German Peace Activists Roll Back Into Action : Protests: The shock of the gulf conflict has touched a chord among the nation’s youth and political left.

The outbreak of the Persian Gulf War has brought Europe’s once-strongest peace movement back into action.

While large protests calling for an immediate halt to the war have occurred in towns and cities across the Continent, none has matched the size or intensity of those in Germany.

The movement was virtually dormant during the latter half of the 1980s, but the shock of the gulf conflict has touched a chord among German youth and people on the political left that has generated a wave of anti-war protest here far greater than that elsewhere in Europe. And this has happened even though Germany itself has so far played only a token military role in the conflict.

On the first days of the war, hundreds of thousands have marched daily, gathering in the centers of more than 100 cities, blocking railroad lines, invading television studios and, in Berlin, dumping pigs’ blood on the streets leading between the old Iraqi Embassy in eastern Berlin and the U.S. military headquarters in the southwestern part of the city.

Friday’s protests spread to the shop floor, with thousands of workers at the BMW and Audi automobile plants joining a call by the Federal Trade Union Federation for a token, five-minute strike at noon.

On Saturday, demonstrators gathered outside the Rhein-Main Air Base in Frankfurt, where more than 100,000 American troops have stopped briefly on their way to the war zone.

That vigil marked the latest in a series of protests staged in front of key U.S. military installations and diplomatic missions, urging a halt to hostilities.

According to Manfred Stenner, director of the Peace Cooperative, the movement’s national office in Bonn, there are two current aims: to exert domestic pressure to try to force Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s government to withdraw Germany from the coalition of nations aligned against Iraq and then force him to shut down American military bases that serve as transit points between the United States and the gulf regions.

“The United Nations resolution (setting the Jan. 15 deadline) was a terrible mistake,” Stenner said. “Germany can help counter this mistake.”

Although opinion polls show that the German public is overwhelmingly opposed to being pulled into the conflict militarily, observers do not believe that the peace movement is likely to force Kohl to cut back his political support for the allied effort, much less to call for closing the U.S. bases.

However, if mass protests continue to grow, they could embarrass the chancellor politically and possibly affect morale among thousands of dependents of American service people deployed in the gulf who wait at bases in Germany for their loved ones to return.

In the northern city of Bremen, peace activists have established an advice center where American or German service personnel can obtain information on how to desert their units and go underground.

Two of about 20 U.S. soldiers, who peace activists say have deserted rather than go to the gulf, were interviewed Tuesday on national television in the homes of German families who said they had agreed to hide the men.

A U.S. defense official said Saturday, however, that fewer than 10 of the 240,000 American service personnel based in Germany have left their units because they did not want to go the gulf.

The speed and intensity of the German peace movement’s revival has taken even those involved by surprise.

“The feeling was always there that people were against a war (in the gulf), but I’m stunned by the extent of the response,” commented Arnd Grever, a Peace Cooperative official.

In part, the resurgence comes with help from some leaders of the West German peace movement that tried to halt NATO’s deployment of U.S. medium-range Pershing 2 and cruise nuclear missiles in the early 1980s. The movement failed to stop the deployment, but it shook the country and government for months.

Many of these individuals have moved into responsible local and regional government positions where they can exert influence.

In the Saarland, for example, the Social Democratic-controlled state government has called for demonstrations to halt the war. Saarland’s state premier, Oskar Lafontaine, and Environment Minister Jo Leinen were key figures in the earlier peace movement.

“Some of us can do more now,” Leinen commented in a telephone interview, referring to the government’s call for demonstrations.

Elsewhere, in states controlled by the Social Democrats, school authorities have either suspended teaching regular classroom subjects in favor of discussions on the war or have released students to participate in outside demonstrations.

Many protesters are in their teens.

Among other factors driving Germany’s peace movement:

* A deep sense of personal responsibility to act in some way to try to stop the war, a responsibility drilled into German schoolchildren in the context of Germany’s failure to resist the Third Reich.

“I don’t ever want to be asked by my children why I didn’t do something to stop something I believed was wrong,” commented a young woman named Kristina. (Confrontations between parents and children were one of the most emotionally traumatic aspects of post-World War II Germany.)

* A mixture of anger and guilt that parts of Iraq’s military arsenal, including its chemical weapons potential, were developed with German equipment and/or German technology.

A list of companies alleged to have violated the U.N. embargo against Iraq presented last week to German authorities by Secretary of State James A. Baker III contained more than 100 German companies, highest of any Western country.

* A traditional strain of German pacifism that has only been reinforced with the absorption of the former East German Communist state.

During last week’s emergency parliamentary debate on the gulf crisis, Communist leader Gregor Gysi and other eastern German members of Parliament were the most vehement critics of Germany’s indirect participation in the gulf alliance.

Germany, of course, isn’t the only country in Europe where protesters have taken to the streets.

In Paris, Rome, Brussels and other capitals, tens of thousands have called for peace.

In France, where organizers estimated 100,000 turned out across the country eight days ago, demonstrations have already begun to drop off. A call by the country’s small, impotent Greens party for a protest in central Paris simply never materialized.

In Spain, an anti-war movement, fueled by a suspicion of American military power nurtured though long years of U.S. support for the regime of the late dictator Francisco Franco, has been able to muster impressive numbers on the streets of Madrid, Barcelona and other cities. In Belgium, the war has reunited diverse organizations that were last together in 1986 to prevent deployment of cruise missiles in that country.

“The structure of the movement continued to exist after 1986, said Francois Vercammen, a leader of the Socialist Workers Party in Belgium. “When the threat of war came to the gulf, the people came back together.”

So far, however, these movements have failed to match Germany’s strength of numbers.

“People (in Germany) feel the risks directly,” said the Saarland’s Leinen, explaining the return to activism. “We’re 2,000 kilometers (actually 2,000 miles) away, but also very near. I’ve just ordered special security measures on our nuclear plants (against possible terrorist attack). If oil wells are set on fire, the (pollution) effects will be felt here too.”

Earlier, the decline of East-West tensions and the European revolutions of 1989 had reduced Germany’s peace movement to virtual insignificance. During all of 1988, for example, its biggest action was to draw 5,000 demonstrators against the construction of a nuclear bunker near the city of Aachen.

The movement’s coordinating committee was dissolved in 1989 and replaced by the Peace Cooperative, which today, as the lone nationwide peace group, acts more as an information clearinghouse than a national coordinator.

On the day Iraq invaded Kuwait, barely 20 people showed up to protest in front of the Iraqi and U.S. embassies, and as recently as November, only 6,000 appeared for a rally in Bonn under the banner, “No Blood for Oil.”

According to organizers, the recent protests have all been either spontaneous or hastily organized local affairs.

The Peace Cooperative’s Stenner said that planning is now under way for the movement’s first attempt in several years to gather a huge crowd in a single city on Jan 26 in Bonn.

Once again, he and others say, the coalition of trade unions, leftist political parties, students and churches appears to be coming together.

“We’re hoping for at least 150,000,” he said.

Speaking of the role of the press as a “fourth” political force in the country after the traditional executive, legislative and judicial powers, Stenner said, “We’ve (the peace movement) got to become a fifth force, where in practice we’ve been a fifth wheel.”

Times staff writers Rone Tempest in Paris, Joel Havemann in Brussels and Stanley Meisler in Barcelona contributed to this article.