17 - U.S. Policy toward German Veterans, 1945-1950

Summary

The Occupation policy of the victorious Allies was guided by a variety of “D's”: denazification, demilitarization, decartelization, decentralization, and democratization. Of these policies, demilitarization was the one that was initially most pressing and the one that found the most consistent support of the Allies - and of the Germans. Because of this, demilitarization was achieved more unequivocally than any of the other D's, a fact that was to cause some embarrassment and difficulty in the 1950s, when the Allies changed their minds and began to push for German rearmament.

Demilitarization as an Allied goal was first stated in the Atlantic Charter, was reiterated in numerous wartime and postwar statements, including those following the Yalta and Potsdam conferences, and was embodied in Joint Chiefs of Staff directive 1067, which laid down U.S. and Allied occupation guidelines. Allied proclamations invariably spoke of the need to rid Germany of Nazism and militarism. In the mind of the Allies the two were inextricably linked, and the latter was the cause of the former. Germany’s enemies accepted fully the contention of Nazi propagandists that the Third Reich was the logical culmination of the Prussian military tradition, albeit with different conclusions.6 If the immediate cause of the Second World War was Hitler and the Nazis, the long-term cause was German militarism. The failure to stamp out German militarism after the First World War had led to the Second.