Fight against nuclear death

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The Kampf dem Atomtod campaign was an extra-parliamentary resistance movement in West Germany against the planned equipment of the Bundeswehr with nuclear weapons and their stationing on German soil. It was created in April 1957 and was active until August 1958, and in individual groups until January 1959 (student congress against nuclear armament). It is considered a forerunner of later protest movements, including the Easter March movement and the student movement of the 1960s .

prehistory

Arms race and military strategies

The problem of nuclear weapons had become obvious worldwide since the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. This began the primarily nuclear arms race between the USA and the Soviet Union that determined the Cold War . Since the Korean War 1950–1953, the USA threatened the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China with “massive retaliation” in the event of an expansive attack, which also meant nuclear counter-attacks on their heartland. NATO , founded in 1949, was incorporated into this military strategy.

In 1954 the Soviet Union reached a nuclear stalemate at "strategic", ie against the US itself usable atomic and hydrogen bombs . As a result, the United States began to deploy “tactical” nuclear warheads, atomic bombers and nuclear-armed short- and medium-range missiles in various countries in Western Europe, including West Germany. These were supposed to compensate for the Soviet preponderance in conventional tank and troop formations in Europe without immediately confronting the USA with the choice of either a world war with the Soviet Union or surrender.

The Federal Republic of Germany joined NATO on October 23, 1954. The Paris Treaties obliged them never to manufacture NBC weapons in West German territory. At the same time, it received military-political sovereignty within the framework of the NATO Council. The Bundeswehr, formed in 1955, as part of NATO, might have been involved in a nuclear war . The maneuvering game Carte Blanche showed the German military in June 1955 what the use of tactical nuclear weapons would mean for their country: It resulted in a fictitious loss of 1.7 million Germans killed and 3.5 million wounded, without taking into account the effects of radioactivity .

Since 1953, France and Great Britain have been pushing for their armed forces to be equipped with nuclear weapons. The main reason was that these were cheaper than the conventional upgrade of NATO by 96 divisions decided in 1954 . The NATO Council included the use of atommunition in its planning since 1954. Since December 1955, West German daily newspapers reported that the Bundeswehr would sooner or later be equipped with nuclear weapons. In September 1956, US daily newspapers reported that the Bonn government was calling for nuclear weapons for the Bundeswehr. In December 1956, the US Secretary of Defense declared that his country was in principle ready to deliver tactical nuclear missiles to its Western European allies. Just days later, Federal Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss announced that the armed forces had already decided to arm the armed forces with nuclear weapons.

With this, the Federal Government wanted parallel plans by the British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden for a gradual military disengagement of the superpowers in Central Europe from December 1955 and Soviet proposals for a nuclear weapon-free zone in Central Europe from March 1956, which the Polish Foreign Minister Adam Rapacki specified in October 1957 ( Rapacki Plan ) , come first.

First European initiatives against nuclear armament

As early as the spring of 1950, a world peace movement supported by communist parties in Western Europe issued an appeal in Stockholm calling for the destruction of all stocks of nuclear weapons and the cessation of their production. The call spoke of "governments that are preparing to unleash a nuclear war today and want the peoples to accept this as inevitable" and called for resistance .

In the Federal Republic of Germany the problem of nuclear armament was not discussed until years later. In the opposition to rearmament that arose from 1949 onwards , this topic hardly played a role. Only since the deployment of short-range nuclear missiles became known in Western Europe, calls against nuclear armament in general began to pile up, without even addressing the possible nuclear equipment of NATO and the German armed forces.

According to surveys in April 1954, around 39 percent of the Germans questioned rejected the installation of nuclear weapons on German soil. In May 1954, the EKD Council called for a general halt to the nuclear arms race; it was followed by the general assembly of the WCC in August 1954. According to the initiators, an appeal “against the preparation of nuclear war” in January 1955, organized by the West German KPD, received several hundred thousand signatures.

On July 9, 1955, Bertrand Russell called in Great Britain to outlaw a future world war, as this would inevitably be fought with weapons of mass destruction . Max Born , Albert Einstein and other physicists also signed his appeal . On September 25, 1955, the Association of German Physical Societies called on the governments of all peoples to voluntarily renounce violence as a last resort, since this last resort would mean self-destruction in view of the fact that nuclear weapons were actually included.

