Two Armies and One Fatherland: The End of the "Nationale Volksarmee": End of the National Volksarmee (French Expressions)

In October 1990 West German general Jörg Schönbohm and a small team of experts moved into the headquarters of the former East German army to effect the unprecedented: the takeover, in peacetime and without the firing of a single shot, of a well-equiped army that had been the Bundeswehr's main enemy only a few months earlier. What Schönbohm discovered and recorded in a diary was almost incredible: plans to conquer West Germany's major cities; blueprints for a surprise attack on West Berlin through the city's subways and sewer systems; papers documenting the planned use of chemical weapons. But there were also the more mundane problems of what to do with those 100,000 men whom the end of the Cold War had made superfluous. It is through accounts like this one that we are reminded of how dangerous a world we all lived in between 1945 and the fall of Communism.


Jörg Schönbohm, General staff training at the Bundeswehr Führungsakademie; from 1978 with the Ministry of Defense in Bonn before being put in charge of the new Bundeswehr Command East in 1990. Having served as Inspector of the Army in 1991 he assumed the position of Staatssekretär in the Ministry of Defense a year later.