Fulda Gap

This edited collection examines the role of the Fulda Gap—located at the border between East and West Germany—in Cold War politics and military strategy. The contributors analyze the strategic deliberations of the Warsaw Pact and NATO, the balance of forces, the role of the local peace movement, and various other topics, while weaving together the history of the Cold War at local, European, and global levels.

Fulda Gap: Battlefield of the Cold War Alliances, which brings together both scholars and veterans, moves deftly from the strategic context to the on-the-ground reality of serving at the front lines of a cold war that did not erupt (at least there) for some four decades. These essays and recollections illustrate what was real and what was imagined about the Soviet threat, the NATO response, and vice versa. Chief among the particular delights are insights into Soviet and East German planning and force structure—as well as into the American experience at the border—and new evidence in advancing the historical narrative well into the 1970s and 1980s. Above all, Fulda Gap demonstrates how much we can gain from situating a specific place in its context and by placing the operational level at the heart of military history., The Fulda Gap remains a catch word for the dilemma of Cold War deterrence in the crises of forward defense at the level below the Single Integrated Operational Plan and the Indochina War. The authors in this volume comprise veterans as well as scholars of the US Army, the Bundeswehr, the Soviet Group of Forces in Germany, and the East German Nationale Volksarmee as found in no comparable work. My praise of this work arises from my own personal experience of this task in the 1980s, my advanced study and graduate instruction in this material in the US and Central Europe ever since, and my active participation today in the reconstitution of NATO’s deterrence posture in an unsettled Europe. Scholars will find what they need here, as will those in the here and now in search of the context of an old nightmare that has reappeared in the twenty-first century.

Dieter Krüger is associate professor at the University of Potsdam.Volker Bausch is former director of the Point Alpha Foundation.