Lapp, Joachim P. Arbeitsgemeinschaft ehemaliger Offiziere. DDR-Propaganda gegen die Bundeswehr

In the 1960s, a group of former Wehrmacht generals and officers living in the GDR or East Berlin sent up to 20,000 copies of the "Mitteilungsblatt ehemaliger Offiziere" (newsletter of former officers) to "comrades" in the FRG and West Berlin. The "Association of Former Officers" (AeO), founded in January 1958 in the eastern part of the German capital at the instigation of the SED, wanted to address ex-officers of the Wehrmacht and Federal Armed Forces officers living in the West via this sheet in order to win them over for an "understanding between Germans in East and West".

The work is based on the evaluation of the AeO activity reports (Military Archive Freiburg), the MfS materials (BStU-Berlin) and the 162 issues of the newsletter. The AeO, led by the SED and the political leadership of the NVA, opposed the rearmament, western integration and NATO membership of the FRG with national slogans that included verbal demands for the reunification of the fatherland. The organisation, the majority of which were former members of the National Committee "Free Germany" and the "League of German Officers" in the USSR, tried to influence "former" and active officers of the Bundeswehr and call on them to resist a Bonn policy that allegedly ran counter to German interests and was heading towards armed conflict. With a Bundeswehr led by "Hitler generals" now trying to undo the results of World War II. In the 1960s, the AeO's magazine primarily sought to discredit the Bundeswehr's military leadership politically and morally and to impute close former Nazi ties to its first commanders. From the point of view of the SED leadership, the AeO made sense in the particularly hot phase of the Cold War; in 1972, after 14 years, the association was wound up without a sound at the beginning of the emerging German-German détente. The official GDR military historiography avoided any mention of the organisation thereafter until 1989.