Watchman on the Rhine

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Under the grey, wintry skies of Paris. the foreign and defense ministers of the world's greatest politico-military alliance gather this week. At NATO's annual meeting, the agenda, as always, is simple: the defense of Europe. But this year there is a mood that old assumptions are outdated, old battle doctrines need revision, old relationships have shifted.

The urgency of fear that forged NATO's first army has long vanished; so has the invulnerability of the U.S. nuclear deterrent that so long buttressed NATO's troops from afar.

Within Europe itself, NATO's policymakers confront a historic new fact that would have seemed incredible at NATO's birth in 1949. Only 15 years after Hitler's death, a new German army has taken its place as the pivot of Western defense in Europe. With half a million French troops tied down in Algeria, the Germans are already the strongest European force on the Continent. In two or three years time, the West German Bundeswehr will match if not surpass in might all the other NATO armies in Europe combined, including the powerful U.S. Seventh Army.

Nuclear NATO. Only five years ago, the new German Bundeswehr accepted its first recruits. Today the Bundeswehr has some 280,000 men, and by the end of next year will be at a planned strength of 340,000. Eleven of the army's projected twelve divisions have been activated, and the twelfth will be next month. Seven have already been committed to NATO, and the rest will be next year.

The big question at NATO's Paris meeting--nuclear arms--is also at heart a German question. France's President Charles de Gaulle raised the whole subject by insisting on creating his own independent nuclear striking force. What if

West Germany raised the issue too? To head off such a rivalry, General Lauris Norstad, NATO's supreme commander in Europe, has proposed that the alliance should have its own nuclear force.

There are signs that President-elect Kennedy is thinking along Norstad's lines. In a book review written for the Satur day Re-view last September, Kennedy declared, "We must think through afresh the military mission of NATO." In the book before him, British Military Expert B. H. Liddell Hart argued that European nations perhaps should abandon atomic weapons and concentrate on conventional forces, leaving the U.S. the task of deterring Soviet atomic strength. Kennedy was convinced that European nations would likely prefer another solution: "Our partners may wish to create a NATO deterrent, supplementary to our own, under a NATO nuclear treaty." That is Norstad's pitch.

NATO would then become the world's fifth power. Inevitably that means giving nuclear weapons to Germany, the new NATO power in Europe. With the memory of the Nazi armies so fresh in the minds of many Europeans, this is no easy decision. Properly enough, the man who will argue Germany's case in Paris this week will be the man who has created West Germany's new army, Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss.

Brown Study. At 45, Franz Josef Strauss is a brawny, brawling bull of a Bavarian who symbolizes the unsettling vitality of the new Germany. Rough, ruthless and flamboyant, he bowls over obstacles in his way like a Tiger tank smashing through a Pomeranian pine forest. He is youthful, energetic, smart, unpredictable, corrosively realistic. Strauss is dedicated to NATO. But he is also proud of Germany's new strength. He demands that Germany get the confidence that dedication and strength deserve. Says Strauss: "Either we are admitted as equal partners in NATO or we are not. You cannot have it both ways."

Youngest and toughest member of Adenauer's Cabinet, Strauss is a man most Germans expect will surely rule Germany some day. He looks as German as a stein of beer. A hulking man (5 ft. n in., 190 Ibs.) with the powerful chest of a onetime cycling champion, he walks with the stiff, lurching gait of a Bavarian peasant. His eyes are small and blue, his head square and massive. But inside the square head of this butcher's son is a fantastically retentive brain that gobbles up details of technology and digests the lumpiest government problem.

His father, a staunch Catholic, kept a butcher shop in the Schwabing sector of Munich in the years Naziism got started there. More than once, young Franz Josef wrapped cold cuts for a poultry-breeding patron named Heinrich Himmler. Across from the butcher shop at No. 49 Schelling-strasse, Heinrich Hoffman kept a photographic shop where a frequent visitor was a pale, mustached man named Adolf Hitler. One day when Butcher Strauss caught his son--aged five--handing out pamphlets that some brown shirt had given him, he gave the boy a thrashing right there in the Schellingstrasse. "That," says Franz Josef Strauss, "was my first experience in politics."

