No other political topic dominated the inner-German debates of the 1950s like the controversial issue of Germany’s remilitarization(s). Hardly half a decade after the end of World War II, the re-creation of German armed forces was back on the agenda on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The legacy of the Wehrmacht cast contrasting shadows on these debates. Hitler’s army had suffered its greatest and most costly defeat in the war against the Soviet Union while simultaneously facilitating and participating in the Nazi mass murder on the Eastern Front. Yet the way the two Germanys faced this past in the course of the remilitarization debates could not have been more different. While in the GDR the war against the Soviet Union became a constant theme, in fact, an obsession in political propaganda and military indoctrination, it was almost entirely absent from official discourses over rearmament in the Federal Republic.

One crucial factor shaped the political cultures in each country and infused the debates on remilitarization: the fear of a new war. In the East, the SED fostered and sustained fear of another “Barbarossa” in a third world war, with a relentless campaign aimed at proving that the West was following in Hitler’s footsteps. This campaign culminated in the building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961, a “measure” that allegedly had saved Europe from the brink of war. On the other side, West German political culture was permeated by a constant fear of “Bolshevism,” and Soviet expansionism, it was believed, sought to spread the communist revolution around the world. Mutual angst derived from each set of rational security concerns in light of each side’s historical experiences – German aggression against the Soviet Union, Soviet domination of East Germany and East-Central Europe – and from irrationally exaggerated hostilities generated in the Cold War spiral of verbal and actual violence.