The German army and its ghosts

LeMonde

2 days ago

When he attended the commemorations of the Allied landing in Normandy on June 6, 2024, Brigadier General Andreas Steinhaus felt "something special, as a German soldier, to be invited to that place." He has always considered himself part of the Allies. Born in 1968 in West Germany, he celebrated D-Day as a child with the feeling of being "on the right side." Then he joined the army at 19 to "defend freedom," before fighting in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq and Sudan alongside other Europeans and Americans.
On June 5, 2024, however, he took the time to visit the grave of his great-uncle, who had served in the Wehrmacht, the Nazi Germany forces. He is buried a few kilometers from the coast in the German cemetery at La Cambe, alongside 21,000 soldiers of the Third Reich killed during the Battle of Normandy. "One day, I was at his grave, the next, I was with the American soldiers," he recounted from his office in Saarlouis, a town in Saarland, where his parachute brigade is stationed. "The notion of homeland is not geographical," he said, highlighting the complexity of the history he inherited.
Stories like his are common in the Bundeswehr, the name of the army in Germany. There are those whose relatives served in the Wehrmacht – "the other army," as one of them called it. Others had parents in the East German army before being integrated overnight into the Bundeswehr when reunification took place in 1990 and the Nationale Volksarmee (East Germany's armed forces) was dissolved. Some of their ancestors successively wore the uniform under the German Empire, the Weimar Republic and then the Third Reich.