Even avid observers of German affairs likely missed the first-ever celebration of its armed forces past and present on June 15, 2024. Last year’s preliminary event — falling during the month-long European football championship taking place in Germany — symbolized Berlin’s sluggish Zeitenwende. Now, amidst evolved trans-Atlantic circumstances and a new government, the national Veterans Day is back for real.
Two key challenges arise: Can the initiative propel a genuine cultural shift in the world’s quintessential post-heroic society? And does raising the profile of veterans help generate the kind of public awareness of defense matters that the country needs to back hugely consequential policy changes? The former should not substitute for the latter.
Memory Culture and Military Appreciation
More than 3,400 soldiers of the Bundeswehr, the Federal Republic of Germany’s armed forces since 1955, have died in service, including at least 119 on foreign missions. Armed overseas deployments began in 1993 when German paratroopers went to Somalia. After foreign operations were ruled constitutional if sanctioned by international law, contributions to U.N., NATO, and E.U. missions followed — as did incomprehension and disapproval at home.
Looking at the Bundeswehr’s largest foreign deployment to Afghanistan, Germans could not understand how they had to be “defended in the Hindu Kush, too.” Paradoxically, even as uniformed personnel were sometimes called murderers at home, the perception that Germans were not participating in “shooting wars” persisted well into the 2000s.
The first suggestion for a veterans’ commemoration day, in 2012, received timid support in a country still fundamentally ashamed by its militarist past. “A common joke among soldiers,” wrote one, “suggests that the only thing militant in Germany is its level of pacifism.” Given the country’s divided past, defining who counted as a “veteran” proved challenging. In 2018, then-Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen designated 11 million current and former servicemembers as veterans. Those with deployment experience felt their concerns sidelined.
It took Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine to force the veteran issue into the broader public. In April 2024, the center-left governing coalition, and the then-oppositional conservative parties, together finally created a day of commemoration. Proponents voiced hopes that the event would not just honor individuals and support their reintegration into civilian society, but advance debate between the military, politics, and society. Veterans’ and reservists’ associations have instead emphasized the need for personal visibility and respect.
Appreciation of the individual soldier, of course, is a huge step for a culture that has had, for good reason, heroics bred out of it. Even finding a suitable date had proved tricky: The existing Volkstrauertag provided continuity to war remembrance but had glorified militarism under National Socialism.
The overt embrace of warriors — and few Germans would use the term — forces an uncomfortable and long-dormant engagement with military power. After West German rearmament in the 1950s, regular troops long remained isolated from the country’s different stages of coping with its past. The widely-believed myth of the “innocent” Wehrmacht was busted only in the late 1990s, after reunification, when a special exhibition documented rank-and-file contributions to Nazi atrocities.
Today, neo-Nazi sympathies in the Bundeswehr still exist. But they’re lower than the average fascist resurgence in a country where the far-right and possibly extremist Alternative for Germany party is polling second. The post-Cold War army quickly became, and still is, a fringe establishment.
An Uprooted Army
Valuing German veterans won’t blitz the country back into militarism. Profiling the achievements and challenges of soldiers might generate some grassroots support for the much-maligned Bundeswehr, if only because the room for improvement is so significant.
The image of Germany’s armed forces is tanked. 182,000 uniformed and 80,000 civilian servicemembers make up a tiny fraction of the population (0.3 percent versus 0.5 percent in the United States). Until recently, headlines trended toward the comically inoffensive. Like its trains, Germany’s armed forces were, due to chronic underfunding and overbuilt bureaucracies, simply no longer taken seriously. Many Germans still believe the military incapable of defending the nation, and few would themselves decide to fight.
Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, Germany’s most trusted politician, has emphasized that fundamental overhauls are needed to cope with existential threats. While funding is now available, its efficient use still requires prioritizing. And severe manpower problems exist. Adding 50,000–60,000 soldiers looks unlikely without reintroducing some form of conscription, which was suspended in 2011. But a reform would likely require a supermajority in parliament.
Meanwhile, the Bundeswehr continues to shrink and age. Despite increasing recruiting efforts, the share of young people who regard the army as an attractive employer has decreased from 69 percent in 2018 to 49 percent in 2024. Around a quarter of recruits drop out of basic training.
A more viable veterans’ culture would help provide financial, social, and medical support for those in need. If it improves the military’s reputation, Germans will have come far. Few citizens will know that a veteran’s service medal has been awarded since 2019.
Debating Violence and Interests
Annual veteran days, however, should not be expected to cause a fundamental rapprochement in Germans’ attitudes toward security questions. Providing a well-defined arena for veterans’ issues might, indeed, have unintended effects.
