Berlin, FRG (Weltexpress). The defeat suffered by the US 50 years ago in its aggression against Vietnam was also a defeat for the FRG. The Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) was more involved in the US’s criminal war in Vietnam than any other US ally. 1 After two devastating defeats in world wars it had instigated, German imperialism wanted to distinguish itself as the main ally of the USA in the new alliance constellation, strengthen its role in NATO, push through the lifting of remaining arms restrictions, and gain a say and control over nuclear weapons. The considerable war profits that West German corporations raked in from their participation in the US aggression naturally played a central role in this.
According to estimates by the International Herald Tribune in December 1968, the US arms industry was making annual profits of $4.5 billion at that time. By the mid-1960s, 18 West German companies were already linked to the 30 largest arms corporations in the US through capital investments and contracts. Capital investments by West German companies in the USA increased fivefold between 1960 and 1969. When the net profits of the 100 largest stock corporations in the West German industry grew from 18.5 billion in 1966 to 30.5 billion in 1970, this included considerable profits from involvement in the war business. The biggest profits were made by the successors to IG Farben, the steel companies and the shipyards. On 14 March 1967, AP reported from Bremen that the Bremer Werften shipyards, affiliated with Thyssen, were building 39 ‘German Liberty ships’ for the USA, which were mainly used to transport war material to Vietnam.
By supporting the US aggression in Vietnam, which amounted to war crimes and genocide, the Federal Republic of Germany, as the successor state to the Third Reich under international law, effectively achieved the rehabilitation by Washington of similar crimes committed by Hitler’s Wehrmacht in the occupied territories. According to the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper on 15 December 1969, Army Inspector Albert Schnez took this as an opportunity to call for the spirit of the fascist ‘combat battalions and companies of the last war’ to be upheld as a ‘role model’. When the USA, with West German participation, made use in South Vietnam of the results and experience gained from the production and use of poison gas by IG Farben during the Second World War, including in concentration camps, this meant nothing less than the rehabilitation of the very war crimes of Hitler’s Germany that had been condemned in Nuremberg.
‘Learning how wars are fought today’
As part of the US strategy of ‘rolling back’ socialism, the Federal Republic was able to pursue its own revanchist expansionist goals, which extended to the GDR and other ‘lost’ eastern territories, and, as Die Welt wrote on 23 May 1964, ‘learn how wars are fought today’ in Vietnam. In the FAZ newspaper on 28 December 1965, Bundeswehr reserve colonel Adalbert Weinstein called for the study of ‘new operational and tactical insights’ gained from the war being waged there. The magazine Wehr und Wirtschaft, which was equally a mouthpiece for the Bundeswehr leadership and the arms industry, spoke in its 8/9-1965 issue of the ‘Vietnam war school’ and the ‘Vietnam test case,’ which it said inspired ‘considerations on weapons technology’ and provided experience, for example on how ‘tactical air warfare is best conducted.’ Lieutenant Colonel Holltorf, a general staff officer and military attaché in Saigon, stated in 1967 that he had ‘of course the task of following all developments that are important for our own military policy and for our own weapons development.’ Mr Holltorf considered the approximately 540,000 GIs stationed in South Vietnam to be insufficient and recommended that ‘in order to end the war militarily, you have to pump troops in here, again and again and again.’ At the end of the war, the Bundeswehr military official stated that this could only be the case ‘if North Vietnam is forced to yield. Whether this yield is achieved through an occupation of North Vietnam or through other military means, including, in my opinion, an intensification of the air war, is completely open.’2
In line with this motto, the Bundeswehr was also prepared in 1968 to ‘support’ the ‘Prague Spring’ in Czechoslovakia. While reactionary circles in the Federal Republic of Germany urged the United States to take even tougher action to liquidate socialism in the GDR and assassinate the national liberation movement in South Vietnam, they feigned concern for a ‘better socialism’ in Czechoslovakia. To this end, the US-led NATO had conceived the ‘Zephir’ (mild south-westerly wind) plan in the spring of 1968, which detailed the preparation of the 7th US Army stationed in the FRG and Bundeswehr units for intervention against the CSSR. This was trained accordingly in the NATO staff exercise ‘Shapex’ in May 1968. The 14th Bundeswehr Commanders’ Conference in the same month “established an unorthodox operational strategy that made use of operational deception and surprise.”3 Bundeswehr units were on standby for “demonstrative military actions in the border area.” Since the summer of 1967, Bundeswehr commanders in civilian clothing had been conducting secret reconnaissance missions in the western regions of the CSSR. Among them in May 1968 was the deputy commander of the Bundeswehr’s 12th Armoured Division, Colonel Fritz Fechner, who entered the country with false papers as a journalist named Anton Speck in order to install covert transmitters. Retired General Trettner stated in July 1968 that it was necessary to exploit certain situations ‘to launch a surprise attack’. The Sunday Times of 25 August 1968 reported that the Warsaw Pact had pre-empted a NATO intervention that was to be triggered by specially trained CIA and BND agents using ‘Gleiwitz-type’ provocations.
The most reactionary circles in the Federal Republic and their media used the US aggression to reinforce their anti-communist enemy stereotype by branding the South Vietnamese liberation fighters as ‘Viet Cong’ (Vietnamese communists) and bloodthirsty monsters. Apart from the fact that the majority of FNL fighters were not communists, this linguistic distortion, like Goebbels’ propaganda terms “Bolsheviks” and “Russians,” became one of the worst swear words in anti-communist propaganda. The Bild newspaper published countless “frontline reports” from Saigon. One report on 27 February 1968 stated: ‘Dogs tracked down the Vietcong. … 50 were shot dead.’ It was also the Springer newspaper that presented its readers with glowing praise for the Saigon police chief, who had himself photographed murdering a captured FNL fighter with a shot to the back of the head. This was underpinned by threatening legends, which the newspaper published on 4 July 1967, among other places: ‘The question is being decided in Vietnam: will freedom lose its last bastion in Southeast Asia … or not?’
While Western governments distanced themselves from the US aggression and France condemned it in a communiqué issued by the Council of Ministers, the official Bonn government stood fully behind Washington. In view of the continuing defeats of the US army, Die Welt recommended on 11 August 1965 to ‘stick to the rough rule of thumb of tank general Guderian: don’t dabble, go for broke!’ Federal President Heinrich Lübke, who had been involved in the construction of Hitler’s concentration camps, congratulated President Johnson on the first terrorist attacks on Hanoi on 29 June 1966 in an official state telegram, which stated that the air terror should ‘be crowned with success.’ On 1 July, when reports of the numerous civilian deaths caused by the terrorist attacks were already known, Chancellor Erhard, the architect of the economic miracle, approved ‘all measures taken by the Americans’. On the same day, the West Berlin newspaper Nachtdepesche hailed the deaths as a ‘miracle of precision’ and demanded that Washington decide to ‘bomb densely populated industrial centres.’ Springer’s West Berlin newspaper BZ wrote on 18 July that what was needed was ‘an uncompromising war that does not stop at factories, ports, irrigation systems and dams.’ Erhard’s successor, Kurt Georg Kiesinger, a member of Hitler’s party since 1933 and deputy head of the radio department in Ribbentrop’s Foreign Office, assured Washington in his government statement on 13 December that the Federal Republic would ‘assume its share of responsibility in Vietnam more decisively than before.’
While open warmongering was allowed to go unpunished in the Federal Republic and West Berlin, opponents of US aggression were subjected to severe reprisals. In West Berlin, on 10 December, ‘Human Rights Day,’ 74 participants in a demonstration against US aggression in Vietnam were arrested. During a subsequent protest demonstration organised by the Socialist German Students’ Union, the West Berlin police brutally intervened with rubber truncheons and arrested 86 people.
Nazi diplomats Ambassador in Saigon
In Saigon, Dr Wilhelm Kopf, Bonn’s chief diplomat, had already earned his spurs under Hitler. In December 1968, Dr Horst von Rom became his successor. He had been an employee of the fascist judiciary during the Third Reich, which had in no way hindered his career in the Federal Republic. Previously, he had been consul in Atlanta, among other posts. Even for the United States, his Nazi past was no reason to refuse his accreditation. Why should it have been, when one of their puppet leaders in Saigon, the aforementioned Nguyen Cao Ky, had publicly declared Hitler his ‘role model’ and added that ‘we need four or five Hitlers’? When he took office, von Rom assured him that the Federal Republic would continue to regard support for South Vietnam as its ‘essential duty.’ Until then, this included arms, loans and other subsidies amounting to 1.165 billion Deutschmarks. Under the Adenauer and Erhard governments, the Federal Republic provided foreign exchange assistance of over 10.8 billion Deutschmarks between 1961 and 1965 on the basis of a ‘foreign exchange equalisation agreement’ in the form of arms purchases. During a visit to the United States in 1966, Chancellor Erhard assured President Johnson that he would continue to ‘comply with the foreign exchange equalisation agreement’ in the future. With Erhard, another accomplice to the war crimes of the ‘Third Reich’ supported the similar course of the White House. From 1943 onwards, he had been an ‘economic advisor’ to the ‘Reich Industry Group and IG Farben’.
Under Kopf and von Rom, the West German embassy was a veritable command centre for the deployment of West German aid for US aggression and the evaluation of the diverse experiences gained by the Bundeswehr in this dirty war. At the end of 1967, the staff of the Bonn military attaché, along with three other officers flown in from the Bundesluftwaffe, was stationed at the US air force and naval base in Da Nang. The aforementioned Weinstein repeatedly visited South Vietnam to refresh his war experience and then pass it on to officers of the Bundeswehr. He also served as a front-line reporter for the FAZ newspaper. In July 1970, Hubertus Prinz zu Löwenstein, in his capacity as ‘special advisor to the press and information service of the federal government led at the time by the SPD-FDP coalition,’ travelled to South Vietnam to gather information on the situation. The prince flew over defoliated forests and destroyed villages in a combat helicopter and, upon his return to Bonn, said he was ‘very impressed’ by how the Americans were accomplishing their mission.
Ambassador Kopf also repeatedly took part in combat operations in American uniform and exchanged ‘experiences’ with US military personnel. According to the FAZ newspaper on 29 September 1967, Kopf liked to be celebrated in Saigon as an ‘old front-line pig’. He considered this fitting for his work. In the Kölner Rundschau on 17 August 1966, he praised the atrocities committed by the USA, which by then had wiped out more than a thousand South Vietnamese villages with napalm and killed or maimed hundreds of thousands of people, as ‘decisive intervention’. On 18 November 1966, the New York Herald Tribune reported on a front-line flight that the ambassador undertook with Major General de Puy, commander of a division, over his positions. From a combat helicopter, Kopf filmed attacks on South Vietnamese residents. After the joint inspection flight, Puy told Jens Feddersen, editor-in-chief of the Neue Ruhr-Zeitung: ‘The best thing would be if I had a German division on my right flank and another on my left.’
The division commander was not spouting casino slogans, but repeating the Pentagon’s official demand to the Hardthöhe. This was made clear by the Neue Ruhr-Zeitung on 26 November 1966, when it reported the opinion of three-star General Heintges, deputy to Vietnam commander-in-chief General Westmoreland, who demanded ‘two infantry divisions and one armoured infantry division’ for Vietnam. Heintges relied on old comrades from Hitler’s Wehrmacht in Bonn, as he was the general who had built up the Bundeswehr together with Theodor Blank, the first defence minister of the Federal Republic of Germany, and Hitler’s general Heusinger.
Germans to Vietnam
According to Spiegel magazine (4/1966), former SA member Gerhard Schröder of the CDU, as Minister of Defence, spoke out in favour of ‘sending German soldiers to the Far East theatre of war’. Hessischer Rundfunk then reported on 22 February that the Federal Republic wanted to send two divisions to Vietnam. If regular Bundeswehr units were not deployed after all, it was solely due to the growing West German solidarity movement with Vietnam and the protests against the criminal US war, both internationally and in the US itself, which Bonn feared would continue to grow.
