Germany is now further from the Second World War than the time between modern Germany’s founding and 1945, but the country has yet to grow a clear\u002Deyed,…
On a cold Tehran night in December 1943, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill took three matchsticks out of his pocket and laid them, one next to the other, on the table in front of him. The tips pointed toward his conversation partner, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. The two were meeting with U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, to plan the course of the Second World War.
But the U.S.S.R. didn’t rest. Networks of spies, mostly from East Germany, infiltrated the West German government, penetrating the inner circle of Chancellor Willy Brandt in the 1970s.Article content Germany’s unique crimes under the Third Reich were addressed in several ways, beginning with denazification and reparations, then maintained by an on-going societal reckoning with the nature of guilt. Termed “Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung,” it meant collectively understanding and personally assimilating the scale of the Holocaust and the country’s actions in the Second World War.
A cynic might conclude that German history has provided a convenient excuse to consistently under-spend on defence, outsourcing the costs to the U.S. Even with its recent commitment to increase defence spending, Germany isn’t expected to meet minimum annual NATO contributions of two per cent of gross domestic product until 2026, at the earliest.
Kotkin is also critical of Merkel’s gambit — dubbed “Wandel durch Handel,” or change through trade — that was meant to tie Russia to Europe. German-Russian trade more than doubled from 2005, when Merkel assumed power, to 2012, peaking at 80.9 billion euros per year. Despite the trade, Russian President Vladimir Putin was clearly not “wandeled.” In fact, oil and gas made up almost 60 per cent of German imports from Russia in 2021, suggesting that he got exactly what he wanted.
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