One risk is that the celebrations take up the average German’s limited bandwidth for matters of defense and war. That future Veterans Days are treated as token, once-a-year instances of appreciation is not impossible. Engagement may become limited to feel-good gestures without advancing the necessary debate. Praising individual courage and sacrifice matters, but it should not create a substitute for discussing, across the breadth of democratic society, what defense actually means — and what is worth fighting for.
For a thank-you-for-your-service culture that has fundamentally detached soldiers from the political purpose of violence, look no further than the United States. Popular military appreciation is so ubiquitous here that it erases the average soldier in favor of unfailing heroes. Where supporting the troops means uncritical “patriotism,” it stifles debate over what national interests are and realistically can be.
German citizens and soldiers find themselves a long walk away from the world of superficial halftime-show appreciation. If the hegemonic United States is one cultural extreme of a shoot-first, ask-questions-later country (and that’s certainly the impression many Germans have), Germany finds itself on the other end of the spectrum. Deeply suspicious of coercion, the Federal Republic has long been a hapless economic giant without many ideas about hard power.
A strong public presence of armed forces does not cause substance in strategic debate. On the other hand, Germany’s strategic culture won’t grow without guidance. Precisely because the new Veterans Day intends to shape the collective memory of democratic soldiering, it’s essential to think about the military in terms of political goals: establishing what public ends, exactly, personal sacrifice can justifiably serve.
The choice to conduct an open-source event can be read as concern that Veterans Day remains a top-down initiative imposed by politicians. It stands to be seen what attention local bike tours, church services, concerts, and redesigning a roundabout can muster. No such efforts have been slated for Saxony-Anhalt, the stronghold of the Alternative for Germany.
But voter sentiment will be critical to allow urgent but lengthy policy transformations. An invasion on European soil backed by autocratic allies, and an impending “retreat of the United States from the European security architecture,” have forced Berlin into massive departures. The most dramatic: allocating up to 5 percent of GDP to defense.
The government needs to be able to communicate the need for such fundamental changes according to the gravity of threats. But they can only be understood if the detailed worlds of those even recently still mocked as overzealous “caliber experts” cease to be associated with warmongering.
Misunderstanding the Military
Another risk of Germany’s Veterans Day commemoration is that broad military appreciation, especially if offered in celebratory public form, will not only encounter a genuine lack of civilian knowledge about defense matters but might even contribute to false impressions.
It is an open question whether Germany’s incipient Veterans Days, if they recognize the acts of millions, will manage to differentiate levels of commitment. Not all face the same risk. Giving equal attention to the diverse, often invisible range of military roles will be challenging.
Without making and understanding such distinctions, however, only combat veterans may appear as “real” veterans who do the defending and deserve special, national appreciation. The American veteran archetype may have shifted from the greatest generation landing on Omaha Beach to that of a trauma-riddled victim of the so-called Global War on Terror. What both have in common is the misperception, fueled by culture wars, that true military service must mean kinetic “warfighting.”
This confuses what modern armies are asked to do. It also obscures what threats countries like Germany face and how they can be deterred. The hybrid wars of today defy the image of the heroic combat veteran. It’s a harder sell that war already spans civilian infrastructure, public discourse, and cyberspace — especially if attacks are prevented or invisible and disavowed.
With no Russians encircling Berlin, many Germans also still wonder where the threat is. How war in Europe could spread, and how Europe would fare, is not readily understood. The true costs of failing to credibly deter or unhesitatingly stand up to Russian aggression are collective and political. Moscow won’t bomb Dresden, but it will test whether Europeans are willing to risk dying for each other, putting the continent’s entire project of collective solidarity at risk.
Countering this threat not only needs the full, inglorious spectrum of the military machine — but also acknowledging that the backbone of defense extends far into civilian life, and that it is already under attack.
Germany’s new Veterans Day should be closely observed as a site of public encounters with military matters. If done right, it can showcase the scope of public service and civic achievements. Yet commemoration should acknowledge the dearth of a national strategic culture. Recognizing and appreciating the acts and sacrifices of veterans cannot be allowed to become a stand-in for a more spirited and informed debate on German security policy, and it should not involuntarily reinforce outdated stereotypes of soldiers and war that build on decades of neglect.
Christoph Nitschke is a scholar of German and American diplomatic and economic history. He currently researches and teaches at the University of Stuttgart, with past stints at Harvard University, the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C., and the University of Oxford.
Image: U.S. Army via DVIDS
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