The postwar Allied Control Council duly dissolved the Wehrmacht on Aug. 20, 1946. Within a decade, however, the world would look considerably different. In 1949, with the onset of the Cold War, the Western Allies formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), with a unified military command structure. NATO's primary mission was to deter an increasingly belligerent Soviet Union, which had liberated the countries of Eastern Europe only to occupy and enslave them as communist satellite states.
Armies cannot be created overnight. Rank-and-file soldiers can be brought in off the streets and trained to minimum effectiveness in about six months. But what about commanders? Where do you find leaders - particularly general officers - with the background and experience to train, organize and lead an army built from scratch?
In West Germany's case the answer was obvious but complicated. Especially challenging was finding qualified officers who had served the Wehrmacht in the most senior positions and, therefore, had the background and experience to become the Bundeswehr's senior commanders.
The West German government subjected all former Wehrmacht soldiers volunteering for the Bundeswehr to a rigorous screening process. Initially, it permitted only Waffen-SS soldiers at the rank of captain and below to serve. Later it accepted officers up to the rank of lieutenant colonel, provided they passed the screening. Ultimately, 61 Wehrmacht generals and admirals made it through, though by the fall of 1957 only 42 of them had joined the Bundeswehr.
The most senior officers of the latter group were Hans Speidel and Adolf Heusinger, who on Oct. 10 and Nov. 12, 1955, respectively, were sworn in as the Bundeswehr's first two lieutenant generals. Both turned 58 that year and were joining their fourth German army - starting with the Deutsches Heer of World War I, followed by the Weimar Republic's interwar Reichswehr, then the Wehrmacht. Though Speidel and Heusinger had been lieutenant generals in the Wehrmacht, both were brought into the new German armed forces one level up. Prior to 1945 a German Generalleutnant had been the two-star equivalent of a British or American major general. The Bundeswehr changed the rank structure to make a new Generalleutnant the three-star equivalent of its NATO allies' lieutenant generals.
Heusinger and Speidel were appointed senior members of the Blank Office, which on June 7, 1955, became West Germany's Federal Ministry of Defense, with civil servant Theodor Blank as its first minister. Once commissioned as the Bundeswehr's first two general officers, Speidel was assigned as chief of the Combined Forces Department at the Ministry of Defense, while Heusinger chaired the Military Leadership Council. In 1957 Speidel and Heusinger were promoted to become the Bundeswehr's first four-star generals.
That spring Heusinger succeeded Speidel as chief of Combined Forces when the latter was appointed commander in chief of Allied Land Forces in Central Europe (COMLANDCENT), becoming the first German officer to hold a NATO commander in chief position. Working from headquarters at France's Fontainebleau Castle, Speidel managed the Bundeswehr's integration into NATO. Although he had never commanded anything larger than a company, he was the senior operational commander of all German, American, French and British divisions assigned to NATO's Central Region. If war had broken out with the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, Speidel would have been the senior NATO ground commander.
www.historynet.com
