The covert US involvement in the rearmament of West Germany, 1948-1955

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Ulrich Herbert
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2017 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 379438738

The decision concerning a West German defense contribution was made in 1950 and led ultimately to the founding of the Bundeswehr and the Federal Republics admission to NATO in 1955. The research project presented here aims at investigating certain indications on a broad basis, which were discovered in the preliminary work for the project. According to these indications, US intelligence agencies, particularly the CIA, were, maybe decisively, involved in this decision. Scholarly literature has dealt with the implementation of the rearmament project against opposition in West Germany and its military realization as a intra-German matter. With regard to the US, mainly their diplomatic efforts on an international level have been analyzed. However, the project presented here assumes that the US government, particularly after the outbreak of the Korean War, had found itself in a state of putative defense against the communist powers and that it had come to the conclusion that it was heavily reliant upon the support of German troops to resist the threat of Soviet aggression in Europe. As a result, the United States intervened significantly in the domestic political affairs of West Germany in order to isolate the groups opposed to rearmament. With the help of pro-Western forces primarily among the former Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS officers, the support for a West German contribution to the Western defense effort was to be strengthened. Alongside secret diplomatic contacts and intelligence gathering activities, covert operations were one of the primary means of achieving this during the period 1948-1955. Such operations included propaganda campaigns to promote rearmament, the influencing of decision-makers, or the build-up of military and paramilitary structures. These activities are central to the planned research project, which will focus on three main actors: Firstly, the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), the CIAs covert operations branch; secondly, the Office of Special Operations (OSO), the espionage branch of the CIA; thirdly, the Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) of the US Army. Alongside these, however, it will also examine the influence exerted on covert operations by political institutions and those responsible for policy planning. By analyzing the covert efforts of the USA in the context of German rearmament, this research project aims to facilitate a new understanding of the prehistory of West German rearmament. Furthermore, it attempts to determine the role of intelligence agencies as tools of US foreign policy and the policy towards Germany during the early Cold War.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants