2023-11-24 08:00:00
The National People’s Army was, alongside the Stasi, the second internal power pillar of the SED regime in the GDR. Nevertheless, to this day it is considered comparatively harmless and peaceful in the context of the time. Can it stay like this?
Shared Views Podcast.
It is this one achievement that was repeatedly credited to the National People’s Army (NVA) after the fall of reunification: key leadership officers quickly turned their backs when, in the fall of 1989, some SED members had the idea that they could fight the rapidly growing demonstrations in many Cities in the GDR deploy the military. The clear statement states that no weapons will be aimed at the population. The fact that not a single shot was fired during the fall of the Berlin Wall and that the revolution remained peaceful is due not least to this positioning.
The fact that the GDR army never “fired live” in the decades of its existence and was never deployed outside, not even during the “Prague Spring”, was viewed positively even in the Western media at the time. Quite a few Ostalgics therefore saw the claim of a “peace army” that had always been proclaimed by the SED dictatorship confirmed. And: From the 1990s onwards, the GDR’s repressive mechanisms were debated primarily using the example of state security – when it came to the NVA, people mainly talked about the handling of technology or military service anecdotes.
The GDR troops were anything but harmless, as the historian Johannes Mühle reports: “The NVA was a sharp weapon right up to the end; it was actually assumed that there would be an inevitable exchange of blows with the West until the fall of the Wall.” Since the Cuban Missile Crisis, with which NATO mothballed its strategy of “maximum counter-strike”, both sides have been focused on waging a war conventionally for as long as possible, apart from the nuclear threat scenario, as Mühle said in the new episode Shared Views Podcasts Explained.
What is usually completely forgotten is that the GDR army was used internally, as an essential power pillar of the SED dictatorship: “The male population was supposed to be kept in the institution for 18 months through military service in order to keep them there to educate in a socialist way,” says the historian Dr. Philipp Schultheiss, author of the book “Excluded instead of recognized – former NVA members and the coming to terms with the GDR”. With a perfidious system of drill, arbitrariness and the infamous EK movement, young men were systematically harassed in an attempt to shape them. “The history of the construction soldiers alone has been dealt with quite well so far,” says Schultiß: “The effect of the drill has not yet been examined in detail.”
In short: As often as people have talked about the Stasi prison in Bautzen since the fall of communism, so little has been said about the NVA penal company in Schwedt. “The fact that you could simply be transferred there like you were to another unit, without any procedures, shows what kind of spirit there was in this army,” adds Mühle. Last but not least, a certain brutality was brought into society through the omnipresent army at all levels of society and the accompanying, comprehensive militarization.
“This needs to be examined even better,” said Schultheiss. After all, there was one officer for every eight soldiers in the force: many citizens also saw career opportunities there.
“We need to understand all of this better,” said Mühle: “Also to see what specific mechanisms exist in the Bundeswehr today – and must exist!”
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