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\"Rhein-Main AB [air base] has been the 'Gateway to Europe' since the mid 1940's...Most importantly, it served as the major airfield supporting the movement of all US forces to and from continental Europe...The decision to close Rhein-Main AB caused a need to replicate its essential mobility capability at other places in the European En Route System. Although many locations are being enhanced, major construction projects are being undertaken in southern Germany at Ramstein AB and Spangdahlem AB.\" (Mobility Forum) Features of the construction projects are noted.

Antisemitism in the German Military Community and the Jewish Response, 1914–1938 explores how German World War I veterans from different social and political backgrounds contributed to antisemitic politics during the Weimar Republic. The book compares how the military, right-wing veterans, and Jewish veterans chose to remember their war experiences and translate these memories into a political reality in the postwar world. Antisemitism addresses several neglected issues. First, there is relatively little scholarship discussing antisemitism in the imperial German army and the impact former imperial officers had on the antisemitic predilections of veteran associations. This subject deserves attention given that veteran politics during the Weimar Republic were of tremendous significance to the collapse of democracy and the rise of National Socialism, and that the primary architects of the Third Reich and the “Final Solution” were either World War I veterans or had been members of paramilitary organizations in the interwar period. The second issue addressed is how veterans influenced the definition of “Aryan” identity, or how race came to be perceived through the prism of war and political violence. Since German Jews had to fight both accusations of shirking military service and the perception of the “Jew” as effeminate, the manner in which these veterans tried to reforge Jewish identity and their relationship with their former comrades is an extraordinarily important issue. The third issue concerns situational antisemitism, or the process by which an organization expressed an opinion or policy concerning Jews in response to internal dissension and external influences.

No one has ever posed a satisfactory explanation for the extreme inhumanity of the Holocaust. What enabled millions of Germans to perpetrate or condone the murder of the Jews? In this illuminating book, Thomas Kühne offers a provocative answer. In addition to the hatred of Jews or coercion that created a genocidal society, he contends, the desire for a united \"people's community\" made Germans conform and join together in mass crime. Exploring private letters, diaries, memoirs, secret reports, trial records, and other documents, the author shows how the Nazis used such common human needs as community, belonging, and solidarity to forge a nation conducting the worst crime in history.

This study examines the force of tradition in conservative German visual culture, exploring thematic continuities in the post-conflict representation of battlefield identities from the Franco-Prussian War in 1870-71 to the demise of the Weimar Republic in 1933. Using over 40 representative images sampled from both high and popular culture, Paul Fox discusses complex and interdependent visual responses to a wide spectrum of historical events, spanning world war, regional conflict, internal security operations, and border skirmishes. The book demonstrates how all the artists, illustrators and photographers whose work is addressed here were motivated to affirm German moral superiority on the battlefield. They produced images that advanced dominant notions of how the ideal German man should behave when at war – even when the outcome was defeat. Their construction of an imagined martial masculinity based on aggressive moral superiority became so deeply rooted in German culture that it eventually provided the basis for a programmatic imagining of how Germany might again recover its standing as a great military power in Central Europe in the wake of defeat in 1918. The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871-1933 is an important volume for any historian interested cultural history, the representation of armed conflict in European culture, the history of modern Germany, the Franco-Prussian War, and the First World War.

This study links two fundamental political structures of the Cold War era, the transatlantic security system and the international monetary system. Central to this issue is a problem which soured relations between the Federal Republic and its allies from the 1950s to the 1970s: who was to bear the enormous cost of British and American troops in Germany? Both Washington and London identified this cost as a major reason for the decline of their currencies, whereas Germany reluctantly paid and traded 'Money for Security'; a fundamental pattern of its postwar foreign policy. The interweaving of money and security leads toward a more complete understanding of transatlantic history during the Cold War, one which provides an incisive comment on the pattern of simultaneous conflict and cooperation in the interaction of modern states, demonstrates the influence of domestic politics on foreign policies, and comments on the relative nature of American hegemony.

This is a major new account of the Soviet occupation of postwar Germany and the beginning of the Cold War. Dr Filip Slaveski shows how in the immediate aftermath of war the Red Army command struggled to contain the violence of soldiers against German civilians and, at the same time, feed and rebuild the country. This task was then assumed by the Soviet Military Administration in Germany (SVAG) which was established to impose order on this chaos. Its attempt, however, intensified the battle for resources and power among competing occupation organs, especially SVAG and the army, which spilled over from threats and sabotage into fighting and shootouts in the streets. At times, such conflicts threatened to paralyse occupation governance, leaving armed troops, liberated POWs and slave labourers free to roam. SVAG's successes in reducing the violence and reconstructing eastern Germany were a remarkable achievement in the chaotic aftermath of war.

This book provides a comprehensive view of trhe reamament of Germany after World War II. The book centers on the debate on German rearmament inside Germany and in the international context. The issues of military planning and economic effects of German rearmament are discussed, as well as the rearmament of the East German State.

The post-Cold War era has witnessed a dramatic transformation in the German political consensus about the legitimacy of the use of force. However, in comparison with its EU and NATO partners, Germany has been reticent to transform its military to meet the challenges of the contemporary security environment. Until 2003 territorial defence rather than crisis-management remained the armed forces' core role and the Bundeswehr continues to retain conscription. The book argues that 'strategic culture' provides only a partial explanation of German military reform. It demonstrates how domestic material factors were of crucial importance in shaping the pace and outcome of reform, despite the impact of 'international structure' and adaptational pressures from the EU and NATO. The domestic politics of base closures, ramifications for social policy, financial restrictions consequent upon German unification and commitment to EMU's Stability and Growth Pact were critical in determining the outcome of reform. The study also draws out the important role of policy leaders in the political management of reform as entrepreneurs, brokers or veto players, shifting the focus in German leadership studies away from a preoccupation with the Chancellor to the role of ministerial and administrative leadership within the core executive. Finally, the book contributes to our understanding of the Europeanization of the German political system, arguing that policy leaders played a key role in 'uploading' and 'downloading' processes to and from the EU and that Defence Ministers used 'Atlanticization' and 'Europeanization' in the interests of their domestic political agendas.

The fifteen essays in this volume offer a comprehensive look at the role of American military forces in Germany. The American military forces in the Federal Republic of Germany after WWII played an important role not just in the NATO military alliance but also in German-American relations as a whole. Around twenty-two-million US servicemen and their dependants have been stationed in Germany since WWII, and their presence has contributed to one of the few successful American attempts at democratic nation building in the twentieth century. In the social and cultural realm the GIs helped to Americanize Germany, and their own German experiences influenced the US civil rights movement and soldier radicalism. The US military presence also served as a bellwether for overall relations between the two countries.

  In 1948, just as the Cold War was settling into the form it would maintain for nearly half a century, major antagonists the US and the USSR began maneuvering into a series of dangerously hostile encounters. Trouble had broken out in Poland and Czechoslovakia, but it was in Germany, which had been at the heart of World Wars One and Two, that the first potentially explosive confrontation developed. The USSR, which had suffered more at Germany’s hands than the rest of the Allies combined, may have viewed developments there with heightened fear and irritability. When the western Allies moved to consolidate their areas of control in occupied Germany, the USSR responded by cutting off land access to West Berlin, holding over two million residents of that city hostage in an aggressive act of brinkmanship. Into this difficult situation the US placed General William Henry Tunner. He was given a task that seemed doomed to failure—to supply a major city by air with everything it needed to survive from food to a winter’s supply of coal—and made it a brilliant success, astonishing the world in a major public relations defeat for the Soviets, and demonstrating the unexpected capacity of air fleets in a postwar world.