Might Without Military

Clad in a rumpled suit and a grubby mackintosh, stocky, tousle-haired Theodo: Blank, who is West Germany's defense boss, looks nothing like the traditional great-coated, heel-clicking Prussian militarist. As secretary of the Miners' Union, he once told an Allied general: "I know you generals. You're the biggest trade union in the world, and if I had my way I wouldn't let anybody who served in the old German army back in."

After the embarrassing discovery of some Prussian-style thinking on his own staff, Herr Blank went on the radio to reassure everyone that he is determined to revive German might for the European Defense Community without reviving German militarism. Details:

P: There will be no German general staff. The 40 general officers required to head Germany's proposed twelve divisions, two corps commands and supporting units (about 360,000 men) are to be picked not by the army but by a committee of "independent persons with democratic spirit." The choices will then be ratified by the Bonn cabinet and by the other five nations in EDC. Similar committees will select the remaining officers (250 colonels, 900 lieutenant colonels, 2,000 majors, 6,300 captains, 12,300 lieutenants), and "Parliament will have the last word."

P: "This will be a citizens' army in uniform . . . We shall have no repetition of former German military training methods." Goose-stepping is out. Off duty, soldiers will be allowed to wear civilian clothing and will be required to salute only immediate superiors. (Formerly, an enlisted man entering a civilian restaurant had to salute every officer present and ask the highest-ranking for permission to eat there.) Civilian judges will participate in courts-martial and soldier-defendants will be free to choose their own lawyers and appeal their cases.

P: Soldiers will get vocational training and be encouraged to vote. Says Blank: "Democracy can be defended only by democrats and freedom only by those who experience it themselves."

P: Blank is careful not even to speak of German soldiers. He calls them "European soldiers of the German nation."

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