Abstract
This article analyses the Europeanization of West German associations of Wehrmacht veterans in the 1950s. Using archival sources concerning the foundation of a European veterans’ umbrella organisation, the article argues that the veterans’ attempts at political reassertion in the post-war decades cannot be understood without accounting for their European dimension. Indeed, the veterans considered their European outreach to be a core pillar of their ‘politics of honour’, which manifested itself mainly in the agitation for the war criminals in Allied custody. Thus, aiming to establish themselves as effective and legitimate interest representatives, the veterans Europeanized. This process was consciously modelled after the ongoing process of integration while simultaneously exhibiting distinct characteristics stemming from the veterans themselves. The article tracks the veterans’ transnational interactions, their competitive dynamics in West German associational politics and the veterans’ associational interests to explain their specific form of an alternative Europeanization.
Paris, 1955: Veterans from all over Europe came together for the founding of the ‘Fédération européenne des associations de combattants’ (FEDAC), a veterans’ umbrella organization, in a story that seemed to fit harmoniously into the first decade of European integration. After all, the FEDAC's self-proclaimed goal was ‘creating a climate for the unfolding of the European idea’. 1
This harmony was not broken by Siegfried Westphal, one of the FEDAC's vice-presidents, even though, only 15 years earlier, the veteran had been part of the German invasion of France. After the war, he remained popular in circles of the former Wehrmacht elite due to his leadership role in the veterans’ association of the German ‘Afrikakorps’ and because of his agitation against accusations of war crimes by the Wehrmacht. 2 At first, it might seem that these activities contradict his involvement with the FEDAC. For the assembled veterans, however, there was no contradiction.
As this article will show, the surprisingly seamless integration of former Wehrmacht officers into a European organization was part of a broader post-war reassertion of veterans’ associations as legitimate players in Western politics. While the story of the Wehrmacht veterans seeking a close intermingling with the federal government has been established in the literature, 3 the European dimension of their efforts is still unknown. However, as this article will show, they saw their European outreach as the logical continuation of their national agitation; furthermore, sometimes European connections were even seen as more effective than national contacts. This European dimension is essential in fully understanding the veterans’ struggles for political recognition. Only by showcasing their European efforts were they able to plausibly claim the legitimacy of their existence in the face of competition between associations.
There were two reasons why Europe held the promise of legitimacy for the veterans: the internationalized structure of their interests and the opportunity provided by the European Defence Community (EDC). 4 As the associations reconstituted themselves after 1949, they quickly came to adopt a ‘politics of honour’ 5 as the core of their agitation, a politics in which several actors competed to be seen as the most effective fighter for the reconstitution of the Wehrmacht's soldierly honour. Within this politics, the so-called war criminals question was of great symbolic importance. As it revolved around Germans in Allied custody, political agitation on the matter had a necessary international dimension. Thus, if they wanted to claim effective interest representation, the veterans had to seek transnational connections to solve a transnational problem. Herein, the EDC provided an important argumentative framework. The plan to conduct German rearmament within a European, integrated framework implied that the former Wehrmacht officers were once again needed, not just by their own, but also by Western governments. This enabled them to weld their interests to the European integration project and impelled them to label their transnational outreach European. The anti-Soviet thrust of the EDC furthermore had the additional appeal that it made it possible to claim the continuity of a European anti-Soviet struggle, allegedly a logical continuation of the Wehrmacht's war. 6 In rallying around Europe, the veterans sought to exploit an opportunity to solidify their political reassertion and to claim European connections as effective interest representation.
