U.S. Troops Are Enjoying Their Last Beer, Bratwurst

There will be fewer Tennessee drawls around the bratwurst stands. There will be less head scratching over why soccer teams don’t have cheerleaders. And, most assuredly, fewer tattoos will be etched and fewer beers sipped along the cobbled alleys from Heidelberg to Wiesbaden.

The American soldier, who has endured in Germany since the end of World War II and through decades of Soviet-bloc communism, appears ready to break camp. President Bush’s announcement Monday of plans to withdraw up to 70,000 troops from foreign bases over the next decade will hit hardest in Germany, where most of Europe’s 106,000 U.S. troops are stationed.

Because of the dispute over the war in Iraq, some Germans will be happy to see the Americans go. But others will not.

“From the bottom of our hearts we want the Americans to stay,” said Christoph Zoerb, spokesman for the mayor of Giessen, home to 1,000 soldiers of the 1st Armored Division. “It’s not just that our shops will lose business or 100 civil servants will lose their jobs. American soldiers have been here for 60 years. They symbolize democracy for us.”

The German Foreign Ministry said Berlin and Washington would work to limit the economic impact of the base closings. Germany plans to cut 100 of its own bases in coming years and wants to avoid shutting down installations in areas where the U.S. is trimming. The magazine Der Spiegel on Monday quoted Peter Lang, the mayor of Baumholder, as saying his town of 4,300 Germans “would bleed out” if the 5,500 U.S. soldiers left local bases.

Terrorism has replaced the Cold War as a global threat, and as dangers facing American interests shift, the Pentagon is streamlining its forces in Europe, redeploying some divisions to the U.S. while moving rapid-response units to bases in Poland, Bulgaria and other former Soviet-bloc countries. More than half the overseas cuts will be in Europe, and most of those will come from the 70,000 U.S. troops stationed in Germany. The rest of the cuts will be in Asia.

Europe and the U.S. have changed greatly since U.S. forces battled through the Black Forest and the Rhineland. Transatlantic alliances remain strong, but they have been loosened over the years and have not recovered from bitter differences over the Iraq war. Some Germans say it is time to close U.S. bases despite the economic consequences for a nation with a nearly 11% unemployment rate.

The Defense Department’s annual budget to operate bases under the U.S. European Command is about $13.7 billion. The command’s headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany, which oversees installations in 93 countries, generates $150 million to $175 million for the local economy each year. German regional governments are assessing the likely economic losses, and officials, who have known about the U.S. plans for more than a year, are searching for industrial development possibilities.

Friedberg, north of Frankfurt, with a population of 26,751, recently glimpsed the hardship that may come if the 2,500 soldiers of the 1st Brigade, 1st Armored Division, close their base in the city center. Most of the unit was stationed in Iraq this year, causing a 20% drop in business for Friedberg’s shops and restaurants.

“If the base closes here, we see it as a chance, not as a danger, for our city,” said Michael Keller, Friedberg’s chief councilman. “We’re not far from the Frankfurt airport, so there’s a chance for economic development.”

He said U.S. commanders had informed the city that “troops may go back to the U.S. or to bases in Bulgaria or Romania. They say it’s too expensive here.”

Many German officials believe that the Bush administration’s decision makes logistical sense. The number of U.S. troops in Europe has fallen to 106,000 from 315,000 in the last 15 years. But there are hints that the animosity between Washington and Berlin over the Iraq war and Germans’ pacifist tendencies have created an atmosphere in which saying goodbye won’t be that painful.

“We stood hand in hand with American soldiers in our town after Sept. 11, 2001,” Keller said. “But Germans were against fighting in Iraq. I told the Americans that Europeans have a different history of war. We have had millions dead. My town has seen and felt war.... Some people even began asking after the fall of communism in 1989, ‘Why are [U.S. forces] still here?’ ”

Such questions don’t come up much in Giessen, where the conservative Christian Democrats have been more supportive of the Bush administration than of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s Social Democrats.

“The politics of the German government have not been helpful in keeping U.S. forces in our city,” said Zoerb, spokesman for Giessen Mayor Heinz-Peter Haumann. “We’ll write letters to U.S. senators and committee members to convince them to stay. Maybe the upcoming presidential election will change things.”

He added: “The U.S. needs to hear [that] a part of Old Europe still supports it. I was born in 1968, and I still remember the story told by my mother of how, when I was 1 1/2 years old, I pulled the glasses off an American soldier while my mother held me in a checkout line. He laughed at me. I can’t imagine Giessen without American soldiers.”