WEST GERMANY: Military Realism

In old Munich there was a butcher named Strauss who bought poultry from a breeder named Heinrich Himmler. Opposite the Strauss butchershop, at No. 50 Schellingstrasse, Heinrich Hoffmann owned a photographic shop; a frequent visitor was a pale man with a wispy mustache named Adolf Hitler, who wore a trench coat and nervously slapped his boots with a dog whip. A goggle-eyed witness of the spectacular rise of Hitler, Himmler & Co. was the butcher’s stocky son, Franz Josef. Catching his son distributing Nazi propaganda one day, Butcher Strauss, a staunch Catholic, gave the boy a thrashing right there in the Schellingstrasse. Said Franz Josef Strauss, recalling the incident recently: “That was my first experience in politics. I’ve never been able to get away from politics since.”

Last week Franz Josef Strauss. 41. no Nazi but a veteran of Bavarian beer-hall politics in his own right, became West Germany’s new Minister of Defense. He got his job from old Konrad Adenauer-but he is a symbol of the kind of Germany that will replace Adenauer’s Germany. He is also a symbol of the kind of military thinking that Konrad Adenauer once stood resolutely against.

The Tiger Tank. Like a great many other Germans, Defense Minister Strauss learned about armies the hard way. The butcher’s son dodged the early Nazi draft by entering Munich University, where he topped the examination lists, joined a Catholic students’ organization and brawled with young Nazis. When the call-up for World War II carne in 1939, he talked himself out of the infantry (“Because I don’t like walking”) and into the artillery. He was almost court-martialed for calling his uniform a Klufterl (a childish masquerade). But he served in Poland, France, Russia, and at the Battle of Stalingrad he led his platoon out of encirclement, fighting a rearguard action for 50 miles.

Taken prisoner by the U.S. Army at war’s end, he spent a couple of months in a P.W. camp before being appointed a top county official in Schongau by the American Military Government. He took naturally to politics. He advocated uniting Catholics and Protestants into a political party, ultimately founded the Christian Socialist Union in Schongau and was one of the founders of the greater Bavarian C.S.U. Elected to the West German Bundestag in 1949, he charged onto the national scene like a Tiger tank on the rampage.

A heavy-set man (5 ft. 9 in.. 205 Ibs.) with a powerful chest and wide shoulders, he walks with the stiff gait of a Bavarian peasant. His eyes are small and blue, and his head is square and massive, with thick, dark blond hair. “He has the manners of the Munich Tal,” says Free Democrat Leader Thomas Dehler (the Tal is Munich’s slum district). But inside Franz Josef Strauss’s square head is a fast-thinking brain gifted with a photographic memory. His bachelor apartment near Bonn, his office and his automobile are jampacked with books, which he reads voraciously and from which he can often quote whole pages of text. He is probably the best extempore speaker in Germany today, and he rates as the German politician with the biggest future.

The New Army. Franz Josef Strauss first caught the eye of Chancellor Adenauer in the 1952 EDC debate, when he made an eloquent appeal for acceptance of Adenauer’s policy of Western alliance. But when Adenauer made him a Cabinet Minister Without Portfolio, Strauss immediately launched a vigorous attack on the new German army “with democratic safeguards” proposed by Theodor Blank, an ex-trade unionist who was made Defense Minister precisely because he was antimilitarist. A year ago, though still a man Adenauer had doubts about, Strauss became Minister for Atomic Affairs and deputy chairman of the West German Defense Council. He was in a fine position to wage war against Blank.

Strauss made no secret of the kind of Bundeswehr he thought West Germany should have, and it was a far cry from the postwar dream of Konrad Adenauer and the other “good Europeans.” Strauss wanted an efficient fighting force with the accent on air force armed with tactical atomic weapons-even though Germany had by treaty renounced the right to atomic weapons. He wanted the army to be as independent as possible, because he felt that the NATO strategy was not in Germany’s best interests. He advocated a defense plan which would assign German troops to the defense of Germany, not Paris, London and points West. He wanted immediate revival of the German arma ments industry which, in his conception, would not only produce weapons for German use but for export to other parts of the world (e.g., the Middle East). He thought that conscription should be postponed as long as possible, not only for political reasons but in the interests of military efficiency. In short, Herr Strauss demanded a national German army of professional soldiers.

Imposition of an 18-month draft at a time when other nations were cutting back their armed forces was political poison in Germany. Adenauer saw his chance to beat a retreat when he got wind of the so-called “Radford Plan.” In the garbled and sensational version that appeared in the German press, Radford was proposing to cut down on military manpower by accenting atomic weapons. “So. if the Americans are going to do it.” said Adenauer, “then we must follow.”

Invited to present his case to the Cabinet, Strauss laid down three conditions for taking the Defense Ministry: 1) that NATO be told West Germany will not meet its commitments under the Paris accords (96,000 men under arms by Dec. 31); 2) that he be given Cabinet backing for. an atomic tactical weapons program which will first draw on allied sources for atomic warheads, bombers and high-altitude interception devices, gradually transfer atomic production to German industry; 3) that there must be a complete overhaul of the Defense Ministry, and the establishment of a military planning group, tantamount to a German general staff.

Much will depend on how the NATO allies receive Defense Minister Strauss when he calls on them next week to ask for atomic weapons in place of the conscripts Germany promised to deliver.