Consequently, the veterans’ European actions were deeply embedded in and consciously related to the context of early European integration. At the same time, they were more than mere reactions to integration politics. As the analysis of their European outreach makes clear, it was based on the veterans’ very own European conceptions. To do justice both to the important influence of integration history and to the veterans’ own European ambitions, the historiography offers the concept of Europeanization. This process has been defined as the ‘strengthening of intra-European connections […] that have been experienced and labelled as “European”’. 7 Europeanization was ‘ambivalent’, which implies the integration and coexistence of different, even contradictory tendencies in one process. 8 For example, the West German agitation on behalf of German war criminals was a source of contention in their interaction with European federalist groups; however, it was not at odds with their European convictions and was an important factor driving their transnational ambitions. 9
Against this backdrop, the integration of veterans into the ‘European project’ did not simply follow guidelines set by the governments. When the intention to form the FEDAC was first declared in 1953, the EDC was still on the horizon. Yet, when the constitutive congress took place in 1955, this project, the Schuman Plan's ‘twin’, 10 had already failed and an important incentive for the foundation of the FEDAC seemed to have disappeared. The fact that the FEDAC continued to exist shows that the veterans’ attitudes developed within a contingent space of Europeanization that allowed for their own conceptions of Europe. 11
This article analyses archival material relating to two of the founding members of the FEDAC. These were also two of the most important veterans’ associations in West Germany, namely the ‘Verband deutscher Soldaten’ (‘Association of German soldiers’, VDS) and the ‘Kyffhäuserbund’ (‘Kyffhäuser Union’). 12 Section 2 remains on the domestic level and shows how, struggling for legitimacy, the newly formed veterans’ associations adopted a politics of honour which was internationally structured. On this basis, Section 3 goes into the details of the cross-border exchanges with other veterans and federalist groups. After an overview of these exchanges, it shows how, as a part of Europeanization, the veterans asserted their politics of honour in transnational interactions. Because they thought it important to demonstrate the effectivity of their interest representation on the European level, accounting for their European connections also had repercussions for their domestic interest politics. Finally, explaining why these interactions were labelled European, it shows the specific opportunities the European framework offered the veterans within competitive associational politics.
Veteran politics of honour and the transnational structure of West German politics
Due to the occupation of Germany in the post-war years, veterans’ interest representation was directed towards both the federal government and the occupying powers, 13 and was informed by two sets of historical experiences. First, the veterans were still seen as the military officers who had commanded an invading force. 14 Security from a German military threat continued to be a key concern of Western policy, albeit in ambiguous tension with concerns over the Soviet threat. 15 The federal government, pursuing sovereignty, and the veterans, pursuing their interest, played on this tension, emphasizing the potential of a German contribution to Western defence. 16 Secondly, and at least as importantly, militant veteran politics (the ‘Stahlhelm’ veterans’ organization, for example) had been a major challenge to the interwar republics. 17 This made for an ambiguous relationship with the federal government and the occupation authorities, who feared the revival of this threat. While the occupying powers had initially prohibited all veteran organizations, the federal government, after 1949, sought their incorporation by establishing a mutually beneficial relationship with the aim of controlling them. 18
The veterans’ associations’ position thus developed out of their initial prohibition by the Allies. This prohibition of interest organization coincided with a situation which many former soldiers considered dire. 19 Even in illegality, informal groups were formed. 20 They rallied around social causes such as officers’ pensions, which were also abolished by the Allies. 21 Different social groups among the veterans had different interests. Accordingly, when it became legal to organize again, shortly after the birth of the Federal Republic, the multiple associations can be grouped around the special interests of war victims, of prisoners of war or of former career soldiers. 22 The new-born associations’ lobbyism was soon relatively successful, for example with the reinstatement of the payment of officers’ pensions in 1951. 23
Success presented the ‘Bund versorgungsberechtigter ehemaliger Wehrmachtsangehöriger’ (‘Union of former Wehrmacht members entitled to provisions’, BvW) with a conundrum. It posed the question of the legitimacy of its existence, considering that its previous purpose had chiefly been to deal with the pensions question. 24 Gradually, this led the BvW towards a ‘politics of honour’, 25 particularly as radical, competing associations such as the ‘Schutz-Bund ehemaliger deutscher Soldaten’ (‘Protective union of former German soldiers’) put ‘soldiering’ 26 and questions of ‘honour’ at the centre of their agitation. This was supported by a broad societal consensus seeking the ‘end, and even, to a certain extent, the undoing’ of the post-Nazi Allied purges. 27 This move also meant that the BvW came into much broader competition for the representation of this politics, as they were moving away from special social interests to a broad political issue that did not necessarily stem from veteran politics.