Nevertheless, the Federal Republic of Germany participated in the US war in various covert forms or allowed such involvement, which was contrary to international law. From then on, there was talk of a West German ‘ghost army’ or a ‘Vietnam Legion’. After AP reported from Bonn on 24 January 1966 that Federal Press Chief State Secretary von Hase had declared that ‘any personnel assistance is worth a thousand times more than purely material aid in South Vietnam,’ the Cabinet’s press and information service confirmed four days later that this was the explicit position of the Federal Government.
The personnel commitment took the form primarily of sending ‘technical specialists’ and soldiers and officers of the Bundeswehr in American uniforms. In 1965, these included 121 members of the Bundesluftwaffe who flew bombing missions against North Vietnam. Bonn was guided by the experiences of the ‘Legion Condor’ in Spain. At that time, after being pro forma discharged from the Wehrmacht, the soldiers had also gone to Spain as civilians, where they wore Spanish uniforms and rank insignia as ‘volunteers.’
The US magazine “Time” reported on 23 July 1965 about the deployment of “German pilots” in Vietnam. Three days later, a Panorama programme on West German television confirmed these facts, based on statements by a mother whose son had been deployed as a pilot in Vietnam from February to April 1965. The members of the German Air Force sent to Vietnam had undergone special training in the United States from autumn 1964 to February 1965, after the start of the air war against the DRV. Le Monde, Paris, reported on 8 September 1965 about open recruitment in Bundeswehr barracks for military service in Vietnam. Ordinary soldiers were offered a monthly salary of 2,000 DM and the promise of rapid promotion. While Bonn sought to keep the mercenary deployment secret and denied it, the Americans made it public in order to induce their German allies to openly acknowledge their involvement. A DPA report dated 2 August 1966 stated: ‘The headquarters of the American armed forces in Saigon confirms that a small number of German citizens are serving in American units in South Vietnam.’
On 12 January 1966, UPI reported that this support was part of a ‘broad-based aid programme for South Vietnam’ decided upon by the Erhard cabinet. The Bonn-based information service RF-World News confirmed on 8 February 1966 that there were around 2,500 West German technicians in South Vietnam at that time, including numerous members of the Bundeswehr. The Inspector General of the German Air Force, Steinhoff, who was visiting the United States in February 1967, promised a further increase in the deployment of West German pilots in Vietnam. This included the delivery of 40 combat helicopters from the German Air Force, complete with flight personnel.
In the last days of March 1966, a distinguished-looking middle-aged gentleman emerged from an American military jeep at one of the combat zones north of Saigon and allowed himself to be led ‘to the front line’ by a colonel of the Special Forces. The colonel explained the situation to him. He then met with US Commander Westmorland, who ‘made it clear’ to him that ‘the Americans cannot lose this war militarily.’ Afterwards, the gentleman had breakfast with the newly installed head of the Saigon government, Air Force General Nguyen Cao Ky, an ‘open admirer of Hitler.’ He raved about his visit to the front and was ‘impressed’ by the ‘perfection of the American military machine.’
The distinguished gentleman in question was a certain Konrad Ahlers, at that time deputy editor-in-chief of the Hamburg news magazine Der Spiegel. Just one year later, he was promoted to press chief and state secretary of the SPD-FDP government for three years. The report that Ahlers published in issue 16 of his magazine differed only in nuances from the ‘front reports’ in Springer’s ‘Welt’, the ‘Morgenpost’ or the ‘FAZ’, in which Hitler’s general staff officer Adalbert Weinstein regularly reported and stirred up sentiment for even greater involvement of the Federal Republic in the dirty war being waged by the USA in Vietnam. Der Spiegel rambled on about an idyllic war in which ‘before the eyes of the South Korean Tiger Division, Vietcong women sold pork and received a sack of rice from American camps.’ ‘It is difficult to see who is fighting whom.’ Ky, interviewed by Ahlers, was able to ramble on about ‘installing a democratic regime,’ that the war was being waged to counter ‘communist aggression,’ to implement a ‘reform programme,’ that the South Vietnamese were ‘not ready for general elections,’ and that once they took place, ‘communists would of course not be allowed to be elected.’