Local Gods. The Schwabing sector was a kind of Munich equivalent of Paris' Latin Quarter. Munich's finest university was near by, abstract painters mingled with budding ballerinas, and professors were the local gods. Young Franz Josef might have gone right on cutting Weiss-null and Leberkds all his life if the parish priest had not observed how swiftly the lad caught the meaning of his Latin prayers and helped get him a scholarship at the crack Maximilian Gymnasium.

Franz Josef proved to be a standout student. He won highest prizes in Latin, somewhat offset by his predilection for rowdy pranks, which kept his grades in deportment low and his popularity with fellow students high. He developed a passion for bicycling, once entered a 75-mile cross-country bike race, and won it, earning himself the title of "South German Road Champion." Resisting pressure to join the Nazis, he enrolled himself and his new motorcycle in the innocuous National Socialist Motorized Corps, which was little more than a sports club. At Munich University, he ranked at the top in all examinations, seemed destined for teaching. Even after he was drafted in 1939 and assigned to an antiaircraft unit, he was forever getting leave to take more exams. His academic hopes were smashed when the war wrecked Germany, and even the manuscript of his unfinished thesis ("The Idea of World Empire in Justin's Historiae Philippicae") was burned in a raid that leveled No. 49 Schellingstrasse.

Prisoner of Freedom. Caught with his flak outfit in the Stalingrad encirclement, Strauss escaped but suffered frostbite so severe in both feet that he was declared unfit for combat. Ending the war as a lieutenant and an instructor at a flak school in southern Bavaria, Strauss was taken prisoner by the U.S. Third Army. It was the break of his life. The Americans made Strauss an interpreter. Then, finding that he was untainted by Nazi ties, they gave him a local-government job. Under American supervision, a new Catholic party was being formed in Bavaria. Joining forces with those who wanted to make it a modern conservative party to include Protestant merchants and Catho lic trade unionists as well as the peasant diehards, Strauss was named secretary-general of the new Christian Social Union.

The boy who wanted to teach had found his true vocation. In 1949 Strauss was elected to the first postwar Bundestag. At 33, he was the leader of Bavaria's delegation by virtue of his party post. "Anyone who wants a weapon in his hand," he said in one of his first speeches, "should have his hand cut off."

It was then Allied occupation policy not only to enforce total disarmament of a nation that had thrice in 70 years invaded its neighbors, but to re-educate Germans to hate militarism. The Com munist invasion of Korea changed all that. The danger that limited war could start in Europe, too, led U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson, in September 1950, to propose the rearmament of West Germans under NATO command. (The Communists had already organized their East Germans in paramilitary "police" units.)

In West Germany, Acheson's proposal met with sharp resistance. "Believe me," observed then-President Theodor Heuss, "at first it was not very easy to explain to the man in the street that it was his duty to do military service, after he had been told by propaganda that his previous military service had been bordering on criminal action." By this time, Franz Josef Strauss had observed that the man to get along with in German politics was Konrad Adenauer. When Adenauer, under Allied pressure, began talking up German rear mament, Strauss did too. It looked like a road to political power.

Crashing the Cabinet. In the face of heckling by table-banging Socialists, Adenauer once faltered. Strauss leaped to his feet, bellowed the opposition into silence as he argued that Russia was out to absorb Germany and that Germany's only hope lay with alliance with the West. "However much I like to see them talk to each other, I still would not like to see Dr. Adenauer and Dr. Schumacher [then Socialist leader] talk behind barbed wire in the Urals about what they should have done in the spring of 1952," he cried. Der Alte was so moved that he strode down to wring Strauss's hand. After Strauss delivered a big Bavarian majority in the 1953 elections, Adenauer offered him the Ministry for Family and Youth Affairs. "Me, a bachelor, in charge of family affairs?" countered Strauss, who was leading a pretty gay life in the wine-houses of Bonn. He settled for Minister Without Portfolio, a likelier steppingstone to the defense ministry.

Jeered Ostrich. It took him three years to snatch the defense job away from Theodor Blank, the mild-mannered antimilitarist to whom Adenauer had given it. Strauss knew all about the art of war in military theory and political practice. Thereafter, Strauss was at the center of all fights in the Bundestag, and stenographers complained that he spoke half again as fast as any other debater.