Developments in the organization of interests further sharpened this shift towards the politics of honour. The government sought to better control the veterans, but it eventually failed in its ambitions to form a single, unitary association. This push nonetheless led to the merger of BvW and Schutz-Bund into the ‘Verband deutscher Soldaten’ (‘German Soldiers’ Association’, VDS), which implied the fusion of BvW's established organizational structures with a faction more radically dedicated to the politics of honour. 28 Simultaneously, the foundation of the ‘Kyffhäuserbund’ in explicit opposition to the VDS project reinforced the emphasis on this politics, as it widened the competition for legitimacy. 29
The politics of honour circumscribed efforts aimed at the rehabilitation of the Wehrmacht, whose name it thought had been ‘defamed’ both by public opinion and by Allied post-Nuremberg jurisprudence. 30 These efforts at ‘collective rehabilitation’ 31 would later come to be known as the ‘clean Wehrmacht myth’, of which veterans were important distributers, while the story clearly also resonated with broader parts of the population. 32 The politics of honour crystallized in the veterans’ campaigns on behalf of the war criminals in Allied custody, whom, they claimed, had been unjustly convicted, and it was incorporated into the veterans’ rhetorical repertoire. 33 This was part of a political environment in which the old elite of the National Socialist state assertively demanded a more lenient attitude towards their past. 34 For the veterans, this was especially relevant in a campaign for amnesty for the war criminals 35 or in the successful inclusion of the politics of honour in governmental military politics. 36 While the veterans directed much of their agitation at government officials, they were also highly aware of the limits to governmental power stemming from the occupation statute. Significantly, therefore, when high-ranking former officers successfully pressured Dwight Eisenhower to declare that the Wehrmacht had fought ‘honourably’, 37 they were aiming at an occupation official.
The veterans’ new assertiveness was boosted by the negotiations over West German rearmament after the outbreak of the Korean War, because they came with a renewed government and Allied interest in the veterans. 38 Chancellor Adenauer's goal of integrating veterans into his politics was, for two related reasons, sharpened further: Firstly, in addition to lingering concerns over the Weimar experience with veterans, the government feared, in the light of some of their more radical statements, the veterans’ opposition to rearmament policy. 39 This situation was worsened by mass opposition to rearmament, which exacerbated the Federal Republic's severe lack of legitimacy in the eyes of much of its population. 40 Secondly, the former Wehrmacht was the object of Allied anxiety; the Allies had explicitly identified ‘German militarism’ as a key concern. 41 Indeed, integration politics, and particularly the EDC, was fundamentally shaped by this preoccupation. 42 In the context of the Allied right of control, the government had an interest in controlling the utterances and actions of the veterans in order to signal to the Western powers that the young republic was not under threat of a militarist relapse. 43 The veterans quickly realized that this political situation was a potential lever in their struggle for influence, and there arose a tendency to portray their cooperation in rearmament policy as conditional upon the fulfilment of their demands. 44
Thus, while the situation of the newly founded associations was tenuous, the VDS and the Kyffhäuserbund were clearly aware of the transnational dimension of their politics of honour. 45 The project of the EDC, or the fact that German rearmament was being planned in European terms, meant that the veterans also framed their engagement with this transnationalism as European. Their forceful assertion of the politics of honour was driven by their need to legitimate themselves first and foremost in the face of associational competition, 46 and secondly through the government's preference for a relatively wide, but quiet accommodation in closed-door negotiations with the Allies. 47 This precarious situation of veterans engaging in a transnationally structured politics of honour was the immediate context of their initial European outreach.
