What Ever Happened to the East German Armed Forces?

In the Die Hard sequel Die Hard With a Vengeance (that was film number three) a group of demobbed East German soldiers robbed the Federal Reserve Bank of New York--only to be stopped, of course, by John McClane and company. I suspect that comparatively few outside Germany have given much thought to the old East German army since that movie came out--at least, until this year, when there were plenty of headlines about Germany resupplying Ukrainian forces (and topping off the stocks of NATO forces using similar gear that also made contributions) out of its old stockpile.

For my part, I found myself wondering what happened to the army to which that stockpile had once belonged. As it happened the armed forces of the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic were officially reunified when the two countries were--but the situation was untenable in many ways.

One was the question of the sheer size of the resulting establishment. Together the two armed forces' (the nearly half million man West German forces, the 140,000-person East German military) came to over 600,000 personnel. Impossible to justify in the post-Cold War context (for lack of need, as well as the associated budgetary pressure and the difficulty of getting enough recruits), the figure was also far above the 500,000 person limit generally thought to have been set by the Paris Accords in the 1950s. And it was that much more above the still lower ceiling established by the 1990 Treaty on the Final Settlement With Respect to Germany with the Allied Big Four (the U.S., Britain, France and, of course, the Soviet Union)—which was set at 370,000 personnel in all, and 345,000 in the land and air forces, versus the 540,000 in the two countries' combined air and ground forces.

The result was that simply to keep under that limit some 240,000 personnel--with these having to include 190,000 ground and air force personnel, more than were in the entire pre-reunification GDR military establishment--had to be retired simply to meet the country's international obligations.

In considering the inevitable, deep cuts, one should remember that from a plain and simple efficiency perspective it made less sense to try operating two militaries rather than just one, or make the investments required to create a single integrated, standardized military out of the two as it was being massively cut back, than to dispense with one entirely--with, given its larger size and integration with Germany's society and government and with the NATO alliance of which reunified Germany remained a member, the Bundeswehr the natural candidate for retention.

This was reinforced by the lack of incentive to retain much from the GDR armed forces. If they were by some lights the best-regarded of the non-Soviet Warsaw Pact forces, they brought no distinct capabilities such as a very well-armed West Germany lacked, and in fact were, even by non-Soviet WP standards, mostly equipped with older materiel--the Motor Rifle divisions reliant on T-55s, the air force on MiG-21s (hardly the thing to impress an army with Leopard 2s or an air force with Tornados), while the navy was even more thoroughly a coastal force than its West German counterpart. (It did not possess a single submarine--in contrast with the two dozen high-quality subs the West German navy used--while the 800-1,000 ton Butzow-class vessels that made up almost all of its "frigate" force were better describable as corvettes, and not even very modern ones at that, completely lacking missile armament.) Moreover East Germany did not bring with it much in the way of the military-industrial base for supporting those forces, relying heavily on imports to keep that war machinery going--compounding a logistical problem worrisome even before one considered just how much disarray the East European countries would be in economically in the '90s. (And of course, the low opinion Western analysts tended to have of all things Soviet at the time, compounded in early 1991 by the Gulf War, did not improve the case for holding on to the Volksarmee.)

Unsurprisingly the GDR military was in the end shut down, with the vast majority of its personnel retired (particularly the older and more senior of them) and its equipment mostly sold off--often to East European states still using the same stuff (many to this day), sometimes by other countries further off (with the Indonesian navy buying 39 East German craft in a particularly big sale, advertised as a third of the old fleet). As the resupply of Ukraine and other East European states shows not everything found other takers, even three decades on, but at least where Germany's own active-duty forces were concerned the only really significant retention would seem to have been two dozen MiG-29s, which were pretty well regarded at the time, and even if opinion toward them has soured since ("fourth generation engineering with third generation hardware" as one critic called it), still usable--and having an intrinsic interest as "aggressor aircraft," the more in as the West had so little access to examples of them at the time.

Still, logical as the Federal Republic's shutdown of the Volksarmee was from the standpoint of practical utility, there seems plenty of room for questioning the Federal Republic's handling of its human element, which calls to mind the attitude the West German government showed East Germany in the civilian sphere. Just as it let the East German economy and social services system collapse, and privatized the associated assets without regard for the attitudes of the population, the Federal Republic (in complete contempt of the idea that reunification was a matter of two Germanies being made one) classed the veterans of the Volksarmee "veterans of foreign armed forces." Thus the time they put in did not count toward their pensions, which meant practical hardship for many (especially as East German veterans had an especially tough time in the poor post-reunification economy's job market), while other aspects of that status brought numerous other irritations--as with their denial of the right to use their old rank as a professional title, in spite of the fact that, as has been pointed out, Nazi-era veterans, including SS veterans, were not subject to such treatment. There was, eventually, redress of the issue, but it was fairly late in coming--and I would imagine this worse than shabby treatment of the country's veterans was yet another contributing factor to the much-remarked ill feeling many East Germans had about their status and situation within post-reunification Germany.