‘German Warriors’: My primary summer reading in 2023. Mind blowing, I dare say. So Germany’s leading young military historian, Sönke Neitzel, asks what the Kaiser’s soldiers in 1914, the Wehrmacht ones in WW2, the Bundeswehr’s ‘virtual’ soldiers in the Cold War, and the post-unification first (few) real warriors since 1945 (Afghanistan) had in common. Not to forget a few other German armies in between, such as the 1920s Reichswehr and the East German NVA.
His ambition is breathtaking in its temporal and intellectual scope. He looks at how political leadership, the standing of soldiers in society and politics, and force structure and inner resilience are intricately linked, in no less than 7 German militaries over 120 years. He zooms in and out, from broad sweeps of the geopolitical and ideological ‘big picture’ to day-by-day accounts of individual battles of WW2 or the Bundeswehr Afghanistan mission. Sometimes you feel like he read an entire book in order to put down a half sentence.
His primary questions are: What was the common element (subsidiarity/Auftragstaktik, the preference of mobility over firepower, leading from the front, a higher emphasis on offence rather than defence etc.) and: how can German soldiers still be warriors while aiming to be the contrary of Hitler’s Wehrmacht, or even other past German forces, in every sense?
It is this last question which makes Neitzel’s book so explosive: he is absolutely right (but very much opposed to the PC Berlin zeitgeist) that in order to maintain liberal democracy in the 21st century, neither the emphasis on deterrence of the Cold War Bundeswehr nor the ‘development assistant’ mode of post-2001 will suffice. Soldiers kill and die on the job, and therefore develop a very special tribal culture, which is what makes them unique among professionals. Whether that means that Bundeswehr garrisons should return to celebrating WW2 Fallschirmjäger strikes in Crete or panzer attacks in the East, is a different question. My answer is no; Neitzel is a bit less clear on that. But he is right in saying that Afghanistan, and the sacrifices made by German soldiers there, would offer some ground to create new tribal traditions.
So for military geeks like me, this book is no less than a treasure trove, more captivating than a Netflix series and food for thought and debate for years to come. Thank you, Sönke Neitzel, for the best book I’ve read in a long time!