Ambivalent Europeanization
The veterans’ Europeanization was the expression of an assertive associational politics grappling with the transnational entanglement of their key interests, and soldierly honour in particular. There were two main phases to its development. The first saw the VDS seeking alignment with the European federalist movement. It did not manage to form an association with the European federalists, but the interaction established contacts and an argumentative plane that provided the basis for the second development. This involved both the VDS and the Kyffhäuserbund and saw both reacting to the initiative of the French general Antoine Béthouart. On his initiative and under his eventual presidency, the FEDAC was formed as an umbrella organization for veterans’ associations. The article will now describe these developments in more detail, before going on to show how the veterans carried their politics of honour into transnational interactions, then explaining why these interactions were called European.
Overview of events
In 1951, shortly after its founding, the VDS sought contact with the ‘Europa Union’, a German organization of European federalists. 48 The Europa Union facilitated a meeting between members of the VDS, the Europa Union and other organizations such as the federalist umbrella association ‘Union européenne des fédéralistes’ (UEF) and the influential French veterans’ association ‘Union nationale des combattants’. 49 While the participants noted some disagreements on the more contentious issues (like the war criminals question), the overall impressions were positive, 50 and a second meeting was arranged. This second meeting was attended by associations from all the states, in addition to West Germany and France, who were negotiating the formation of the EDC. 51 Clearly, the EDC project was the focus of the veterans’ ambitions. Again, the assessments afterwards were positive, 52 and the position of ‘permanent secretary’ was created, who would coordinate the veterans’ European efforts. 53 A later justification of these steps before the central committee of the UEF reveals the role played by ‘Europe’ in these negotiations: the issues discussed might have been ‘thorny’, but ‘all participants were attached to sincerely European sentiments’. 54
Even though the path of direct association with the federalists eventually failed, 55 it was nonetheless characterized by a pronounced engagement with Europe on the part of the veterans. For example, at the second meeting with the federalists, VDS officials and their European counterparts adopted a resolution stating the will to influence public opinion in a way that would ‘allow the evolution of free peoples towards a federated Europe’. 56 Furthermore, there was talk of fostering a Europeanist line within the VDS publication. 57
Meanwhile, the Kyffhäuserbund had not stood idly by; it had started European initiatives of its own. In fact, one of the five points explicitly listed in their statutes under their ‘purpose and mission’ was ‘comradely relations to veterans’ organizations abroad’. 58 Furthermore, a document listing the ‘goals of the Kyffhäuserbund […] affirms the community of European peoples’. 59 The driving force behind this was the former general Leo Geyr von Schweppenburg. Stemming from his time as a military attaché in London, Geyr had a wide network of correspondents throughout Western Europe. 60 When he came up against resistance within the Kyffhäuserbund, he drew on this network to establish contact with veterans outside of Germany. 61
Through Geyr's networking, the Kyffhäuserbund was invited to a conference organized by the retired French general Antoine Béthouart in Luxembourg in 1953, at which the foundation of the FEDAC was discussed. Béthouart was influential: he had reached the highest rank in the French military, and he had served as the French high commissioner for Austria. At the conference, veterans’ associations from five of the six EDC states decided on a final resolution which stated their will to form the FEDAC 62 with Béthouart as its president. Since Norwegian, British and Greek associations had declined the invitation to the meeting, all FEDAC members came from EDC signatory states. 63 Obviously, the looming Europeanization of the national militaries was a strong incentive for the veterans to join the FEDAC.
