In the opening decades of the Cold War, West Germans faced a terrifying geo-strategic dilemma. Located on the frontlines of the Cold War between nuclear-armed superpowers, they were forced to consider how best to protect their nascent democracy from the possibility of a devastating war fought with weapons of mass destruction. For Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and the right-of-center coalition that governed West Germany in the 1950s and 1960s, the answer to the country’s dilemma was threefold. Close rapprochement with the West and a strong national military were combined with civil defense—protecting the country’s civilian population and its societal and cultural institutions from the worst effects of a future war through a tripartite strategy of mass evacuation, protective shelters, and post-attack rescue and recovery units.
This chronologically and topically-organized dissertation examines the origins, evolution, and demise of the West German civil defense program during the Cold War’s opening decades. In doing so it presents three major arguments. First, as a result of unique historical and cultural influences West Germany’s early-Cold War civil defense program exhibited remarkable conceptual continuity with its Weimar and National Socialist predecessors. Second, the program’s political failure in the mid-1960s was due in large part to the inability of West German civil defense planners to make a clean break with the past. Finally, the Federal Republic’s early-Cold War civil defense experience provides a new understanding of the process by which West Germans individually and collectively worked to create a new national identity in the post-1945 world. Specifically, in rejecting the highly-centralized program proposed by civil defense proponents West Germans individually and collectively rejected the sacrifice of their democracy called for by Adenauer and his allies. In doing so, the dissertation concludes, West Germans made a momentous decision about the fundamental nature of the Federal Republic’s existence, its new and untested political institutions, and the structure of its society—a decision that has lost little of its relevance to contemporary democracies debating fundamental beliefs about personal freedom and the limits of government authority in an era of a global war on terrorism.