To understand Germany’s reluctance about supplying tanks to Ukraine, it helps to understand the ways in which its World War II-era history informs its government today
To outsiders, Berlin’s reluctance to heed Ukrainian calls for battle tanks demonstrates the limits ofand Germany’s deep divisions over what kind of military power it should be, if indeed it ought to be one at all. But those within the German government offer a different interpretation: one not of indecision, but prudence, and a desire to be seen as keeping pace with allies rather than leading them.
“There are very good purely military reasons to send these kinds of weapons to Ukraine, for sure,” says Nils Schmid, the foreign policy spokesperson for Scholz’s Social Democrats in the German Bundestag. But if “something turns ugly and if, against all odds and all expectations, the war spreads, the responsibility will fall fully on the shoulders of Scholz and [U.S. President Joe] Biden and [French President Emmanuel] Macron.”.
“There are a lot of people who really have trouble with the idea of seeing German tanks roll east of Germany and kill Russian soldiers because it really creates a kind of image that reminds ourselves of World War II,” says Ulrike Franke, an expert on German foreign and defense policy at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “There is a big belief that weapons are no solution; you don’t solve conflicts with arms.
This concern is reflected in German public opinion: Just 46% of Germans are in favor of supplying Ukraine with the Leopard 2 tanks, according to, compared to 43% opposed. But it’s also reflected within the German governing coalition, the largest parties of which—Scholz’s center-left Social Democrats and the Greens—have their own pacifist factions.
“Germany is a team player,” says Sudha David-Wilp, the director of the U.S.-based German Marshall Fund’s Berlin office. “It wants to be in the mix, wants to help, but is somewhat reluctant to take the lead, even within Europe.”
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