In Luxembourg, representatives of the VDS were also present. After abandoning their plans with the federalists, they now thought that negotiating ‘on the soldierly level’ (with the exclusion of the federalists) would be the best way forward. 64 However, in their endeavours in this direction, they not only built on previously established connections (e.g. to the Union nationale), but also argued based on positions they had arrived at in their interactions with the federalists. 65
There followed a long period of protracted back-and-forth. This was due, in part, to French inactivity, which stemmed from insecurity caused by the uncertain future of the EDC, 66 but also to in-fighting on the German side: as explained above, the Kyffhäuserbund was born out of opposition to the VDS. Geyr had led this opposition, and the conflict was still simmering as the FEDAC was being formed, which intensified the antagonism between the VDS and the Kyffhäuserbund. 67 Consequently, Geyr, who was positioning himself as the presumptive ‘head of the German section’ and hence vice-president of the FEDAC, 68 failed to obtain the necessary votes for this position. 69 This is how Siegfried Westphal, mentioned at the beginning of this article, came into play. As the head of the Verband Deutsches Afrikakorps (Association of the German Africa Corps), his assumption of the FEDAC vice-presidency was the result of an impasse in which neither of the strongest associations, that is, the VDS and the Kyffhäuserbund, could assume dominance. After the German in-fighting was thus resolved, and after the EDC had failed, the veterans finally agreed to meet at a constitutive congress, and in 1955, the FEDAC was founded. While this brief history of the FEDAC demonstrates that the veterans were making significant efforts at the European level, the following section will show that they strongly asserted their own interests within these interactions.
Transnational politics of honour
The veterans’ transnational outreach was part of the politics of honour. The veterans attempted to build Europe on their own terms, as their interaction with European federalists shows particularly well. Thus, VDS president Gottfried Hansen noted in a document created in preparation for the first meeting with the federalists that ‘primarily the question of the captives is to be broached’. 70 To accomplish their goals, Hansen advised they should ‘be the European par excellence’. 71 The VDS would continue to make this connection throughout the whole process, repeatedly justifying European steps they were taking as in the interests of the war criminals. 72 Meanwhile, the federalists aimed to gain the veterans’ associations as associated UEF members. 73 While divergent interpretative frameworks for the federalists’ actions exist, 74 their different background naturally led to tensions with the veterans.
This tension crystallized around one person. ‘[N]ames like Kogon […] make them recoil’, VDS Managing Director Heinz Trettner wrote, expressing the feeling that Eugen Kogon, the head of the federalist Europa Union, would not sit well with the membership. 75 Many specific concerns were brought up about Kogon, most of them boiling down to an unease with the leftist politics associated with him. 76 In reaction, and accompanied by a controversial internal discussion, there were some serious attempts to make Kogon palatable to the membership, including a lecture before the VDS board. 77
To overcome doubts around Kogon, the veterans attempted to integrate him into their own European designs. In an exchange of letters among the leadership, the proponents of association with the federalists praised Kogon's role in the negotiations with federalists and French veterans. His organization, they held, had contributed to ‘awakening a truly European spirit’. 78 Furthermore, they wrote, his expertise on the SS had helped in assuaging French doubts over Waffen-SS members in the VDS. 79 Thus, it was hoped that doubts over Kogon's politics could be overcome because his help could further the European politics of honour.
While the debate around Kogon already shows the veterans expressing their interests in European terms, this became even clearer when the veterans reproached the federalists for their allegedly insufficiently European commitments. Thus, Managing Director Trettner had his concerns about some of the French federalists’ refusal to work together with former occupation-collaborators: ‘But these are
Two other episodes involving the federalists underline the assertiveness with which the veterans carried this politics over into cross-border interactions. The veterans judged their European outreach to be important because they were also willing to accommodate their European partners with compromises in the domestic sphere. The episodes involve Henri Frenay, the president of the UEF and one of the most important voices in post-war federalism. Frenay had also been a leading figure in the French resistance and, even then, had put forward European conceptions in explicit competition with other post-war plans for international order. 84 The former French minister for prisoners, deportees and refugees was not one to shy away from confrontation, and it was in confrontations with him that the veterans’ Europeanization developed.
The first episode revolves around the publication of an article and shows how the Europeanizing interaction saw the ambiguous alignment of political positions. In the article, reacting to prompts by the VDS, Frenay argued for a better understanding of the Germans’ positions in the war criminals question. One can see how the article's title ‘So That There May be Justice’, 85 would have pleased the VDS. The association had the text translated 86 and widely distributed, 87 forcefully advertising its European connection.
