In deciding to provide Leopard battle tanks to Ukraine, Olaf Scholtz breaks the self-imposed constraints on the army’s position in German international coverage that had been in place for the reason that finish of WWII.
Two days earlier than Holocaust Remembrance Day final week, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, underneath heavy strain from Washington and pro-war members of his personal authorities, introduced that Germany can be sending 14 Leopard 2A6 principal battle tanks to Ukraine.
Answering media questions on the German Bundestag, Scholz declared:
“It is correct that we act carefully with our worldwide companions to help Ukraine — financially, with humanitarian assist, but in addition with weapons deliveries. Now we will say that, in Europe, it’s us and Britain who’ve made essentially the most weapons obtainable for Ukraine. Germany will at all times be on the forefront in the case of supporting Ukraine.”
Two days later, at her personal press convention, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova responded:
“We all keep in mind what are German tanks. These are machines which grew to become a logo, not solely of loss of life…not solely of deathly ideology. They grew to become a logo of misanthropy, as a worldwide existential menace to the planet.
When you examine Nazism and fascism about these occasions within the Second World War, I believe that these SS uniforms and these very German tanks and these symbols of the Third Reich had change into a worldwide image of the autumn of the humankind into the abyss of hatred and horror and bloodbath.”
Zakharova had extra to say:
“It was precisely the German tanks which grew to become the image — the anti-symbol, I might say — which is able to keep within the reminiscence of all humankind endlessly. Now these German tanks will as soon as once more be on our land. … So what does Berlin count on? That these armored automobiles, with all their symbols again then and now, that they may cross our villages and settlements? We keep in mind the tip of these occasions. Does Berlin keep in mind?”
The Morgenthau Plan
In the aftermath of the horrific atrocities inflicted on the world by Nazi Germany, there have been many who believed that Germany not had the ethical proper to exist.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr. was a type of folks. In 1944 he promulgated a plan, subsequently generally known as the “Morgenthau Plan,” which called for the demilitarization and dismemberment of Germany after the Second World War.
“It should be the aim of the Allied Forces,” Morgenthau wrote, “to accomplish the complete demilitarization of Germany in the shortest possible period of time after surrender. This means completely disarming the German Army and people (including the removal or destruction of all war material), the total destruction of the whole German armament industry, and the removal or destruction of other key industries which are basic to military strength.”
Morgenthau singled out the Ruhr Area for particular attention. “Here lies the heart of German industrial power, the cauldron of wars,” he wrote. “This area should not only be stripped of all presently existing industries but so weakened and controlled that it cannot in the foreseeable future become an industrial area.”
Morgenthau didn’t just target the industrial capabilities, but the human potential to sustain them. “All people within the area should be made to understand that this area will not again be allowed to become an industrial area. Accordingly, all people and their families within the area having special skills or technical training should be encouraged to migrate permanently from the area and should be as widely dispersed as possible,” he said.
New Security Model
This history seems lost on Armin Papperger, the CEO of Rheinmetall AG, the producer of the Leopard 2 tank. The headquarters of Rheinmetall AG is in Dusseldorf, the capital of North Rhine–Westphalia Land, the epicenter of the Ruhr Area targeted by the Morgenthau Plan. Papperger and his armaments company are the benefactors of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’sZeitenwende (“watershed”) policy, announced with great fanfare on Feb. 27, 2022 — three days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
In this speech, Sholtz turned his back on the German experiences of both the First and Second World Wars, where unrestrained German militarism worked in concert with German industrialists to build massive military capability, which was then married to aggressive German foreign policies that turned into global conflict.
Sholtz was now proclaiming military-based deterrence as the national security model for Germany going forward, including a massive increase in defense expenditures that would dramatically increase the profit margins of companies like Papperger’s Rheinmetall AG.
According to Papperger, Scholz’s Zeitenwende has indeed been a watershed moment for Germany, allowing many Germans to see past the self-imposed constraints on the German military’s role in German foreign policy that had been in place since the end of the Second World War.
“In former times we were insulted and sometimes threatened,” Papperger told a reporter. “Today people say and write to me: ‘Thank God you’re around.’”
Papperger appears unapologetic about the role that he and his company have played in the dispatch of German tanks to Ukraine. “I think about what weapons can do,” he said. “But I also think about what can happen when you don’t have weapons. You can see that right now in Ukraine.”
Scholz, Papperger, and their ilk would do well to reflect on the example set by former German Chancellor Willie Brandt.
Cognizant of the moral responsibility he bore toward Germany’s history with the Poles, he laid a wreath at the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes in Warsaw. But Brandt did not go through the motions of simply bowing his head; he fell to his knees in what is now known as the “Warsaw Genuflection,” where he remained for more than a minute.
