At the end of October, the Bundeswehr said it counted 181,383 soldiers in its ranks — that’s still some distance from the target of 203,000 that the German military hopes to reach by 2025. This has given rise to concern in times of Russia’s war against Ukraine, which has once again reminded Germans how quickly conflicts can erupt in Europe.
Since taking office at the beginning of 2023, Defense Minister Boris Pistorius has been thinking about ways to make the Bundeswehr more attractive as a career. He said he has received 65 concrete proposals from his ministry on recruitment and reforming training methods.
From 1962, the GDR also introduced general compulsory military service for all men between the ages of 18 and 26 for a basic military service of 18 months. The only recognized reason for refusal was religious conviction.
So if you believed in a god who told you it was immoral to serve in the military you didn’t have to, but if you believed it was immoral because you came to that conclusion by thinking critically about the arguments for and against military service, you were just fucked?
A bit too simplistic. First, the service has been drastically cut down to first 12, then 9 months in the 90s and 00s. Second, you could also argue with moral principles of ethics without mentioning a deity, at least in the 2000s, when I was in the service. We even had a guy shooting a rifle for the first time and dropping it after the first shot, stating he won’t do that ever again. He left soon after.
That is not how it was. You could refuse military Service due to “Glaubens- und Gewissensgründe”. The first being religious reasons, the latter being reasons of your own conscience. If you were physically able to fulfill your duty, but refused to do so, you had to do “Zivildienst” instead, which was a civilian service like caring for the elderly.
