Germany’s Vexing Debate: What Makes a Military Veteran?

“A lot of Germans think of us as murderers. They hate us,” he told me at a gathering of German combat veterans in Potsdam. “And those that don’t hate us couldn’t care less about us.”

Alex is one of roughly 400,000 veterans here who were sent abroad by the German military, or Bundeswehr, in recent decades to serve in places as diverse as Afghanistan, Kosovo, and Mali. And he is not alone in feeling frustrated and angry.

To be sure, other countries have disaffected veterans: In a survey of American veterans published in 2015, just 22 percent said they believed that the federal government treated them well. But because of Germany’s tortured 20th-century history—two humiliating world wars, followed by more than four decades of Cold War division—and the deeply entrenched pacifism that resulted, the country’s struggle to forge policies to support its veterans is in many ways unique. Today, nearly 75 years after the end of World War II and the devastation left by the Nazis, Germany remains deeply ambivalent about its military.

There is no Veterans Day here to honor soldiers like Alex, and veterans aren’t celebrated at sporting events or other public occasions as they are in the United States and other European countries. The memorials erected in recent years to remember Germans who died in foreign wars are not prominently displayed, like those for American soldiers on the Mall in Washington, but rather hidden on a barren side street near the defense ministry and behind fences on a military base south of the capital. Few politicians speak openly about Germany’s combat veterans, and the Bundeswehr does not recognize those who fought abroad as a distinct group. Even the term veteran remains tainted by associations with the Nazis.