In 1967, the West German Army appointed a new Inspector of Panzer Troops, the officer responsible for its tank forces. His name was Heinz Günther Guderian. A generation earlier, his father had built Hitler’s Panzer force, led it across Europe, and finished the war as Inspector General of its armored troops. Now the son held a comparable post in the army of democratic West Germany, a striking example of how deeply the Bundeswehr’s early leadership was rooted in the Wehrmacht.
When the Bundeswehr was founded on November 12, 1955, the date was chosen with care: the 200th birthday of Gerhard von Scharnhorst, the Prussian reformer who had once rebuilt a beaten army from nothing. Ten years after the Reich was destroyed, West Germany had an army again. The hard question was who would lead it. As the Cold War intensified, the Western allies wanted a West German force inside NATO.
But the only Germans with real command experience had earned it in Hitler’s Wehrmacht. Planning had begun in secret in 1950, when former Wehrmacht officers met at the Himmerod Monastery and drafted a blueprint for the new army. Even famous wartime commanders were consulted, among them Erich von Manstein. Rearmament was fought bitterly at home.
Many Germans, worn out by one war, wanted no part in building another army. Their slogan was “Ohne mich” — without me. Chancellor Konrad Adenauer pushed it through anyway, because an army was the price of West Germany’s place in the Western Alliance. Two men stood at the center of the rebuilt force.
Adolf Heusinger had been operations chief of the German Army’s High Command for most of the war and was standing beside Hitler at the Wolf’s Lair when the July 1944 bomb went off. Hans Speidel had been a senior staff officer in occupied France. In 1955, both put on the new uniform and became the Bundeswehr’s first full generals. They were not exceptions.
By 1959, more than 12,000 of the army’s roughly 15,000 professional officers were former Wehrmacht men, and every one of its first 44 generals had worn the old uniform. The constitution was new; much of the senior officer corps was not. These men became the founding generation of the West German army, soon joined by the actual sons of commanders whose names had filled the war’s headlines. Few German military names were more closely tied to tank warfare than Guderian.
Heinz Guderian had built Germany’s armored force in the 1930s, led it through the opening victories of the war, and finished as the army’s chief of the general staff. To the public, he was the man who made the Blitzkrieg work. Less well known was that his son had entered the same branch of the service. Heinz-Günther Guderian was born in Goslar in 1914.
He entered the army as an officer cadet in 1933 and was commissioned two years later. He was wounded twice during the Battle of France in 1940, graduated from the General Staff College in 1942, and served in a string of armored staff posts before becoming operations officer of the 116th Panzer Division in 1944. When fighting ended, he was taken prisoner and not released until 1947. His father, dismissed by Hitler in the final weeks of the war, surrendered to the Americans, was held for three years, and released without charge.
He died in 1954, one year before the Bundeswehr was established. In 1956, Heinz-Günther Guderian returned to uniform. He commanded a tank battalion, then a tank brigade, and climbed steadily: colonel in 1960, brigadier general in 1963, major general in 1968. In 1967, he was appointed Inspector of Panzer Troops, a position closely resembling the armored inspectorate his father had held under Hitler.
He remained in the post until his retirement in 1974. For seven years, he helped shape how West Germany’s armored forces were trained, organized, and equipped. His father had readied an armored force for conquest; the son readied a NATO force to defend West Germany against the Soviet Union his father had invaded. He later wrote a history of his old wartime division and lived until 2004, dying at the age of 90.
Guderian’s son was the sharpest case, but not the only one. Walter Model had been one of Hitler’s most relentless commanders, a field marshal repeatedly sent to stabilize fronts already close to collapse. In April 1945, his army encircled in the Ruhr, Model took his own life rather than surrender. He left behind a teenage son named Hans-Georg.
Hans-Georg Model had been pulled into the war at the very end, entering the Wehrmacht as an officer cadet in December 1944. As an infant, he had been baptized by Martin Niemöller, the pastor who became one of the regime’s most prominent prisoners. In 1955, he went looking for his father. Walter Model lay in a hasty forest grave in the Ruhr.
His son found it and had the body reburied in the German war cemetery at Vossenack in the Hürtgen Forest. A year later, in 1956, he joined the Bundeswehr and made a full career of it. He commanded a mechanized infantry brigade in Hamburg, later headed an army signals office, and retired in 1987 as a brigadier general. It was a far less dramatic career than his father’s — three decades of command and staff posts in a peacetime democratic army.
Another famous field marshal’s family had its own link to the Bundeswehr. Erich von Manstein, the German commander many Allied officers considered the most dangerous of the war, was convicted of war crimes by a British court in 1949 and released in 1953. Within a few years, he was advising the West German government on how to rebuild its forces. The father helped design the new army from the outside; one of his sons would serve inside it.
That son was Rüdiger. His eldest brother, Gero, had been killed on the Eastern Front in 1942. Rüdiger, born in 1929, served in the new army only as a reserve officer, reaching lieutenant colonel. His role was slight, but he had more influence over how his father would be remembered, keeping the family papers and in 1981 helping publish a volume of the field marshal’s post-war writings.
Not every general’s son entered the Bundeswehr. Manfred Rommel was the only child of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox, the one German commander the Allies openly admired. In October 1944, Erwin Rommel was forced to take his own life over his suspected links to the plot against Hitler. His son, by then a teenager manning an anti-aircraft gun, left his unit in the war’s final months and gave himself up to French forces.
When West Germany built its army, Manfred Rommel did not join it. He went into civilian politics instead, rose through the Christian Democratic Union, and served for more than 20 years as the mayor of Stuttgart, known for tolerance, dry humor, and his friendships with the sons of the Allied generals who had once fought his father. The most celebrated name in the Wehrmacht passed not into the new army, but into a democratic city hall. After his death in 2013, the city’s airport was renamed in his honor.
The Bundeswehr had been created explicitly to be different from the Wehrmacht. Its founders built it around a new idea they called Innere Führung, inner leadership. Shaped by reformers such as Wolf Graf von Baudissin and Ulrich de Maizière, the soldier was to be a citizen in uniform answerable to his conscience and the constitution, not an instrument of the state. Yet elements of the old army remained embedded in the new one.
Many of the officers who shaped the new institution had served in the Wehrmacht, and the barracks bore the names of Wehrmacht commanders. The wartime records of some of them were also hard to ignore. Adolf Heusinger, the Bundeswehr’s first Inspector General, had initial wartime orders that stripped legal protection from captured Soviet officials. In the early 1960s, while he chaired NATO’s Military Committee, Moscow publicly demanded his extradition, accusing him of responsibility for civilian deaths during anti-partisan operations.
He was never tried and retired with honors. Heinz Guderian retired in 1974. Hans-Georg Model in 1987. By then, the Bundeswehr had become a genuinely different institution, but it had never fully resolved how to handle the men, traditions, and reputations it had taken over from the Wehrmacht.
The issue returned sharply in 2017 when a young officer was arrested in a far-right plot, and the inquiry that followed found Wehrmacht relics still on display in Bundeswehr barracks. The next year, the Defense Ministry reaffirmed that the Wehrmacht as an institution could not serve as a source of tradition for the Bundeswehr and that a figure from that era could be honored only if his life showed something beyond skill in battle. Old names began to come down from the barrack gates. One base honoring an Imperial era general was renamed for a sergeant killed in Afghanistan.
But one name survived. The base at Augustdorf is still the Rommel barracks, named for the Desert Fox, the father Manfred Rommel had buried and pointedly never followed into uniform. The men who had served Hitler were gone.
What they left behind, their country is still sorting out.
