Vietnam War and West German Protests
West German peace activists began protesting the Vietnam War in 1965, when Operation Rolling Thunder, the campaign of bombing North Vietnam, began. Many protesters were veterans of the peace and antirearmament movements of the 1950s, and others were activists in the Socialist Students League (SDS).
They rejected the official stance that the war in Vietnam was part of a worldwide struggle against communism and charged the United States with imperialism. By 1967 West German antiwar protesters were drawing parallels between U.S. actions in Vietnam and the Nazi’s murder of Jews in Auschwitz. Moreover, they connected the U.S. administration with the Grand Coalition in Bonn, labeling both “fascistic.” The SDS and other student groups called for ever more radical resistance against the West German government, and some activists turned to terrorism.For many students in the 1960s, taking a stand against the Vietnam War relieved the guilt they felt as descendants of those implicated in the crimes of the Third Reich. Their condemnation of the policies of the United States enabled them to atone for their parents’ inaction and provided an opportunity to universalize Nazi brutality. Other Germans saw the question in a more nuanced light. While many disapproved of U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia, or supported the war only tepidly, a majority of German citizens continued to support the U.S. military presence on their own soil, seeing it as a necessary protection against Soviet aggression. This was true especially in West Berlin, the center of radical antiwar protest. In 1967, when students from the Free University of Berlin staged a demonstration against the war, drawing perhaps 20,000 participants, supporters of the United States held a counterdemonstration of over 100,000.
Ambiguity existed on many levels. While protesters condemned the United States for its actions in Vietnam, they also placed elements of American youth culture at the center of their general rebellion against West German politics and society.
Clothing, sexual morals, drug use, and especially rock music from the United States and Great Britain became forms of protest. Moreover, the U.S. forces in Germany were not generally targets of anti-American protest; rather, soldiers were seen as victims of U.S. policy similar to the Vietnamese. West German political leaders such as chancellors Ludwig Erhard (1963—1966) and Kurt Kiesinger (1966—1969) supported U.S. involvement in Vietnam, aware that U.S. defense of West Germany implied a quid pro quo, though they resisted sending troops or equipment to Southeast Asia. However, growing public distaste for Germany’s unconditional support of U.S. cold war policy brought Social Democratic Party (of Gemany) member
Demonstration against the American war in Vietnam in West Berlin, 1968. (Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin/Michael Ruetz)
Willy Brandt to power in 1969. Brandt was unafraid to disagree with the Americans, and led West Germany down a more independent path.
Although U.S. troops in Germany experienced few acts of anti-Americanism as such, the Vietnam War had a long-term negative effect on the U.S. forces in Germany and on German American relations on a local level. As the war sapped energy, morale, and funding from U.S. military communities, problems burgeoned and German American relations deteriorated. Both sides lost interest in expressions of friendship, and the social problems of the U.S. forces, caused in great part by the trauma of Vietnam, frightened and alienated German civilians. The Vietnam War protest movement virtually disappeared by 1972, but the reservoir of informal friendship and trust was drained, and when a new round of protests against American policy began in the 1980s, the overt anti-American flavor was much more pronounced.
Anni Baker
See also U.S. Bases in West Germany; West Berlin
References and Further Reading
Nelson, Daniel J. A History of U.S. Military Forces in Germany. Boulder, CO, and London: Westview, 1987.
Seiler, Signe. Die GIs: Amerikanische Soldaten in Deutschland. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1985.