Blueprints for Battle: Planning for War in Central Europe, 1948-1968

11. The German Democratic Republic

175 11 The German Democratic Republic Torsten Diedrich Eggesin in the north of the German Democratic Republic (GDR): Shrill alarm bells are ringing in a remote barracks complex. Units of the 9th Tank Division of the Nationale Volksarmee (National People’s Army, NVA) are lined up for a large-scale division-level exercise. The soldiers are told that NATO has declared an alert and is prepared to launch an attack of aggression against the Eastern bloc. Among the attacking forces is the Netherlands 1st Division, which is based along the same latitude. It is not long before the old joke is heard among the soldiers: “Listen, can you hear the clattering of wooden clogs yet? If so, we can stay in position!” As of this writing, access to the records of the basic operational plans of the Warsaw Pact and the NVA is much more complicated than access to the records of NATO and the West German Bundeswehr. The Russian archives are still largely inaccessible, especially for the recent military planning records, and they will probably remain so for the foreseeable future. Those archives alone hold the fundamental information on Soviet thinking about strategic and nuclear warfare, our understanding of which remains vague. That thinking, however, would have directed the military actions of the entire Warsaw Pact. As we now know, even the leading GDR general officers had not been privy to the real-time planning of Moscow’s strategists.1 When the East German NVA ceased to exist in 1990 it is probable that their most important operational documents were shipped to Moscow, and many other records were destroyed.2 For the time being, the only option open to historians is to attempt to reconstruct the operational thinking of the Eastern bloc 176 Torsten Diedrich and the NVA by considering various exercise scenarios, the preparation of the countries for war, and structural changes in their armed forces. At the same time it is necessary to close gradually the gaps in our historical knowledge through international cooperation, especially with historians from the former Eastern bloc countries. The Warsaw Pact’s general ideas on modern warfare, its preparations for and conduct of national defense in general—that is, its common military doctrine—were based on the thinking of Moscow’s military leadership, which naturally was heavily influenced by the thinking of the Soviet political leadership. Nevertheless, the individual Warsaw Pact states, including the GDR, did in fact develop their own ideas, and the general opinion that the NVA primarily served foreign interests does not hold up under closer examination .3 The thinking of the leadership of the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (Social Democratic Unity Party of Germany, SED) was subject to the established principles of the Leninist understanding of the protection of the “socialist revolution,” without the party’s losing sight of its objective of an armed defense of the social regime. The NVA was the product of Soviet and East German security and power interests during the Cold War period. But the East German rulers did not simply tolerate the development of the state’s instruments of force to support the system. Rather, they actively encouraged the arming of the GDR. Thus, they had crucial responsibility for the increasing totalization and militarization of their society. Military Doctrine Military doctrine is a complete system of political and military principles and views on the nature, causes, and character of wars. It includes the methods and means of warfare, military objectives, analysis of the enemy, and the derived techniques for armed defensive or offensive warfare.4 Within the framework of Communist ideology, war was understood as the continuation of policy by other means. The Communist theoretical approach on the development of social formations conceived war as a “class conflict” in an “epoch of transition from capitalism to socialism.” As a rough generalization, just wars were those that served to defend socialism, or could be classified as revolutionary civil wars of the “working class” against the bourgeoisie, or as wars of national liberation from foreign rule and colonialism. Consequently, unjust wars were all military actions of imperialism against socialism, “counterrevolutionary wars of the bourgeoisie against the working class,” colonial wars and wars of aggression, and wars of the capitalist states against each The German Democratic Republic 177 other.5 This framework served to channel the moral restraints concerning war—a strong political factor in the West—within the socialist ideology. An important imperative...