Frenay's argument was still a far cry from the official VDS position, which was the demand for a general amnesty, 88 but the article's explicit connection of war criminals with European integration was clearly a move in the veterans’ direction. Similarly, the VDS's distribution of the text was viewed as a modest step towards the other side, since it contained the plea for the Germans to be more tolerant of the French stance. The actors themselves noted an alignment of positions, but there was some ambiguity: Frenay claimed that his ‘brutal positioning’ against general amnesty had ‘visibly worked’ 89 on the VDS, while in the VDS there was still hope that Frenay would ‘bring himself, in the interest of the goal pursued by him and us’ to embrace general amnesty even for the French collaborators. 90 The contradiction in these statements is striking, yet they were still both able to claim to be growing closer.
The second episode shows that the veterans judged their European connections to be important enough to effect a repositioning in domestic politics. It revolves around statements by the former general Hermann-Bernhard Ramcke. Ramcke, one of the many war criminals whose sentences had since been commuted, had said in a speech to Waffen-SS veterans that the ‘real war criminals’ had been those who had dropped the atomic bomb: ‘It is an honour for us to have been on the black list of the enemy, and time will teach us that this can become a list of honour again.’ 91 This caused an uproar in France, 92 and the UEF leadership immediately impressed their strong displeasure upon the VDS and included excerpts from the French press in an illustration of how statements such as these made the positions of those who were pressing for association with the Germans harder. 93 VDS officials promptly reassured them of their distance from Ramcke. 94 Deeply embedded in the politics of honour, the veterans were not in substantive disagreement with Ramcke's polemics against Allied war crime jurisprudence. Underscoring the importance it attached to its European endeavours, the VDS however quickly reached the opinion that it needed to appear distant from him if it did not want to endanger its European ambitions.
As in the first episode, the seemingly confrontational Franco-German set-up within the politics of honour paradoxically ended up bringing both sides closer together. This is in contrast to government policy, where a high-ranking advisor remarked that Ramcke's statements had been ‘infinitely damaging’ to his cause of helping the war criminals. 95 Frenay, on the other hand expressed his ‘deep satisfaction’ with Hansen's ‘very strong and very quick positioning’ and assured him that ‘[i]t goes without saying that if certain French statements should produce the same impression in Germany, I would be personally grateful if you could indicate this to us, so that we can take appropriate measures in due time’. 96 Effectively, Frenay was offering a quid-pro-quo. In both episodes, the aspiration towards Europe not only led both sides to adapt their positions, but also allowed them to obscure the interpretation of the other's position, hiding divergences behind a nebulous goal. By projecting an allegedly shared project, ‘Europe’ here acted as an anchor within this instability.
Pursuing this project was also a reaction to the veterans’ perception of the transnational fault lines underlying their politics of honour: being able to claim the publication of an article on the war criminals issue in France, and having a French counterpart issue assurances of a quid-pro-quo meant that the association's leadership was capable of plausibly claiming to be able to conduct pressure politics in the place where the question of their captivity was actually decided. Assurance of interventions by French counterparts and high-ranking French officials on behalf of the war criminals supports the impression that this was an important component in Europeanization as the associations continued to push transnationally for politics of honour interests in order to bolster their legitimacy. 97 The following section will explore the specific opportunities for this offered by European integration. It will also explain why the veterans ended up calling their transnationalism ‘European’.
