Sometimes, it is the seeming footnotes in modern history that turn out to contain the most important lessons.

Adolf Hitler committed suicide in April 1945, but that was not the end of his government. His successor, Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz, relocated the German government to Flensburg, in the north of the country near the Danish border. Lasting about three weeks, his administration controlled only isolated patches of territory, what with the Soviets and American forces rapidly closing in on the Third Reich.

Winston Churchill, British PM, had a plan – to recognise the Flensburg administration. Why? So that all the millions of demobilised German soldiers of the Wehrmacht could be reconstructed into a new fighting force. His objective? To launch an attack on the Soviet Union. Two distinct yet related plans were drawn up for that purpose; codenamed Operation Unthinkable.

Churchill, while opposed to Nazi tyranny, maintained that the real threat was Soviet Bolshevism. The Wehrmacht, its soldiers overwhelmed by successive defeats, could be reconstituted as a fighting machine, footsoldiers in a new Cold War. But there was a problem; the German army was guilty of horrendous war crimes, and its senior officers were being arrested and charged for multiple offences.

Eisenhower, the Supreme commander of Allied forces in Europe, vehemently rejected Churchill’s proposal. The Flensburg government, already reduced to rump status, could barely be considered a credible authority given that it was basically a continuation of the criminal Nazi regime. Collapsing in a heap by the end of May 1945, it was officially dissolved in June by the victorious powers.

Rehabilitating former Wehrmacht officers, while officially rejected, was revived in a way by the 1950s. West Germany, occupied by the western powers, could be turned into a military bastion against the Communist East. That objective, demanded by the exigencies of the Cold War, dovetailed nicely with a domestic West German project initiated by former Nazi military officers – the rehabilitation of the ‘clean Wehrmacht.’

Rearming West Germany was going to be difficult, given the memories of the monstrous crimes of the Holocaust and ethnic cleansing perpetrated by the Nazi military. Former Wehrmacht officers, as well as civilian personnel in the West German bureaucracy, began the myth of the ‘good Wehrmacht’, German soldiers reluctantly carrying out the orders of the Fuehrer and his inner circle.

German officers were noble, motivated by patriotism and love of homeland – the SS and Gestapo were made the alibis of a nation. In 1950, invited by then West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer, a meeting of former Wehrmacht officers issued the Himmelrod memorandum. A forty page document, this statement exonerated the German military of its crimes, laid the blame for the genocide of the European Jews at Hitler’s door, and elaborated the intent of the German military to rearm.

In this objective, they found a surprising ally in US President Dwight Eisenhower. The latter made clear his respect and admiration for the German officer corps, unsullied by the worst crimes of the Nazi regime. By placing a strong distinction between the German military hierarchy and the Nazi party echelons, Eisenhower assisted in cultivating a collective amnesia regarding the German military’s criminal conduct and massacres, especially in the war against the Soviet Union.

The Himmelrod memorandum was so named after the 12th century monastery where the attendees met. If the honour and reputation of the German military was restored, and the stains of the Holocaust and mass slaughter of ethnic minorities removed, then the US and Britain could supply the West German military with all the armaments they needed. A new bulwark against the Soviet bloc was born.

One of the thousands of Wehrmacht officers rehabilitated and put in charge of West Germany’s rearmament programme was General Hans Speidel (1897 – 1984). Chief of staff of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, Speidel had a long and fruitful career carrying out the Nazi military’s mission in occupied Europe.

While conspiring with the coup plotters in the July 1944 scheme to assassinate Hitler, he was unaware of the actual bombing of Hitler’s headquarters. Using his connections with the anti-Hitler officers as anti-Nazi credentials, Speidel surrendered to Allied troops at the conclusion of the war.

One of the post-war architects of West Germany’s rearmament, Speidel along with his former Wehrmacht colleagues, waged an incessant propaganda campaign to rehabilitate the honour of the German army. Here was a German officer, ready and willing to be used as a weapon against the Soviets in the Cold War.

In May 1955, the West German state was officially declared as having the authority of a sovereign state – the Federal Republic of Germany. Its armed forces were now known as the Bundeswehr.

Speidel’s efforts in rearming Germany, and aligning with NATO, were handsomely rewarded. In 1957, barely twelve years after the end of the Second World War, Speidel was appointed commander in chief of NATO Allied forces in Central Europe. Speidel was one of numerous officers who managed the integration of the Bundeswehr, the reconstituted armed forces of West Germany, into the NATO command structure.

Why is all this relevant today?

Current German chancellor Friedrich Merz announced, earlier this year, that Germany will embark on a massive rearmament programme, with thousands of new troops to be recruited for a confrontation with Russia. European nations, such as Germany, will increase their proportion of GDP on military spending to five percent of the national budget. Merz pledged that Germany will have the strongest conventional forces in Europe.

In a way, Churchill’s original proposal for the Flensburg government as a militarised sledgehammer against Russia is coming to fruition.