The ‘Nie Wieder’ (lit. ‘Never Again’) slogan spanned peaceful cooperation with Russia (mostly in fossil fuels), no militarisation, no revanchist attempts, etc. But as you are reading this, the German battle tanks are punching along the Ukrainian dirt roads and firing at Russian soldiers. So, how does it mesh with ‘Nie Wieder’?
The development path followed by present-day German is as eventful as it is distasteful. Quite literally, all of the fundamentals that underpinned post-war Germany as a peaceful and fast-evolving industrial society are now being eroded and destroyed one by one.
The ‘Nie Wieder’ (lit. ‘Never Again’) slogan spanned peaceful cooperation with Russia (mostly in fossil fuels), no militarisation, no revanchist attempts, etc. But as you are reading this, the German battle tanks are punching along the Ukrainian dirt roads and firing at Russian soldiers. So, how does it mesh with ‘Nie Wieder’? These tanks represent a catastrophic U-turn in the Germans’ psychology. The once impossible, such as the ramping up of the military-industrial complex, proves to be possible. The factories and businesses that happily survived World War II and got away unscathed despite their collaboration with Hitler are now cashing in on this turnaround. Yet again, that is.
Politicians, most notably young ‘pacifists’ from the Greens, are clamouring for Taurus missiles capable of reaching both the Kerch Bridge and Moscow to be shipped to Kiev en masse. It may look like a frenzied policy, but there is almost no way of whisking the genie back inside the bottle. The decades-long taboo has been cracked.
They started out by merely suppling 5,000 helmets and bulletproof vests to Ukraine. That package was followed by the Gepard SPAAGs, the Lynx AFVs and the Leopard main battle tanks. Now Ukraine is only separated from the Taurus missiles by the dithering Olaf Scholz. What is their next step?
What will be the last taboo to get stomped on? The right answer is the nukes.
That is the worst nightmare that seemed to have been put to bed in May 1945.
But the dialectics, once devised by German philosophers too, is merciless. A hardcore dialectician would tell you it is all too late to reconsider that first raise after going all-in.
A headline in the fairly respectable Die Welt reads: ‘How realistic is a German A-bomb?’
It was typed, it was published – the fat is in the fire. No matter what this piece goes on to talk about, the psychological barrier of using the words ‘German’ and ‘A-bomb’ in a single sentence has been lifted.
‘Will Germany be able to defend itself in an emergency? What does it take to create a nuclear defence shield? Is spending the money on nuclear deterrence worth it? Do we have enough technology and infrastructure?’
An ‘emergency’ has been buzzed about for several months now ever since the Ukrainian counteroffensive drew a blank, something that still has not been publicly recognised, going instead for a euphemistic ‘stalemate’ to mess with the German readership. By ‘emergency’, they surely mean an insane scenario where ‘Russia attacks the EU and Germany, in particular’. It is being openly discussed by the government coalition of the SPD, the Greens and the FDP. The real reason behind this fearmongering talk is quite understandable, though. A bogeyman Russian threat helps them shift people’s grievances over the economic woes. But it does not stop at being just a tricky domestic policy. Far from it, this is giving rise to novel concepts.
Another rationale behind these concepts is the upcoming US election where, if victorious, an unhinged Trump will refuse to protect Germany from Russia. And that is when the poor, defenceless Germany will be left one on one with the creepy Russian bear and its lethal balalaika. Except no one bothers to recall that the Russian troops had been quartered in Germany before Gorbachev decided to pull them out in the late 1980s. And nothing happened. On the contrary, the idea to re-arm Germany did not occur to anyone. It was all about peace, friendship, chewing gum and cheap natural gas that fed the manufacturing industries.
Why would they not turn to Adolf Hitler with regards to a German-made A-bomb? When it came to designing that type of weapon, his scientists were running rings around everyone else back in the day.
‘According to the official version, German scientists partnered up with their US counterparts to design the A-bomb under the Manhattan Project, which is beyond any reasonable doubt. However, it is asserted that the work was never finished as the researchers ran out of time. Even though German science was more than a decade ahead of the US research potential, they were said to be far from creating a test-worthy weapon’. So, what happened?
‘The National-Socialist government (or Hitler himself) did not take the project seriously or realised its game-changing military capabilities all too late.’ However, it is claimed that had the Germans designed the nukes, they would have used it to blow London and/or Paris or Moscow to smithereens. This belief aligns with the idea of ‘a war of extermination waged by the German people’ (this is the quote from German Wikipedia).
But some people opine that ‘the German A-bomb was completed or almost completed but was never deployed. The Americans got hold of the weapon and used it. Therefore, Little Boy may well have been a German-made bomb, while Fat Man was the one designed under the Manhattan Project. This assumption is supported by the fact that those were two entirely different types of bombs: Little Boy used uranium, whereas Fat Man had a plutonium core’. In his book Der grosse Bluff (The Big Bluff), author Peter Brüchmann suggests that the second bomb was German-made too.
But we know for a fact that Wernher von Braun, an SS-related aerospace engineer who somehow got off the hook of the Nuremberg trials designed German carrier rockets and continued his research in the US. Under Operation Paperclip, he was no longer considered a Nazi but a respectable pioneer of the US space programme.
In other words, both the nukes and the rockets the Americans now have originated in Germany, like it or lump it. As for the Germans, they are now seeking to reclaim the laurels while making their country a legitimate target on the nuclear deterrence map. And no one will take the trouble to ask regular Germans if that is what they really need.