Achtung

Five years ago the Allied conquerors of Germany jointly abolished "all German land, naval and air forces . . . the General Staff, the officers' corps, reserve corps, military schools . . . other military and quasi-military organizations." The world cheered and said: "Never again."

Last week, confronted with an enemy who had already recruited a German army of his own, and encouraged, though with some misgivings, by the Western Allies, West Germany took the first steps to raise a new Wehrmacht. It tell to a sober, pale German official named Theodor Blank to broadcast the details of a new 300,000-to 400,000-man German military machine with:

P: Twelve ground divisions of 12,500 men each--six motorized infantry, three heavy Panzer and three light Panzer divisions.

P:An air force of 75,000 men and 1,000 to 1,500 modern planes.

P: "A coastal defense force"--i.e., navy--of unpretentious strength.

P:A selective service program to draft about 300,000 young Germans, 19 through 21, for 18-month military service.

P: An initial hard-core cadre of 60,000 volunteers solicited from among veteran officers and noncoms of the World War II Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe.

As anonymous as his name, Blank has been working over his blueprint for more than a year. No military man himself (he was a conscript in World War II), Blank is a trade union official, a wheel horse in Chancellor Konrad Adenauer's Christian Democratic Party. He declares himself opposed to reviving a German military caste, but willing to assemble an army which will exist only inside the six-nation European Army. On this point, most Westerners accept his and Adenauer's sincerity.

To build the new German army, Blank has picked two generals who fought hard and well against the Allies:

MAJOR GENERAL ADOLF HEUSINGER, 55, wartime chief of operations for the General Staff. He served on the General Staff for 22 years in all, spent part of his forced postwar retirement writing a book of memoirs which dealt mainly with the German officer's problem of carrying out orders in which he did not believe.

MAJOR GENERAL HANS SPEIDEL, also 55, who was chief of staff to Field Marshal Rommel in France, later imprisoned for complicity in the 1944 bomb plot against Hitler, and liberated by the French army. A straight-backed man who thinks like a general but looks like a professor (after the war he taught history at Tuebingen University), Speidel is the big military brain of revived West Germany. In his postwar memoirs (Invasion 1944), he showed a familiar German military rationalization--that the army would have won if it had not been stabbed in the back (in this case by Hitler). But Speidel, an easy, convincing debater and brilliant strategist, admires the French, and has proved to be one of the most persuasive champions of the European Army idea.

Before a German army can march again, it must be approved by the Bonn government (many Germans also have misgivings), and by the other partners in the proposed European Army--France, Italy and Benelux. To win their approval, Blank is making sure that on the new German army rolls there will be none of the old familiar names--Guderian, Kesselring, von Rundstedt, Mannstein. "This army," said a retired German officer, "will not be commanded by anyone you have read about in the papers."

The German soldier will not have German uniform, but the same uniform issued to all the other troops of the European Army. Also, promised Blank, there will be no more goose step.

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