German Vietnam legionnaires participated in the war crimes committed by the USA. On 7 February 1967, AP reported in words and pictures about a German named Rudolf Heinrich from West Berlin who, as captain of the 1st US Infantry Division, participated in the destruction of villages and the liquidation and expulsion of inhabitants near Saigon. In its 11/1966 issue, the magazine ‘Quick’ quoted a Dierk Piffko from Munich who described the ‘search’ of a village: ‘We came across an old couple, one of us shot them, probably out of boredom or like someone hunting rabbits. He shot the old man’s toes off. … I shouted: Don’t take any prisoners, shoot them all!’
West German transport ships flying foreign flags brought American war material, including Pershing missiles, to Vietnam. According to Vorwärts No. 16/1967, in 1966 the Hamburg shipping company Transerz transported tanks and other military equipment to South Vietnam on the freighter Magellan, which was flying the Liberian flag and had a West German crew, including the captain. West German tankers transported fuel for USAF aircraft. The West German sailors had American passports in addition to their German ones so that they could move freely in the South Vietnamese war ports.
In 1965/66, West German and Western European media, including AFP from Saigon on 23 November 1967, published not only reports of West Germans fighting in the US Army in South Vietnam, but also obituaries for Germans who had been killed there. Among them were 27-year-old Frank Prediger and Franz Xaver Wallner, who was one year older. According to various obituaries and reports, a total of six West Germans lost their lives between November 1965 and July 1966. Pressure was exerted on family members and newspapers not to publish such obituaries.
The misuse of the ‘Helgoland’
The hospital ship ‘Helgoland’ was also deployed in the war. It sailed to South Vietnam. The West German Red Cross initially expressed reservations about its use under the command of the Bonn military attaché in Saigon; the International Red Cross refused to allow it to sail under the Red Cross flag. According to the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper on 12 February 1966, the Federal Government rejected the IRK’s recommendation to grant the Helgoland the status of the Second Geneva Convention, according to which the hospital ship would have had to provide assistance to both warring sides, i.e. it would also have had to sail to North Vietnam. A Panorama programme on 28 February 1966 called the mission the ‘first stage of pre-military involvement’. Personnel from the Helgoland took part in ‘Vietcong hunts’ with American officers in helicopters as a ‘Sunday outing’. The effects of napalm and other chemical weapons used by the USA were also researched on the hospital ship. Dr Erich Wulf testified about the deployment of the Helgoland, which was contrary to international law, on 1 December 1967 before the Russell Tribunal in the Danish city of Roskilde.
In June 1969, the involvement of West German companies in the criminal use of chemical poisons and warfare agents in South Vietnam came to light. It concerned a billion-dollar loan from a West German banking consortium to the American company Dow Chemical. Among the partners of the notorious corporation, the largest producer of napalm and main supplier for the US aggression in South Vietnam and thus also a beneficiary of the loan, was the IG Farben successor company Badische Anilin- und Sodafabriken (BASF) in Ludwigshafen, which had two subsidiaries in the USA, including the Badische Dow Chemical Company in Freeport, Texas. With five branches each, the Hoechst paint factory and Bayer AG Leverkusen were represented in the USA and were involved in orders for American troops in Vietnam. On 6 July 1965, the Paris-based newspaper France Nouvelle reported that Bayer AG had sold several patents for the production of chemical warfare agents to the USA and, through its US subsidiary Chamagro Corporation in Kansas City, had also directly supplied toxic substances that were used by the US Chemical Corps in Vietnam.
Chemical weapons for use in Vietnam were also being developed in the Federal Republic of Germany itself. Professors Otto Ambros and Wolfgang Wirth, who had both developed and manufactured poison gases under the Hitler regime, were working on this in the poison laboratories of the Bayer Research Centre in Wuppertal-Elberfeld. Ambros had been director of IG Farben and head of the chemical warfare department in Speer’s Ministry of Armaments and had been convicted of war crimes. Wirth had been researching the military application of nerve gases since 1937.