European opportunities
The European label offered the veterans opportunities to get an edge over the associational competition, firstly because of the centrality of Europe in West German military policy, and secondly because it enabled claims to anti-Soviet continuity. This perception of rivalry is visible in the VDS's argument that ‘if we do not continue down this path with resolve, maybe in half a year the VdK and the BDKK will work together with the French Mutilés and we will be presented as reactionaries who are lagging behind the times’. 98 The metaphor of racing brings it home: the veterans saw themselves as in competition with the international efforts of other associations. 99
Europe remained central to West German military planning beyond the EDC. The veterans’ actions reflect this: when the FEDAC's constituent congress finally took place in 1955, the EDC project had failed. While the veterans were clearly initially focusing their efforts on the EDC, the European label held a promise for them beyond the supranational institutions. As a matter of fact, while there was some bemoaning of the EDC's failure, 100 the FEDAC was still considered necessary, ‘now more than ever’. 101 Some even read the EDC's failure as an acceleration for the FEDAC, because now they would be able to press ahead with it independent of the public controversy in France, 102 which saw opposition to the EDC particularly widespread within the French military. 103
Once more, competition was the reason why the veterans saw themselves exposed to justificatory pressures. Domestically, the big soldiers associations’ claim to be the ‘voice of German soldiering’ became even more contested after the formation of the Bundeswehr and the foundation of the ‘Deutscher Bundeswehr Verband’ (‘German Bundeswehr Association’). 104 Since German military policy continued to be thought of in the framework of the ‘defence of Western Europe’, the European label remained an important claim if one was to make statements about German soldiering. Aptly, the German entry into NATO was accompanied by their joining the ‘Western European Union’, the extension of the Brussels pact as the European element in the Atlantic alliance.
In addition to enabling the veterans to make claims within the spatial frame of reference of West German military policy, Europeanization was also necessary to them because transnational outreach was a commonplace in associational politics. One example is the biggest West German association for prisoners of war, which was also in touch with European counterparts. 105 Another, eyed suspiciously by the VDS, was Communist veterans’ internationalism. 106 The ‘International Federation of Resistance Fighters’ was financed by the Soviet Union and was sure to attract the Wehrmacht veterans’ ire with its emphasis on their resistance against the very troops the officers had once led. 107 Furthermore, on the opposite side, veterans of the Waffen-SS organized outside of the VDS and the Kyffhäuserbund and continued to propagate claims that their multinational units in particular had been practising European solidarity in the defence against Bolshevism. 108 The most important competition, however, came from the ‘World Veterans Federation’, founded in 1950. 109 This development was noted with great interest by the German veterans, who were initially not represented, 110 and their interest grew even further when the biggest West German war victims’ association joined in 1954. 111 In an echo of the situation between the World Wars, the international stage of veterans’ politics was quite crowded. 112
The competition with the ‘World Veterans Federation’ is instructive, as it underscores the specific promise the Wehrmacht veterans saw in labelling their transnationalism ‘European’ rather than, say, ‘international’. This again was the opportunity to posit an anti-Soviet continuity between Europe and their own careers as active soldiers, which was especially important because of the emphasis on the experience of soldiering in their agitation. Hence, a VDS official reasoned that the advantage over the WVF of European grouping would be its linkage to the EDC with its ‘goal […] to defend against Communism’. 113 This Cold War framework was embedded in the European label, a framework further sharpened for the veterans by the division of Germany. 114 In an attempt to justify its existence and its agitation, the transnational competitor WVF was claimed to be an insufficient forum for the global Cold War struggle. 115
The importance of claiming the European label as anti-Communist is borne out by taking a look beyond the German borders. While the World Veterans’ firmly anti-Communist outlook is undeniable from a historical perspective, 116 contemporary actors were sceptical. The French FEDAC partners in the ‘Union nationale’ were irritated with their government-required membership of a national umbrella organization because it also contained a Communist veterans’ association. 117 This criticism was transferred to the World Veterans, of whom they were only indirect members through the umbrella, with the underlying tension leading to harsh criticism of the FEDAC by the World Veterans 118 and to a jibe in return by the ‘Union national’ president. 119 Significantly, defending FEDAC against the criticism, the interim FEDAC president Béthouart spoke of the necessity to ‘eliminate any possibility of a totalitarian rebirth’. 120
As this shows, the specific European label offered important opportunities to Wehrmacht veterans struggling to legitimize their international interest politics. As a contested concept, Europe meant many different things to many different people, but in certain contexts these meanings could become very concrete and enable specific convergences. While this article has not focused on the French veterans in the FEDAC, there are indications of such a convergence around colonial and anti-Communist concepts of Europe. For example, in 1955, leading members of the Union nationale, now simultaneously leading members of the FEDAC, were displeased by a vote on the issue of Algeria in the General Assembly of the United Nations and tried to get the FEDAC to take a position on this. 121 The VDS saw the tensions with its own conceptions: ‘The whole question […] is actually quite distant to the FEDAC. […] On the other hand, the FEDAC would become highly fragile if we did not engage in this discussion […]. We can only take the position that Western Europe should be strengthened and that all points of friction should be got rid of (e.g., the question of people convicted of war crimes, and the Saar question), which for us still present a hindrance […].’ 122 In the end, the French side was successful in this confrontation. 123 While ‘Europe’ remained contested, this confrontation also indicates the potential it harboured for cross-border alliance building. Just like the Germans, the French thought their interests were best furthered through a specific form of transnationalism they called ‘European’.
