U.S. Forces’ Pullout Hits Germans in Hearts, Wallets

At the height of the Cold War, someone surely would have paid a mighty sum for a full-color, aerial photograph of America’s front line against communism at Bitburg Air Base.

Today, Mayor Horst Buettner gives the pictures away in a hard-driven bid to sell the entire 1,200-acre, 480-building compound. But so far his only customers for the former jet fighter and missile base are tire kickers.

“We get one or two inquiries a week,” Buettner says between cigarettes. “But I doubt we’ll find someone to buy it all.”

What’s the price?

“Oh,” he says, brightening. “You can have all of it for about $50 million.”

The Amis are going home, shipping out of this area of western Germany once known as “NATO’s aircraft carrier” because of all of the U.S. air bases. With American forces drawing down to 100,000 troops in Europe from 340,000, nearby Hahn Air Base was closed a year ago and, just to the south, Zweibruecken was shut down in 1991. The U.S. military will hand over Bitburg’s keys to the German government on the last day of September.

Neighboring Spangdahlem Air Base is supposed to remain open, but rumors run through Bitburg that even Spangdahlem will be closed in a couple years, and that, says the Social Democratic mayor, would be “a complete disaster.”

“Everyone appreciates that the Cold War is over and that it is good for humanity in general that the Americans don’t have to be here anymore,” Buettner says in near-perfect English. “Mostly, everyone just hates to see the Americans go.”

Buettner’s lament is indeed heard throughout the Bitburg area--where Americans have spent about $200 million a year on everything from construction contracts to beer steins--and in other such U.S. garrison towns that have developed hybrid cultures over the last four decades.

Until last year, 12,000 Americans lived in Bitburg side by side with a like number of Germans. With 2,500 intermarriages since the base opened in 1953--more than one a week on average--nearly every Bitburg family has an American son-in-law or a German daughter in America. And nearly every homeowner has had a GI living in guest quarters, paying rent that helped to pay the mortgage.

Although most Americans first heard of Bitburg in 1985, when a visit by then-President Ronald Reagan to a cemetery in which Waffen SS soldiers are buried stirred up much controversy, the town has long been a favored post for Air Force troops.

Bitburg is the home of Bitburger Pils beer and the Bitburg Warriors baseball team, whose German and American players won the state championship last year in the sub-AAA league. The German-style Im Kuhstall tavern is not far from the American bar Your Place or Mine. Rosie’s Garage, another American favorite, has closed with the departure of so many beer drinkers.

“Bye, Boys,” says Stern Magazine’s melancholy story on the departure of American troops--and dollars--from Bitburg. For unlike Panama, for example, where the U.S. presence has been regarded with as much suspicion as appreciation, Germany actually seems to like its American troops.

In Bitburg, the U.S. military was largely seen as a protector rather than as an occupying force. Residents say they felt safe with their American allies, even if the base made their town a likely target in a hot war with the Soviet Union. The entire country, after all, was a bull’s-eye in the Cold War conflict.

Bitburg was a small town of about 5,000 people in the 1950s when the Americans moved in with their broad grins and rock ‘n’ roll music. Bitburgers worked in the brewery, in construction or farming, growing hops and raising cattle. Then the Americans brought millions of dollars, thousands of jobs and that big, open, easy way that Americans have. They drove large cars and used electric clothes dryers. They celebrated the Fourth of July and hung their Christmas decorations in exotic ways.

In came McDonald’s right at the entrance to the base, and down the street Dave’s Tattoo opened for business on those meaty American arms. There were all kinds of Americans, blacks and Latinos, Southerners and Midwesterners. Living all together like that, they just seemed more tolerant, more open-minded than small-town Germans.

“When I was growing up, I used to love going onto the base,” says Noach Rosenzweig, owner of the 1950s-style Max Diner. “I liked the multicultural situation. I liked it because it was like being abroad in the States. Americans take things so much easier than Germans do.”

The 32-year-old Bitburg native wears jeans and sandals and an American take-it-easy attitude. His diner serves BLTs and Sloppy Joes to a background of jukebox music. Like most people in town, Rosenzweig speaks colloquial English. His wife is half-American, the daughter of a German woman and a GI. And although he has been to the United States twice, most of what he knows about Americans he learned in Bitburg.

The U.S. base was Bitburg’s window to the world. During the Cuban missile crisis, the base went on highest alert, warning residents that war might be near.

Bitburg students protested the Vietnam War and then were introduced to illegal drugs by U.S. soldiers returning from Southeast Asia.

Seventy-two F-15 jet fighters were stationed at the base, along with a Patriot missile battery. Pacifists demonstrated against the installation of a system to direct cruise missiles in the 1980s but failed to prevent it.

And there was the incessant, piercing noise of jet engines, of aircraft taking off for hot spots around the world and landing again, polluting the Bitburg skies in their practice runs for a showdown with the Soviets.

