Germany’s intelligence chiefs are now stating openly what this is about: the population is to be prepared for war with Russia.
At their hearing in the Bundestag, the heads of the BND, the domestic intelligence agency and Military Counterintelligence declared that Germany is already under attack by Russia. BND President Martin Jäger described Russia as Germany’s “most dangerous adversary” and declared: “We did not seek this confrontation. Russia is forcing it upon us.”
This propaganda has a dark history.
In 1914, Kaiser Wilhelm II claimed that Germany was waging a war of “forced self-defence” against Russia. A few years later, German troops occupied Ukraine and sought to exploit its vast agricultural resources for the German Empire.
And in 1941, the Nazis once again justified their long-prepared invasion of the Soviet Union as supposed defence against a threat from the East. In reality, it was a barbaric war of conquest and annihilation. The invasion was also a decisive turning point in the Holocaust; around 27 million Soviet citizens lost their lives in the war. Ukraine, with its vast agricultural lands, and the raw materials of the Soviet Union stood at the centre of German expansion plans.
Today, once again, we are told that Russia is forcing the conflict upon Germany.
Yet Germany and NATO deliberately provoked Russia’s reactionary invasion of Ukraine through the systematic military encirclement of Russia and the anti-Russian coup in Kiev in 2014. Since then, they have driven the escalation ever further in order to expand the war and provoke a direct conflict between NATO and Russia. The German government is supplying ever longer-range weapons, developing new weapons systems jointly with Kiev and officially making the Bundeswehr “war-ready.” Behind this policy once again lie far-reaching geopolitical and economic interests in the East.
At the same time, the state apparatus is being strengthened at home. The BND and the domestic intelligence agency are being granted new powers of surveillance and intervention. Even the separation between the police and intelligence agencies established in response to the experience of the Gestapo and the Nazi dictatorship is being dismantled. The apparatus of repression is being geared toward growing opposition to war, rearmament and social cuts. The domestic intelligence agency is explicitly to be granted powers to intervene when “significant unrest among large sections of the population” threatens.
War abroad and attacks on social and democratic rights at home are directly connected.
Our warning is therefore: for the third time in little more than a century, the German ruling class is preparing for war against Russia.
This time, nuclear-armed powers confront one another. Such a war would end in catastrophe.
The Socialist Equality Party and the World Socialist Web Site condemn this reckless war drive. It must be stopped. To do so, the international working class must intervene independently against war, rearmament and nationalism—on the basis of a socialist program.