The Socialists jeered at his name, which means "ostrich" in German. Strauss, perhaps the best extempore speaker in the country, gave back in kind. Once he flung out the suggestion that Germany might some day consider "the Austrian solution," i.e., neutrality. In the outcry that followed, Strauss explained that for the foreseeable future Germany must side with NATO. Nonetheless it was a hint, after the Blank era of yes-sirring the West, that under Strauss Germany's defense policies would be tailored to Germany's interests. In Cabinet meetings, he badgered Blank relentlessly, once making Adenauer so angry that he reportedly told Strauss afterward: "You'll never get the defense ministry, Herr Strauss. You'll never get it."

To keep him occupied, Adenauer made him Minister of Atomic Affairs. Typically, Strauss plunged into the job with zeal, read so deeply in scientific texts that after a conference with him a Nobel prizewinner remarked: "There were moments when I wasn't sure who had studied more chemistry, he or I." From his study he acquired a conviction that the new forces must have nuclear weapons, arguing that otherwise the German soldier would fight at a suicidal disadvantage.

In late 1956 Adenauer grudgingly decided that Strauss was ready for the job and made him, at 41, Minister of Defense, moving Blank to Labor.

More Equal. From the instant he took over, Strauss made clear that West Germany should be treated as an equal by its NATO partners, and not as an ex-sinner on probation. The Germans will never agree to be "foot soldiers to the American atomic knights," he proclaimed. He got Germans appointed to top NATO commands; currently, German General Hans Speidel is commander of all allied ground forces in Central Europe. Original NATO doctrine called for establishment of the main line of NATO defense at the Rhine in case of Communist attack, thus abandoning most of West Germany without a fight; Strauss got the doctrine changed in favor of a fighting defense of all West German soil. To the shocked amazement of other NATO ministers, he even used beerhall language at the conference table, arguing with SHAPE Commander Norstad. Finding that the Allies had already preempted the good supply and training spots in Germany, he asked them to give some of their own land for his Bundeswehr. It was hardly the sort of request that French and British politicians leap to fulfill. When answers dragged, Strauss, with typical indifference to political considerations, began dickering for supply and training areas in Franco Spain. A spectacular explosion followed (TIME, March 7), but Strauss got the results he wanted. The French let 2,500 Germans train in Champagne, the Italians opened Sardinian airdromes to the Luftwaffe, and the British themselves are now quietly arranging for the Bundeswehr to store gear somewhere behind the white cliffs of Dover.

Democratic Boots. At home, Strauss had to combat a deep-seated antipathy to anything that smacked of militarism. Invited to join the fight against the new threat from the east, the first reaction of German youth was "Ohne mich" (Without me). Soldiers in uniform were booed in public places, and the Socialist opposition attacked every defense measure as a "provocation" to the Russians, and a blow to the negotiations for reunification.

The psychological problems of creating the new German army were unique. Though it was to be a democratic army, its first officers obviously had to be veterans of the old Wehrmacht, nearly all of whom had been willing Nazi servants. Strauss set up a special "Inner Leadership" school in Koblenz where the officers were shown movies of Nazi atrocities, given handbooks on democratic treatment of subordinates. The government provided elaborate legal safeguards for the new soldier's rights and easily accessible channels through which he could air his citizen gripes. A West German soldier is told: "A command must not be followed if thereby a crime or offense might be committed." Last year the Bundeswehr's top officer, General Adolf Heusinger (whose title, with the characteristic euphemism of the new German army, is Inspector General rather than Chief of Staff), publicly praised the "Christian-humanist sense of responsibility" of the officers who joined the wartime 1944 anti-Hitler plot and said: "Their spirit and their attitude are our models." As every German soldier knows, Heusinger was a general staff officer briefing Hitler when the conspirators' bomb exploded in 1944, was wounded by the explosion.

To clear up any doubts about civilian supremacy in the new order, Strauss himself sacked one old-line general last year for refusing to wait for him in his anteroom. At a widely publicized affair, Strauss showed off his new uniforms, almost identical with what the army and Luftwaffe wore in World War II. But the jack -boots were different. "Gentlemen," grinned Strauss, "these boots are fitted with democratic civilian rubber soles."