IG Farben successors supplied poison gas
Further details on how ‘German military leaders and a number of industrial companies in the Federal Republic helped the Americans in their war of aggression in Vietnam’ were revealed by the London magazine Eastern World in its July/August 1966 issue: ‘They (the Americans) have expressed keen interest in the new, extremely effective combat gases being developed in West German laboratories on the basis of gases produced by IG Farben during the Second World War.’ This had led to ‘close cooperation between American and West German military circles, laboratories and companies that are influential in the fields of the development, production and use of chemical and bacteriological warfare agents.’ Hoechst AG had agreed to ‘send several experts … to the United States’ and to provide the United States with ‘the necessary documents and information for the production of lethal gases of the Zyklon B type, which the Nazis used extensively in their death camps during the last war and which the Americans have already begun to use for no less cruel purposes in South Vietnam.’ According to Eastern World, West German chemists and bacteriologists, including some from Farbwerke Hoechst AG, worked in South Vietnam in a special unit of the US Army that operated a mobile research institute for bacteriological and chemical warfare, testing new chemical warfare agents on ‘living subjects’. The status of the Helgoland was also abused for this purpose. On board, disguised as medical personnel, was another group of West German chemists and bacteriologists who in reality belonged to the notorious American special unit.
From their cooperation with the USA in the field of chemical and bacteriological weapons, which encompassed a whole system of capital and production links, West German chemical companies not only reaped lucrative profits, but also gained practical experience that was reflected in further developments. In the chemical laboratories of the US Army at Edgewod and in the research centre for bacteriological warfare at Camp Detrick in Maryland, Bundeswehr officers were constantly involved in the research, development and improvement of further weapon systems and methods of their use. This meant that not only West German companies but also the federal government was directly involved in the most serious war crimes committed by the United States in South Vietnam, including the murder and mutilation of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese and the contamination of huge areas of forest and rice fields. Since 1964, hundreds of thousands of hectares of rice fields and forests have been sprayed with herbicides every year, destroying large parts of the rice harvest and other crops. In 1970, a total of 50,000 tonnes of total herbicides were sprayed in South Vietnam, and almost twice that amount in 1971.
The German Armed Forces immediately evaluated the findings and experiences gained in South Vietnam. Following conclusive press reports, including in the Frankfurter Rundschau on 14 February, the Süddeutsche Zeitung on 24 February and the Hildesheimer Presse on 28/29 February 1970, the State Secretary of the Ministry of Defence, Karl Wilhelm Berkhan, had to admit that chemical warfare agents were being produced in the Federal Republic of Germany, that the German Armed Forces had such poisons at its disposal, including the deadly nerve gas ‘Tabun-Sarin Type 7/67’, and that it was conducting gas warfare manoeuvres. Berkhan stated literally that the Bundeswehr could ‘not do without’ chemical weapons.
Warmongering à la Springer
The reactions in the Federal Republic were shocking when the USA was forced to declare the unconditional cessation of air aggression against North Vietnam on 1 November 1968 and to accept the FNL as a negotiating partner in Paris. In the run-up to the negotiations, the then press tycoon Springer had already called on the USA in his West Berlin ‘Morgenpost’ on 5 May 1968 not to let itself be ‘deprived of the weapon of bombing the DRV’ in Paris and not to recognise the FNL as the legitimate representative of South Vietnam. On 6 November, Die Welt demanded a continuation of the terrorist attacks against the DRV, calling their cessation a ‘capitulation by President Johnson,’ who had ‘bowed to Hanoi’s demands.’ On 14 January 1969, the FAZ accused Johnson of having ‘ended the air strikes too early.’
Notes:
1 H. Rennhack: BRD-Imperialismus. Komplize der USA-Aggressoren, Berlin (DDR) 1973.
2 Heynowski & Scheumann: Die Kugelweste, Berlin/DDR, 1980, S. 10 f.
3 Wehrkunde, München, 6/1968, S. 379