From the symbolic action of the “Warsaw Genuflection” emerged what became known as Ostpolitik, the process of normalizing relations and openness between West Germany and “the East” — Russia and the nations and territories which, in their totality, represented the major victims of Nazi Germany’s lawless wars of aggression.
Elements of Ostpolitik could be found in the policies of long-time German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who headed the German government for 16 years, finally stepping down in 2021 following elections which saw her Christian Democratic Union party defeated by a coalition led by Social Democrat Scholz and Green Party leader Annalena Baerbock.
Merkel, a fluent Russian speaker, openly promoted policies built around the notion of supporting trade with Russia, noting that given its size, Germany simply could not get away with ignoring their large neighbor to the east.
Merkel’s Betrayal
But there was a darker side to Merkel’s Russia policy, one which manifested itself in the form of deceit and betrayal of both Brandt’s Ostpolitik and Russia’s seeming sincere search for a peaceful resolution to violence that had broken out in the Donbass in 2014 following the removal by a pro-Western coup of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and his replacement by a hand-picked government dominated by Ukrainian nationalists.
“The 2014 Minsk agreement,” Merkel recently admitted to the German media, referring to a ceasefire agreement she had brokered together with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, French President Francois Hollande and Russian President Vladimir Putin, “was an attempt to give Ukraine time” to become stronger.
Merkel’s confession has been mirrored by both Poroshenko and Hollande, both of whom admit that the Minsk Accords were little more than a sham to buy NATO time to build a Ukrainian military capable of defeating Russian-backed forces in Donbass.
Seen in this light, the announcement at the 2014 Munich Security Conference by then-Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier that “Germany must be prepared to get involved earlier, more decisively and more substantially in foreign and security policy,” seems to be little more than the declaration of a policy designed to lead Germany and Russia down a path toward war.
Germany’s current foreign minister, Baerbock, has foregone all pretense as to what the true policy of Germany toward Russia is. During a keynote address last week to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, France, Baerbock declared, “We are fighting a war against Russia and not against each other.”
Baerbock was seeking to defend law, democracy and human rights in response to “Russia’s murderous attack on the people of Ukraine.”
Baerbock’s honesty, however, flies in the face of the stated policies of her own political party, the German Green Party, which in its 2021 manifesto staking out its positions on the eve of the German national elections explicitly called for banning “export of arms and army gear” into warfare zones. “Germany needs to be a driving drive within the political de-escalation of conflicts,” the manifesto says.
The hypocrisy of Baerbock and the Green Party is simply matched by that of Scholz, and Merkel earlier than him, each of whom have embraced a path of German militarism and international coverage activism — the very coverage programs that put Germany on their respective paths to catastrophe in each World Wars.
Loss of Independence
It was this coverage route that Zakharova was talking about when she implored German leaders throughout her Sunday press convention “to not make the identical errors of the German ancestors, that the German folks paid an enormous worth for.”
Zakharova stared into the digital camera, addressing the German folks:
“The day that it was allowed that Leopard tanks needs to be despatched to Ukraine is historic as a result of it has cemented the factor that we talked about, that Germany has fully misplaced sovereignty. And Scholz has simply signed the lack of unbiased German international coverage endlessly.”
Zakharova wanted no assist reinforcing her final level — she received all the assistance she wanted from U.S. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland, who throughout testimony earlier than the U.S. Senate on Friday bragged to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz that, “Like you, I’m, and I believe the administration is, very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you wish to say, a hunk of steel on the backside of the ocean.”
Nord Stream 2 was a significant piece of crucial power infrastructure constructed collectively by German and Russian firms at a price of over $12 billion to ship some 55 billion cubic meters of pure fuel from Russia to Germany per 12 months. On Sept. 26, 2022, the Nord Stream 2 pipeline was destroyed by man-made explosions. No nation has taken credit score for the assaults, though Russia blames the U.S. and U.Ok. Nuland’s brazen feedback counsel that the Russian’s is likely to be right.
Nuland’s feedback come one 12 months to the day after she made comparable statements to the identical Senate committee. “We proceed to have sturdy, clear communication with our German allies,” Nuland stated. “If Russia invades Ukraine, a method or one other, Nord Stream 2 won’t transfer ahead.”
Despite excessive reluctance, the identical reluctance he confirmed in direction of delivery the Leopards, Scholz shut down Nord Stream 2 final 12 months because it was about to open. It was a transparent assertion of the give up of German sovereignty to U.S. coverage pursuits.
Pity the German nation that’s forgetting the teachings of its historical past.
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