“Those old Phantom jets were the loudest,” says environmentalist Hermann Schaefer, who lives in a village behind the base. “And the exercises. They’d circle over here 30, 70, 120 times a day. One day the village of Gondorf counted 268 overflights.”

Some Bitburgers clearly felt a love-hate for the Americans, who wanted to be everywhere and police the world, who threw their money around back when the dollar was 4 marks to 1--it’s now hovering above 1.5 marks--and sometimes acted as if they thought they were better than anyone else.

But as the Americans pack up their belongings and moving vans file through town the way military trucks once did, nostalgia already has set in for the good old days. Scarcely a harsh word can be heard against the Amis .

“The Americans are such fun people,” says Birgit Platz, a saleswoman at the Auto Nova rental car agency. “I had a lot of good American friends here in Bitburg, and I am going to miss them.”

No doubt Bitburg will miss their business too. With the loss of its GI market, Auto Nova has given up car sales--once about 50% of its income--and is only in the rental business. The company already has eliminated the job of Platz’s American colleague, Keith Bearden.

“Ever since the Gulf War, our business has been falling,” says Bearden, who settled in Bitburg with his German wife four years ago. “During the war everyone was gone. When they came back we thought we’d have a booming business again, but no. There was uncertainty. People started saving their money to pay off bills just in case they were moved.

“The closure will make this place a ghost town. You take away $200 million a year and businesses close down. It’s just starting,” he says.

Mayor Buettner tries to minimize the impact of the drawdown, noting that nearly 5,000 Americans will be based at Spangdahlem, many of them living with their families in Bitburg. He hands out a brochure that shows Bitburg at the center of a radar screen stretching from Paris to Amsterdam to Munich--a perfect central location for industry in Europe, he says.

But businessman Heinz Bappert is not so upbeat. He sees a town with no great highway connections and no adjoining cities to provide ready markets. Bappert has made a good living in Bitburg, but 90% of his electrical business came from U.S. contracts that run out next year when he finishes renovations on apartment houses for Spangdahlem troops.

Then, he says, he doesn’t know what he will do with his 35 employees, part of the more than 2,000 Bitburgers whose livelihoods depend on American money. Bappert is looking for new contracts in the surrounding area but figures that his son eventually will have to move the family business elsewhere.

“After the Americans pull out, it’s going to be dead here,” Bappert says.

For some it already is. Harry Delges left his job at Merchants National Bank in Bitburg because even though the branch will remain open, “there’s no more chance to make a career there.”

Instead, he commutes an hour each day to a bank in Luxembourg and an hour back home at night.

“If people want to find work, they’re going to have to get used to this,” Delges says.

Some residents blame the Bitburger brewery for the town’s predicament, saying the beer-maker fought for years to keep out industries that might have competed for workers and driven up wages.

Other residents blame environmentalists like Schaefer, whose Defend Yourself group helped keep the Americans from building a second runway on the base in the late 1980s and from cutting down several acres of woods to do so.

“They wanted to put in a second runway 43 meters from the fence,” Schaefer recalls. “We knew they’d come back after they had it built and say that 43 meters was too close to the fence and ask for even more land.”

Schaefer says the Americans “dealt with the environment here like they had another one to replace it.” They spilled jet fuel, their pipelines leaked, they used defoliants and buried chemicals and ammunitions, he says. He believes that studies now under way will prove the area to be an environmental mess, a charge that the Americans deny.

As for those who think that the U.S. government might have spared Bitburg if it just had two runways, Schaefer only laughs.

“My opinion is that the Americans would have gone anyway, leaving us with a second runway and the woods chopped down. They don’t have the money anymore to support such a military presence in Europe,” he says.

U.S. Air Force Master Sgt. Bob Tobias doesn’t disagree. One runway or two, with such a large-scale drawdown, something had to give.

Tobias, a public relations officer, drives through the near-deserted base in an orange Opel with “For Sale” signs in the windows, past empty office buildings and hollow aircraft hangars. The runway is quiet, and Tobias is visibly saddened by the overgrown fields that used to be cropped as close as a soldier’s hair.

“It’s always depressing to say goodby to your friends, but here it’s worse because there’s not a chance you’ll ever be back. The base won’t be here,” Tobias says.

Like the mayor, he insists that there is life for a town after a base closure and points to Hahn Air Base, which he helped to shut down a year ago. Hahn is operating as a private landing strip for charter companies and a flying school. Germany’s police academy also is moving in there.

Tobias knows of a Belgian company that has shown interest in using a couple of the dark hangars at Bitburg to grow mushrooms. A fireworks producer has looked at them as storage space, and so has a tire company.

But Bitburg is competing with the other former base towns for investment now. Four years after its closure, Zweibruecken still has 30% unemployment and has replaced only about a quarter of the jobs that the Air Force once provided. Moreover, said Zweibruecken Mayor Juergen Lambert, life is never quite the same without the Amis.

“They belonged to us,” he asserts.

Amen, say Bitburgers.

“I grew up with Americans,” city worker Heiner Giller says. “They were part of this city.”