It's a clear signal, we are on your side, she said.

[214] She was widely derided.

[215] Speaking to the German tabloid built, the mayor of Kiev, Vitali Klitsko, called the contribution an absolute joke.

[216] The day after Lombrecht's resignation, Schultz announced that Boris Pistorius, a social democratic politician who served as the Interior Minister of Lower Saxony, but who has little foreign policy experience, would be the new defense minister.

[217] I made my way around the exhibits.

[218] Near one called Life in the Field, amid tents and faux campfires, a soldier slung a helmet and a bulletproof vest over the small frame of a young boy dressed in military fatigues.

[219] The boy's father snapped photos.

[220] I'm more of a pacifist, he told me when I caught up with him.

[221] The man, Frank, who preferred not to give his full name to protect his son's privacy, told me that his son, a seven -year -old named Zamuel, went through role -playing phases.

[222] Zamuel, his father said, had been particularly affected by the invasion of Ukraine because they had family friends who were Ukrainian.

[223] Frank thought this might have created a certain psychological need to be strong.

[224] I met several parents dragged to the event by their children who wanted to look at the equipment.

[225] Recruiters also gave guided tours to young people interested in applying to join the force, an event referred to as Talent Scout, and billed as an exclusive VIP experience.

[226] Teenagers I spoke to had seen Bundesphere, videos on TikTok or followed the Bundeswehr's YouTube channel, where the often humdrum life of a soldier is made to seem maximally cool.

[227] One such prospective soldier was Leonardo Proise, an amiable kid one week from his 15th birthday.

[228] Slung over his shoulder was a drawstring Bundesphere backpack filled with military swag and emblazoned with the phrase, On the way to my strengths.

[229] Proyce told me he aspired to be a KSK soldier and was excited to visit the KSK tent.

[230] I asked Poyce what his friends made of his ambition.

[231] At school, it's not like kids are saying, oh, he wants to join the Bundesphere.

[232] He's not really my type.

[233] Rather, you hear, oh, that's pretty cool.

[234] I asked him if he knew about the right -wing extremist scandals in the KSK.

[235] He recalled hearing something, but this didn't deter him.

[236] I won't become a right -wing extremist or anything like that, he said.

[237] I think Hitler sucks.

[238] I say it like it is.

[239] Before Proyce left, he showed me a poster he received from the KSK tent.

[240] It featured an image of soldiers just dropped from a helicopter with the KSK motto, Der Vila Encheidet, or The Will Decides.

[241] It's definitely going above my bed, he said.

[242] In Germany and Europe generally, resistance to new Get Tough on Russia policies is particularly evident on the political fringes, where elements of anti -U