West Germany's New Man of Iron
HOTTELET, RICHARD C.
Defense Minister Franz-Josef Strauss may one day succeed Chancellor Konrad Adenauer WEST GERMANY'S NEW MAN OF IRON By Richard C. Hottelet WEST GERMANY today stands as a firebreak between...
...Strausss stature has increased steadily...
...As a fighter, Strauss is building a German army that will stand its ground...
...And, when he accompanied Chancellor Adenauer to Paris for the NATO summit meeting last December, he pressed the demand for the bread-and-butter necessities of present defense: standardization of weapons, integration of the air-warning system and accelerated combined research programs...
...Whoever succeeds him will have absorbed the ideas of other times and places and will have been shaped by different forces...
...When the U. S. Seventh Army drove into Bavaria in 1945, Lieutenant Strauss was adjutant of an anti-aircraft artillery school in the village of Schongau...
...Strauss wants, instead, a conscript army with a broad base in the people and embodying, on a tactical scale, the sword and shield principle of NATO's overall defense...
...She had to join the free world in the common defense...
...Strauss served on the Russian front and returned from Stalingrad with nothing worse than frostbite...
...The powerful Social Democrats ridiculed Adenauer for bringing Germany into the Western camp and hinted at civil disobedience if he should insist on raising a German army...
...In the election campaign last year, few people thought that any man responsible for German rearmament could be a political asset...
...Later a Nobel Prize winner left a conference with the remark: "There were moments when I wasn't sure who had studied more chemistry, he or I." Franz-Josef Strauss was born in Munich on September 6, 1915...
...Yet his intelligence impressed his elementary-school teachers and they persuaded his father to let him continue his training...
...By the time he broke through the upper crust of national politics, his skill at making his way in the crowd had his friends referring to him as a "genius with elbows...
...Strauss has always known his own worth...
...From this he launched his political career...
...Also, Germany had been demilitarized...
...He declared that "an officer does not have debts"—which may have been valid in the old days, but should hardly disqualify the enterprising officer who borrowed money to go into business after World War II...
...The Minister of Defense declares, however, that, although Germany will not make atomic or strategic weapons, she must possess the most modern and most effective arms, and he has gone ahead with his plan to equip his army with the most powerful tactical weapons...
...As his arguments struck home, one by one, there was an awareness on the Government benches and in the press gallery that a new man, young and strong, had made his entrance on the international scene...
...Worse, German public opinion was undecided over whether West Germany ought to rearm at all, what kind of force was needed, and how it ought to be raised...
...Perhaps no one is more important to Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization than Strauss...
...When he took over the Ministry of Defense two years ago, he inherited utter confusion...
...The first unit of six Matador guided missiles has been purchased and crews are being trained in the United States...
...Strauss and his contemporaries in the other parties offer a preview of the Germany after Adenauer...
...But Strauss fought back and, for the first time, his party swept every election district in his native Bavaria...
...To get a draft law passed, the Government cut the period of military service to 12 months...
...Strauss ridicules this proposal as suicidal in war, in which an isolated Germany would face the combined power of the Soviet bloc, and dangerous in peace, in which a professional army could repeat the sinister pattern of the old Reichswehr...
...The West German Bundestag has already endorsed the principle of using them with atomic warheads in case of necessity, although these warheads would remain in U. S. custody until NATO gave the order to fire...
...Behind them is the Soviet military machine and Soviet political expansion relentlessly probing every weakness in the Western front...
...Strategically, it is the most important sector of the NATO defenses...
...Immediately behind them, across a historical gap of 12 years, stands Strauss at the head of the younger, post-Hitler generation...
...For the new Army, the trimmings and trappings, precision marching and Prussian punctilio have been dispensable to Strauss—a waste of time in an age of war fought either with apocalyptic weapons or by highly trained teams...
...his staff calls him "Der Boss" and he enjoys the role...
...Germany was dependent for life and freedom on membership in the Western community...
...There was little prospect of the boy growing up to be more than the next owner of the family store...
...No one has yet come up with proof that there is truth in any of this...
...About a third of the original draftees have volunteered to serve 18 months, and somewhat more of the new group enrolled last October have done the same...
...The matter reached a crisis one black day in February 1952...
...Under his predecessor, the military establishment had gotten out of hand...
...Communists from East Germany tried to break up his meetings...
...Strauss is one cabinet member whom Chancellor Adenauer's withering glance does not shut up...
...In molding a fighting force, he has steered his course between the reformers who idealized the citizen-soldier and the professional reactionaries who wanted an army of blood and iron...
...Defense Minister Franz-Josef Strauss may one day succeed Chancellor Konrad Adenauer WEST GERMANY'S NEW MAN OF IRON By Richard C. Hottelet WEST GERMANY today stands as a firebreak between Western Europe and Soviet territory...
...Politics are not gentle there and Strauss, his temperament in complete harmony with his surroundings, learned to play the political game both successfully and hard...
...West Germany is literally the front line along 600 miles of Iron Curtain in the center of Europe...
...The 43-year-old Minister of Defense is a bull of a man, carrying his 200 pounds as though he were waiting to charge...
...We must remember the role he played in shaping Adenauer's defense policy...
...Conscription was generally unpopular...
...He also must reckon with the political opposition...
...Strauss, the man behind the new German army, has more than his share of both...