Interlocking System. In four years at the Defense Ministry, Franz Josef Strauss has organized the fastest-growing military force in Europe. From the foggy shorelines of Flensburg on the Baltic north to Mittenwald on the craggy shoulders of the Bavarian Alps, the old sounds can be heard throughout the day and much of the night, stirring nightmares of the past and mixed feelings about the future. The sounds are the bark of parade-ground sergeants, the whine of fighter planes, the far-trailing echo of strong young voices singing When the Soldiers March Through Town as a paratroop company swings along Franconian roads.

But Germany's new forces are meshed with NATO more thoroughly than any other nation's. Every unit is or will soon be committed to NATO, under the overall command of the U.S.'s General Lauris Norstad. Even in the event of an East German uprising against their Communist rulers, Strauss has said, "There will be no military West German reaction. Our troops are NATO troops." About two-thirds of all Bundeswehr supplies and ammunition are to be stored in other NATO countries. All major weapons systems are closely interlocked with those of other NATO countries. Strauss has not encouraged a new armaments industry, has placed orders for nothing larger than 40-mm. guns in Germany itself. Germany gets most of its weapons from its allies, buys more arms abroad (about $3.5 billion worth so far) than any other country in the world. In all, Germany is now spending about $2.5 billion a year on its armed forces--3^% of gross national product compared with 10% for the U.S.

Army. Present strength is 172,000, the 1961 target 210,000 to 220,000. The seven German divisions in NATO, says Strauss, are intermeshed "like a Zipper" along the theoretical line of battle with British, Dutch, American and French divisions. Though the German army already has 3,000 U.S.-built tanks, Strauss plans to replace them with a lighter, faster, lower model to be produced jointly with the Italians and French. The army's other key vehicle, in conformity with the German World War II doctrine that infantrymen should ride straight into combat, is an armored personnel carrier (powered by a British engine, and using Swiss and French components) that can charge through machine-gun fire at 30 miles an hour--and has a metal roof that can be rolled up to fend off atomic fallout.

Last year 6,000 German troops, joining U.S. Seventh Army veterans in "Winter-shield" maneuvers along the Danube, put on a dazzling show. In one swift swoop, a German armored unit, theoretically knocked out a battalion of Seventh Army tankers and infantrymen.

Navy. Mainly volunteer, the navy has already reached planned strength of 25,000 and amassed 185 small patrol ships to help keep the Russian fleet boxed up in the Baltic. Strauss has held off building the destroyers that were supposed to lead his navy, and now has talked the German government into demanding that the 3,000-ton ceiling on the size of German destroyers be raised to 5.000 tons. He wants warships big enough to mount the latest A. A. rockets -- and the 1,500-mile Polaris. His projected submarine force: 24 to 36 small coastal subs, designed to help block the Baltic at the Skagerrak Straits in case of war.

Luftwaffe. Of a scheduled 100,000 men, the air force now has about 64,000, nearly all volunteers. Under command of Lieut. General Josef Kammhuber, boss of all German night fighters in World War II, the Luftwaffe is already airborne and climbing fast. So far, five Luftwaffe wings are flying F-86s and F-845 for NATO. After keeping the French on tenterhooks for two years over a possible order for their Mirage III fighter, Strauss plumped last year for the U.S.-built F-IO4 as the Luftwaffe's main-line plane. The first trainer models have already been delivered, and the first 66 operational types are due from California in April. The revitalized German aircraft industry is building 210 F-1045 under license for 1961 and 1962 delivery, and a German-Belgian-Dutch consortium will supply another 364. All told, the order will cost the Bundeswehr a billion dollars, $175 million of which will be spent in the U.S.

O Divine Simplicity. The rambunctious Defense Minister has settled down a bit since 1957, when he married a brewer's attractive daughter, a summa cum laude graduate of the same Munich school where Strauss was primus (top) of his class. They have a ig-month-old son named Max Josef, and Strauss has already bought the boy an electric train and, of course, made himself an expert on electric trains. He still manages to knock back heroic quantities of Sekt (German champagne), may sit up all hours drinking beer and arguing furiously with newsmen or fellow politicians. He reads three to four books a week: currently, besides Robert Sherwood's Roosevelt and Hopkins, he is devouring a heap of volumes on a new interest, Africa. He has not lost his lust for Latin. On an indifferently argued staff paper he scribbles: "0 sancta sim-plicitas."