Conclusion
The FEDAC's founding was symptomatic of the multi-directionality of Europeanizing processes in the context of ‘a maze of partially overlapping, partially competing organizations’ 124 of European cooperation. This is illustrated by the fact that the founding congress was joined by a Greek association that hailed from outside of the EDC signatories. 125 Apparently, the context of the EDC had initially only incentivized FEDAC membership in signatory states, while its failure caused an adaptation. Furthermore, in 1961, the association was merged into the ‘Confédération Européenne des Anciens Combattants’: 126 this umbrella association included Spanish membership. As Spain was not even a member of NATO at the time, this indicates that the veterans’ Europeanization, initially intertwined with the EDC, had set off on a separate path.
The veterans continued in their ambiguous relationship with European integration. This article features two of the standard protagonists in stories of European integration: the federalist pressure groups and the supranational institutions (here the EDC). Neither of them was irrelevant to the veterans, who interacted with European conceptions in multiple ways, contesting, appropriating and embracing them. However, they were not necessary for the veterans’ engagement with Europe; they continued pursuing a European network after the association with the federalists had failed, and they formed the FEDAC despite the collapse of the EDC. Furthermore, the federalists’ willingness to accommodate the politics of honour and the opportunities created by the EDC within this politics underline the ‘multiple directions’ 127 inextricably entwined in ambivalent Europeanization. The veterans’ cross-border forging of links was not a step on the path towards ‘Europe’, but a constant coming to terms with an unmapped territory.
While the introduction played on an alleged presupposition that Wehrmacht veterans would not be considered part of European integration history, this article has shown they were an active part of it: indeed, their European efforts were a crucial element of the way in which they conducted their associational politics within a situation they thought required both transnational and domestic pressure. Only through Europe did they think their interests would be best represented. Europe offered them crucial opportunities in claiming the legitimate representation of interests. This embeds the article in the strand of scholarship that details the ideologically murky traditions of ‘Europeanism’. 128 Europeanization appeared as ambivalent, as an interplay of contradictory factors. This article has shown that the Wehrmacht veterans’ politics of honour is better understood through their transnational outreach, and how, through interactions within a competitive framework, their own version of Europe defined Europeanization.
It would probably not be inaccurate to conceive of the veterans’ steps towards their European partners as tactical ploys to gain leverage on behalf of the war criminals, but it is unclear what would be gained analytically by judging their intentions as disingenuous. As this article has demonstrated, the war criminals issue was a genuinely transnational field, which was not understood as restricted only to the national purview of interest politics. Owing to the EDC plans on the horizon, this transnationalism needed to be expressed in European terms, which additionally offered the veterans an attractive way to claim the continuity of their agitation with their military careers. The veterans not only consciously picked up a vocabulary, but used it within interpretive frameworks from their own pasts. They assertively carried these frameworks over into cross-border confrontations which, in turn, impelled them to adapt. Hence, while not a story of the traditional ‘European saints’, 129 theirs was certainly a European story.
