LIFE MAGAZINERANA SPECIAL ISSUE in 1954 titled “Germany: A Giant Awakened,” which included a cover photo of the iconic Neuschwanstein castle in Bavaria. Inside, an article and a series of pictures by legendary twentieth-century photojournalist David Douglas Duncan highlighted a BGS company rounding up “bandits” during a training exercise. In one of the photos, border police officers wearing camouflage with machine guns at the ready have a group of civilians lined up against a wall. The pictures had all the appearances of and indeed evoked the anti-partisan operations of Nazi Germany's military security forces. Images and actions have meaning. Yet if the date and captions were removed, one could easily confuse these images of the BGS with similar photos of Nazi counterinsurgency operations on the Eastern Front.

Did it really matter that border police officers were trained to carry out military-style assaults? After all, what harm could there be in preparing its men for the possibility that they might face invading East German or Soviet armed forces at the Inner-German border? The point is not to say that West Germany became an illiberal regime because it trained its border police officers like soldiers, but rather to highlight the ways in which proceeding in this manner stood in contrast to its democratic ideals and postwar commitment to demilitarization. The government also under-mined its credibility by claiming one thing in public while doing precisely the opposite in practice, giving the impression to many observers that it had formed an army disguised as a police force. If the BGS really was a law enforcement agency and nothing else, as the Interior Ministry often proclaimed, then it should have left fighting wars to the Bundeswehr or NATO. The sociologist George E. Berkley has argued that “nothing is more vital to the creation of a democratic policeman than education.” Although the BGS never fought the hypothetical wars they spent years training for, why risk the negative consequences of police militarization that proved so disastrous to Germany's first experiment with democracy? Training is thus a useful category of analysis because it lays bare the organizational tensions between continuity and change—between those who recognized a need to move away from past models and proponents of maintaining the status quo