In June 1956 the synod of the EKD called on all Christians in a declaration written by Heinrich Vogel not to participate in the development and manufacture of weapons of mass destruction. In the same month, on the initiative of the doctor Bodo Manstein in Detmold, the Combat League against nuclear damage was founded . This first West German organization on this subject demanded the suspension of all nuclear tests , a ban on the manufacture and use of all nuclear weapons and the promotion of civil protection against radioactive dangers.

occasion

The Fight Against Nuclear Death movement was triggered by plans by the then CDU-CSU-led federal government to equip the Bundeswehr with so-called tactical nuclear warheads and launching bases for short-range nuclear missiles to be used on the battlefield. These plans became known through an interview with Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer on April 5, 1957, in which he played down these nuclear weapons as “further developments in artillery”. Thereupon 18 leading German nuclear scientists, led by Otto Hahn and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker , published the Göttingen appeal on April 12, 1957 , which pointed out the destructive power of these weapons and warned of the military and political consequences of atomic weapons.

course

In the further course a broad alliance was formed of the SPD , DGB , FDP , representatives of the former All-German People's Party , the EKD , left Catholicism , scientists and writers against the atomic weaponry. They formed a central working committee on February 22, 1958, which on March 10, called the population in a nationwide appeal under the title "Fight against atomic death" to resist.

The German Bundestag allowed by a majority of the CDU / CSU parliamentary group, however, on 25 March 1958, the establishment of such weapons under the command of NATO in the Federal Republic. As a result, numerous local and regional working committees of the campaign were set up, which carried out numerous demonstrations, vigils, church services and poster campaigns on their own. In the spring of 1958, mass rallies with a total of around 1.5 million participants took place in most of the major West German cities. Martin Niemöller was one of the prominent supporters . In addition, there were political strikes in many companies , including in Bremerhaven and the Volkswagen factory in Kassel . According to opinion polls, up to 83 percent of the West German population rejected nuclear weapons for the Bundeswehr and on German soil, 52 percent were in favor of strikes to prevent them.

Withdrawal and demolition

The leaderships of the DGB and SPD rejected such strikes and preferred the means of a referendum . The Federal Constitutional Court banned this as unconstitutional on July 30, 1958. The initiators then canceled the campaign.

In December 1958, the NATO Council decided that only the US should receive the “key right” to use nuclear weapons from Western Europe and West Germany. The short-range nuclear missiles already stationed remained under the command of the US Army. At the request of the French government under Charles de Gaulle, the Bundeswehr should not have its own nuclear weapons. This eliminated the immediate cause of the campaign, the possible nuclear armament of the Bundeswehr, but not that of NATO.

Historical classification

Heinrich August Winkler judges: Although the government's nuclear plans were not popular among the population, the campaign did not have the long-term result that was hoped for. The majority mistrusted a movement that "primarily addressed fundamental pacifists and could easily slip out of control by the SPD."

According to Joseph Rovan , the SPD wanted to use the excitement about the "atomic death" in the context of a normal election campaign. a. to propagate their demands for a nuclear weapon free zone in Europe. The authors of the program did not notice the illusory character of a demand "which would have fundamentally changed the military balance in favor of the Soviet Union, as it had much stronger conventional armament". The campaign did not pay off for the SPD in the 1957 Bundestag elections , but it contributed to the fact that the Bundeswehr was actually not equipped with nuclear weapons, "which, however, was never likely".

See also

literature

  • Hans Karl Rupp : Extra-parliamentary opposition in the Adenauer era: The fight against nuclear weapons in the fifties. Pahl-Rugenstein-Verlag (1st edition 1970), 3rd edition, Cologne 1984, ISBN 3-89144-116-9 .
  • "Fight the atomic death!". The protest movement of 1957/58 from a historical and contemporary perspective. Dölling and Galitz, Munich / Hamburg 2009. ISBN 978-3-937904-80-1 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ NDR: Researchers protest against Adenauer's nuclear plans. Retrieved May 25, 2017 .
  2. ^ Hans Karl Rupp: Extra-parliamentary opposition in the Adenauer era. Pahl-Rugenstein-Verlag, 2nd edition Cologne 1980, ISBN 3-7609-0548-X , pp. 30-39
  3. ^ Hans Karl Rupp: Extra-parliamentary opposition in the Adenauer era. Pahl-Rugenstein-Verlag, 2nd edition Cologne 1980, ISBN 3-7609-0548-X , pp. 65–72
  4. ↑ Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker: Foreword to: Dietrich Hahn (Hrsg.): Otto Hahn - life and work in texts and pictures. Suhrkamp-Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1988. p. 16. ISBN 3-458-32789-4 .
  5. ↑ rearmament in the exhibition: On the way to mature community
  6. ↑ Manfred Görtemaker: History of the Federal Republic of Germany: from the foundation to the present . Beck, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-406-44554-3 , p. 192 ( limited preview in Google Book Search [accessed December 27, 2016]).
  7. ^ Spiegel Online: German rearmament: When the atomic bomb dreams burst.
  8. ^ Heinrich August Winkler: The long way to the west II. German history 1933-1990. Munich: CH Beck, 2000, p. 183.
  9. ↑ Joseph Rovan: History of the German Social Democracy. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1980 (Paris 1978), pp. 218/219.