...As the Chancellor faced shrieking critics in the Bundestag, he grew nervous and faltered...
...The Socialists want a small, professional army, not allied with the West, geared in size to the military strength of Germany's immediate eastern neighbors...
...Next door, in Communist East Germany, stand 400,000 Soviet troops, armed to the teeth and ready to jump...
...During the campaign, the opposition did everything it could to focus resentment on Strauss...
...He could afford to: He represented the political strength of Bavaria...
...The would-be boss of the Socialist party, Herbert Wehner, recently called Strauss the "Berserker...
...As a statesman, he insists that this army shall be democratic...
...This Army, the Bundeswehr, is comprised of mobile shield forces providing a defense in depth, and a territorial army consisting of regular soldiers who relieve the shield forces of such tasks as guarding military installations, transport and communications...
...But he nettles quickly, too...
...Strauss, without hesitation, plunged his square frame down in the front rank of the "regular ministers...
...For all his brawny behavior, Strauss manages to find some hours each night for book reading...
...Basically the contest between Strauss and the generals is, as one writer put it, a struggle between the men with chests full of medals and men in the gray flannel suits over who is going to run the new army...
...Next in line, as things stand, are men like Foreign Minister Heinrich von Brentano or Production Minister Ludwig Erhard, intellectually and morally formed, like the Chancellor, in the pre-Hitler period...
...He has carried on running battles with the Old Man and has exacted his price from him...
...But he would like to salvage what he can of the wholesome tradition in Germany's military past...
...When he became Minister for Atomic Affairs, before his present job, Strauss holed up for three weeks with science textbooks...
...Now Strauss is molding the new German Army, the Bundeswehr, into permanent shape...
...He is a colossal worker...
...Below-the-belt criticism from his enemies causes him to strike back with the sharpest tongue and the quickest mind in German politics...
...His tastes range wide, but he concentrates on the field in which he finds himself...
...most of the new German soldiers would be drawn from the postwar generation which had been taught to despise military life and to abhor military training...
...Strauss hit on the idea of calling up, in the first batch of 10,000, only those draftees who volunteered for service...
...The Army's former chief of personnel, for example, a former General Staff officer, believes in the old cast-iron code of seniority, proficiency and conformity...
...Adenauer, now 82, will not be succeeded by another like himself any more than Churchill was replaced by his own image...
...Bavaria, after all, was an independent kingdom until 1918, with its own ruling dynasty and its own army...
...The expedient worked, and the timetable for expanding the ground forces set by Strauss two years ago has been followed...
...Only a nation which is willing to defend itself will endure...
...First-hand report has it that he will say: "Let me finish, Herr Chancellor...
...His father owned a small butcher shop, and the Roman Catholic family was not active politically...
...More will follow...
...Strauss plunged at once into counterattack, his shock of brown hair bobbing up and down as he hurled his argument at the opposition...
...Customs as distinctive as their leather shorts color the Bavarians' manners and speech...
...Berserkers in Norse tradition were wild warriors who in the frenzy of battle howled like wolves or growled like bears...
...Since he took office in October, 1956, he has created within the NATO framework seven Army divisions, the beginnings of a coastal Richard C. Hottelet recently returned from almost a decade as chief CBS correspondent in West Germany...
...His enemies, right and left, hate him with a purple passion...
...Other critics assert that Strauss is power-mad and ruthless, and that it would mean the certain end of German democracy should he become Chancellor...
...A collision with Strauss was inevitable, and late last year Strauss transferred this general to a field command...
...And as a politician he hopes and intends that the success of his work will one day make him Chancellor of Germany...
...Strauss sees in this system of national defense a psychological weapon also against defeatism and appeasement...
...Bavarians are a rough-hewn people who rejoice in asserting their knobby independence...
...His round face under a mop of brown hair breaks easily into a broad grin...
...In 1953, when he was sworn in as a minister without portfolio—generally low man on a Government totem pole—the three other ministers without portfolio modestly took their seats in the second row of the government bench...
...Afterward, he studied at the University of Munich until he was drafted in Hitler's Wehrmacht...
...In addition there are Civil Defense Services under the administration of the Ministry of Interior...
...navy and a tactical air force...
...His fluent English secured him an administrative job with occupation troops...
...He graduated from high school with the best marks given in all of Bavaria in 25 years...
...It took him just eight years to rise from a military government clerk to Adenauer's youngest cabinet member...
...Defense in Central Europe is more than an arrangement of divisions or rockets...
...Many Germans, fearing Soviet reprisals, believe that the atom and the rocket in NATO's arsenal should not he based on German soil...
...NATO officers tore their hair at the thought of manning the front line in Germany with short-term conscripts...
...In return, Strauss has been absolutely loyal to the fundamentals of Adenauer's policy...
...Any deal with Moscow was out of the question...
...That it is also a strong one is a tribute to the driving energy and persuasive talents of Franz-Josef Strauss, German Minister of Defense...
...He is already a power in West Germany and is the leading figure of the younger generation that will move in when the Adenauer era ends...
...So far, Strauss has put his strength to good cause...
...It went roughly like this: The Soviet policy of expansion menaced Germany's security...
...It is primarily a matter of courage and confidence...
...When the Russians last fall launched their long-range missile, Strauss scoffed at what he called the "rocket psychosis" and urged the West not to lose its sense of realism...
Vol. 41 • September 1958 • No. 33
