Carved out of the forest on the southwestern edge of Berlin lies an outpost of the Cold War that’s becoming more relevant by the day.
Officially, the Military History Museum located at the former British airfield of Berlin-Gatow documents the role of air warfare, from the first days of flying through to Germany’s reunification.
The real highlight is its collection of Cold War artifacts: fighter jets, Western and Soviet; East German helicopters, West German radar installations, NATO air-defense systems and transport aircraft; even early nuclear missiles.
It’s a sobering, at times unnerving, glimpse of a period that until recently was considered over and done with. But with the West again aligned against Moscow as President Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine grinds toward the 21/2-year mark, it now seems strangely current.
More advanced versions of the same weaponry on show at Gatow, from Patriots to MiGs, are being deployed on the battlefields of Ukraine. And as the largest European supplier of military aid to Kyiv, Berlin is again playing a central role — a reality sparking domestic opposition and spilling into the political arena, just as it did in the West Germany of the 1970s and 1980s.
Cold War-style espionage is back. Just last week it emerged that U.S. and German secret services had thwarted a plot to assassinate the chief executive officer of Rheinmetall AG. His company helps produce Leopard 2 battle tanks and artillery shells that are supplied to Ukraine, and is a key defense contractor in rearming Germany’s armed forces, the Bundeswehr.
Now, as then, the U.S. is the ultimate guarantor of security in Europe. For how much longer is an open question with a turbulent election campaign that could put Donald Trump back in the White House to undermine the North Atlantic Treaty Organization anew, and again clash with Germany.
Perhaps to short-circuit such an eventuality, Washington and Berlin jointly announced that U.S. long-range missiles will be returning to German territory from 2026, a move demonstrating America’s “commitment to NATO and its contributions to European integrated deterrence.”
While conventional, these “advanced capabilities,” including Tomahawk cruise missiles and hypersonic weapons still in development, are an echo of the stationing of nuclear-capable Pershing II ballistic missiles in West Germany in response to Soviet deployments in the eastern bloc — events also documented at Gatow.
Those U.S. plans in the early 1980s met with protests led by the nascent Greens movement, and caused ructions within Social Democratic Chancellor Helmut Schmidt’s government.
Now the Greens are in a coalition headed by another SPD chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and opposition to the deployment is instead coming from the political fringes. Left Party chair Janine Wissler has condemned the policy as provoking Moscow, leading to a “spiral of rearmament that with each step takes us closer to the brink.”
It’s a stance shared by Sahra Wagenknecht, who quit the Left to set up her own eponymous party, the BSW — where the B is for Buendnis, or alliance — on a platform that includes opposition to supplying weapons to Ukraine. The BSW is only a few months old but already attracts as much as 9% support in polls and far more in some federal states — more than enough to complicate future coalition building.
National surveys still show a majority favor helping Ukraine militarily, but a residual pacifist camp rooted in the Cold War peace movement is dismayed, and casting around for a new political home. Taken together, parties that oppose such aid have the support of somewhere between a quarter and a third of voters.
It’s one element that adds to economic stagnation, in-fighting and missed goals from climate to housing that explains disaffection with Scholz and his coalition; it looks unlikely to survive past next year’s federal elections. Like Helmut Schmidt, Scholz calls Hamburg home, but he’s not considered the same caliber of chancellor.
For all that, he is presiding over a government that is making historic changes to Germany’s long-standing positions on defense and security, and seeking a leading role in NATO against Russia, regardless of the future US commitment to that cause.
Asked about opposition to U.S. cruise missiles in Germany and the chance of triggering a new arms race with Putin, Scholz pointed to Russia as having engaged in an “unbelievable buildup of weapons that threaten European territory.”
The “precision-strike capabilities” offered by the U.S. deployment are needed while Germany works with France and the U.K. on developing a similar conventional deterrent to combat the threat, he told reporters at the NATO summit in Washington on July 11.
Trump takes credit for berating allies including Germany into raising defense spending, but Berlin could yet become an even bigger target for his second administration, especially given that his choice of vice president, JD Vance, is an outspoken critic of aid for Ukraine.
Trump professed his “love” for Germany and Europe in a Bloomberg Businessweek interview published July 17. “But once you get past that, they treat us violently,” he said.
Tensions with the U.S. have their Cold War parallels. Back in 1982, Helmut Kohl succeeded Schmidt, and the U.S. missile deployment went ahead despite widespread public discontent. Yet within less than a decade the Berlin Wall had fallen and the Soviet Union impoded — the singular event that shaped Putin’s worldview.
For Frederick Kempe, president of the Atlantic Council, today “Ukraine is the front line of a global struggle,” just as West Berlin was during the Cold War — a reality acknowledged by China and Russia in their “no limits” partnership struck on the eve of the 2022 invasion, he said in an online commentary posted July 15.
Gatow bore witness to the standoff with Moscow then, as a destination for western supplies flown in by Allied planes in a successful bid to break the blockade of Berlin ordered by Soviet leader Josef Stalin in 1948-9.
The effects of the current Russian leader’s actions can also be seen at Gatow.
On a recent visit, a group of wounded Ukrainian veterans toured the museum, which is unusual for its relatively unfiltered take on the past. Displays of items like Nazi aviation chief Hermann Goering’s outsized Luftwaffe uniform carry matter-of-fact descriptions that are mostly shorn of commentary.
They trailed from hangar to hangar in a procession of wheelchairs, accompanied by partners or friends. One man had new prostheses on both legs similar to those used by sprinters at the Paralympics; another wearing shorts revealing a terrible knee wound leaned heavily on a crutch to get around.
More than 1,000 injured Ukrainians have been treated in Germany, including almost 700 soldiers as of March, according to the Health Ministry. Most receive specialist care such as the fitting of prostheses. Ukraine’s first lady, Olena Zelenska, visited wounded veterans in a Berlin military hospital in June.
“Thank you to the defenders!” she said in a post on Facebook. “And thanks to Germany, which treats them as its own defenders.”
One of those defenders, asked at the military museum if he was OK, paused to consider. Offering a fist bump, he said “I am now,” and slowly wheeled himself away.
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(Aliaksandr Kudrytski contributed to this report.)
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