A typical day for Strauss, when he is not off at NATO meetings, inspecting bases or addressing political rallies, begins at 7:30. He has breakfast (tea, dark bread with butter and white cheese) with his wife Marianne and the baby at his villa above the Rhine. By the time his black BMW delivers him at the office at 8:45, his staff has already clipped the news from 140 German and foreign newspapers. Strauss plows through it all. Working at top speed on a schedule prepared 14 days in advance, he fires machine-gun orders at subordinates, sees people, attends meetings, dashes off to the Bundestag. He knocks off at 7:30 or 8, when he usually goes out with his wife to an official dinner.

Ear to the Future. U.S. officials find Strauss good to work with. He is the only Minister Adenauer allows to make major policy statements in the Bundestag without horning in to amplify or correct. Yet many people feel that they cannot trust Strauss. His hell-for-leather ways, his quick temper and his unmistakable relish for power brush many Germans, and others, the wrong way. "He is his own worst enemy," says an old friend. Typically, he supports Economics Minister Ludwig Erhard, 63, as Adenauer's successor, though he knows that Erhard lacks both health and political savvy to hang on for more than one term. Then it would be his turn. Meanwhile, there are signs that he wants to be Foreign Minister, and is beginning to work on Foreign Minister Heinrich von Brentano the way he did on Blank.

Whatever the NATO council may decide, Strauss already has the German army in training for nuclear war, using weapons with dummy warheads. The German army has four battalions equipped with Honest Johns, which can fire a nuclear charge 20 miles, and by late next year will have three more equipped with the U.S.'s new Sergeant, a missile with a loo-mile range. The nuclear warheads for these missiles are kept near by, but they do not belong to the Germans. They belong to the U.S. and are kept in the custody of U.S. representatives, to be placed in the German missiles if and when the U.S. authorizes General Norstad to order their use by NATO forces.

Fight for Volkswagen? This week, in an obviously interim gesture, the Eisenhower Administration is expected to offer five or six Polaris submarines to NATO. But these are deep-sea deterrents and Strauss wants tactical nuclear weapons that are on German ground and in hand. The Germans say such nuclear weapons would be needed, for instance, in the event of a limited war with the East Germans, in which the U.S. might hesitate about using the atom because the Russians were not directly involved. Germany's retired Vice Admiral Hellmuth Heye, now an Adenauer deputy on the Bundestag's defense committee, last week cited a hypothetical case in which only a NATO deterrent might work: "Suppose the Communists organized rioting at the Volkswagen works, which is only ten miles from the Soviet zone. Suppose the Russians then moved in and occupied the plant. Suppose they announced they were acting only to preserve order, had no intention of advancing farther, and would leave as soon as 'workers' rights' had been assured. Would the U.S. use atomic weapons to save the Volkswagen plant?" Or, more bluntly, would the U.S. be willing to risk nuclear retaliation on its cities for the sake of a few acres of German soil?

Under Norstad's plan, the U.S. would turn over to a NATO "pool" certain quantities of the nuclear weapons now stockpiled by U.S. forces in Europe. The weapons would remain in the custody of U.S. representatives, who would teach the Germans and other NATO partners the technique of their use in combat. But when the time for combat came, the U.S. custodians would obey NATO's order.

Who would give that order? Would there be, as Norway's Finn Moe has already asked, 15 fingers on the trigger? No, says Strauss. Decision to shoot a missile in such cases should rest with a "majority" of NATO members. Yet just because it would be a limited war, he argues, there would be time for a decision by a committee--and this decision should be possible by Europeans alone.

The Counterweight. If Strauss has fixed his sights on Germany's own national interests, he argues those interests in terms of total commitment to the West.

Says he: "Because of the invasion of Russia into the heart of Europe, establishing a bloc stretching from the Pacific to the Elbe, Germany's policy no longer has an autonomous position; it is a function of European policy. But even a united Europe can no longer be a third power between East and West; the future of Europe as a third power is gone before it began. The necessary counterweight can be achieved only by an Atlantic community with two strong components--North America and Europe."

Unlike Adenauer, who spoke for a Germany on probation, Strauss speaks for a Germany that feels its credentials are established, that demands: If the Allies need and ask for Germany's new strength for their defense, then they must give their full confidence. More than any man, Strauss embodies both the strength Germany can contribute to the free world--and the uneasiness that strength still stirs by its very impressiveness.

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