The Long Shadow of the Past: History, Memory and the Debate over West Germany's Nuclear Status, 1954-69

What is wrong with discrimination against her [Germany] in the use and possession of nuclear weapons?

Hugh Gaitskell, 1960¹

Two decades after Auschwitz, two apparently unrelated questions simultaneously preoccupied West Germany and the Bundesrepublik's friends and foes alike: first, whether West Germany should maintain the option of possessing weapons of mass destruction; second, whether mass murderers of the Third Reich could come forward without risking prosecution. In the late 1950s, the mood of "collective silence" about the shared memory of the Nazi past during the immediate postwar era gradually gave way to a more open, self-critical discussion about the German past. ² The beginning of a second phase of dealing with the Nazi past was marked most notably by the NS-trials and the acrimonious debates over the extension of the statute of limitations allowing to continue prosecution of war criminals in West Germany. ³ This second phase of the West German history of memory coincided with more than a decade of heated debate over West Germany's nuclear status.

In 1954 Chancellor Konrad Adenauer renounced the development of nuclear weapons within the Federal Republic as a precondition for West Germany's admission into NATO and German rearmament. The late 1950s saw the high tide of the West German peace movement Kampf dem Atomtod protesting against the deployment of US nuclear forces on West German soil. ⁴ The rise and fall of the Multilateral Nuclear Force (MLF)—a mixed-manned NATO nuclear fleet that would have given West Germany a limited say over the control of Western nuclear forces— dominated the nuclear debate throughout the early 1960s. Finally, the signature of the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963 and the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1968 in an age of superpower dÈtente raised the question of German adherence. Joining the NPT meant foreclosing the nuclear option for all time. The nuclear debate and the legacy of the past can not be seen as unrelated issues: the allied restrictions imposed on the rearmament of the Federal Republic resulted from the immediate German past of aggression and extermination. Clearly, the same legal and moral constraints did not apply for Britain and France who continued to develop nuclear forces under sovereign control. West Germany's nuclear status remained at the heart of both intra-alliance and inter-alliance politics. ⁵ For many within the Federal Republic, West Germany's inability to manufacture nuclear weapons came to be seen as a symbol of her secondclass status, and heated public debates on the attitude of the Bundesrepublik to weapons of mass destruction were conducted in parliament, the press and on protest marches.

West German nuclear policy has attracted a considerable amount of scholarly interest. To date it has been examined primarily in the context of the Cold War, alliance diplomacy and NATO nuclear strategy. ⁶ While West German nuclear policy and the imposition of allied restrictions in 1954 were the consequences of the Nazi legacy, little effort has been made to analyze how Germany's past and the politics of memory influenced both the domestic nuclear debate and allied nuclear policy toward West Germany. ⁷ The politics of history and memory in postwar Germany and Europe has also generated an increasing amount of scholarly work. A number of studies have recently been published on German attempts to cope with the past and how the legacy of the past influenced postwar politics, society and culture, but its influence on nuclear policy remains to be examined. ⁸ Some studies have concentrated on the question of how German history was instrumentalized in the postwar German political debate. For example, Edgar Wolfrum has defined Geschichtspolitik, the politics of history, as the act of using history for political aims, of making political gains by using the mobilizing, politicizing, defaming or scandalizing effect...