Word: straussed
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...Theodor Heuss, "at first it was not very easy to explain to the man in the street that it was his duty to do military service, after he had been told by propaganda that his previous military service had been bordering on criminal action." By this time, Franz Josef Strauss had observed that the man to get along with in German politics was Konrad Adenauer. When Adenauer, under Allied pressure, began talking up German rear mament, Strauss did too. It looked like a road to political power...
Crashing the Cabinet. In the face of heckling by table-banging Socialists, Adenauer once faltered. Strauss leaped to his feet, bellowed the opposition into silence as he argued that Russia was out to absorb Germany and that Germany's only hope lay with alliance with the West. "However much I like to see them talk to each other, I still would not like to see Dr. Adenauer and Dr. Schumacher [then Socialist leader] talk behind barbed wire in the Urals about what they should have done in the spring of 1952," he cried. Der Alte was so moved that...
Democratic Boots. At home, Strauss had to combat a deep-seated antipathy to anything that smacked of militarism. Invited to join the fight against the new threat from the east, the first reaction of German youth was "Ohne mich" (Without me). Soldiers in uniform were booed in public places, and the Socialist opposition attacked every defense measure as a "provocation" to the Russians, and a blow to the negotiations for reunification...
...psychological problems of creating the new German army were unique. Though it was to be a democratic army, its first officers obviously had to be veterans of the old Wehrmacht, nearly all of whom had been willing Nazi servants. Strauss set up a special "Inner Leadership" school in Koblenz where the officers were shown movies of Nazi atrocities, given handbooks on democratic treatment of subordinates. The government provided elaborate legal safeguards for the new soldier's rights and easily accessible channels through which he could air his citizen gripes. A West German soldier is told: "A command must...
...clear up any doubts about civilian supremacy in the new order, Strauss himself sacked one old-line general last year for refusing to wait for him in his anteroom. At a widely publicized affair, Strauss showed off his new uniforms, almost identical with what the army and Luftwaffe wore in World War II. But the jack -boots were different. "Gentlemen," grinned Strauss, "these boots are fitted with democratic civilian rubber soles...