In short, reunification led to a near wholesale cashiering of the GDR's Nationale Volksarmee (NVA) establishment. Although the new Bundeswehr accepted some 20000 NVA personnel for the Armee der Einheit (Army of Unity), most of them were specialists or other individuals that could maintain the little Soviet equipment that Bundeswehr elected to keep. NVA officers above Oberstleutnant were particularly not welcome in the new German army as the Bundeswehr felt that these individuals had been ideologically compromised by the regime. Evidence of Stasi collaboration also became grounds for dismissal and the end of their careers. The NVA was very top-heavy in terms of officers, with an officer to enlisted ratio of 1:8, whereas the Bundeswehr maintained a ratio of 1:40. As such, the few NVA officers that remained in the Bundeswehr were dropped to the enlisted ranks as the Bundeswehr establishment saw NVA officers as performing the same functions as a Bundeswehr NCO. By about 2002, only about 5 percent of the Bundeswehr consisted of former NVA personnel.
This rather unceremonious dismissal of the GDR's armed forces had a good deal of support within Europe as Germany rushed to reunification. One of the preconditions for Soviet acceptance of German unification and Germany's continued NATO membership was that the new German state's armed forces would not exceed 375000 men under arms. In theory, combining the NVA and Bundeswehr created one of the largest armies on the European continent, and this was unpalatable Germany's neighbors as the memory of the Second World War still remained a sharp political issue in countries like France and the UK. The resulting 2+ 4 Treaty included provisions to limit German armed forces.
There was also considerable pressure within the FRG establishment to drastically draw back Germany's military strength. Maintaining a large heterogeneous military of Western and Soviet equipment would have been an expensive prospect when Germany was facing the serious issue of economic reunification. Aside from some advanced equipment like the MiG-29, the Kohl government saw little advantage in keeping this hardware and most of it was scrapped or sold to other states. Within the Bundeswehr there was a perception that the NVA operated on principles completely different than their Western counterpart. One of the ideological lodestones of the postwar Bundeswehr was Innere Führung (inner leadership),a philosophical-military concept developed by one of the architects of West German rearmament, Wolf Graf von Baudissin, in which a subordinate was supposed to keep his head and disobey orders if the situation warranted it. The Bundeswehr officer was to be a citizen-soldier who would not mechanistically obey the orders of a superior and instead defend the Federal constitution. In the estimation of the Bundeswehr leadership, the NVA's close relationship with the Soviets and the SED regime meant NVA soldiers lacked any concept of Innere Führung. The idea that the typical NVA soldier lacked a democratic ethos also reinforced the general condescension the Bundeswehr establishment held for their Eastern counterparts. The Bundeswehr was one of the strongholds of anticommunism within the FRG and its leadership did not really consider the NVA to be true German soldiers. The NVA's tutelage under the Soviets and its generally poor standards of hygiene and soldierly bearing among its conscripts made the NVA seem decidedly un-German soldiers in the eyes of the Bundeswehr.
In the end, the soldiers of the NVA were among the losers of reunification. Up to 2005, retired NVA officers were considered Gedient in fremden Streitkräften (a veteran of foreign armed forces), by the Ministry of Defense. This was a source of much grumbling for NVA veterans as it was a status that explicitly claimed they were not German soldiers. The Ministry of Defense reclassified them as "soldiers serving not in the Bundeswehr", a status that still implies they were serving a foreign power. Nor can NVA officers officially use their retired rank as a title, außer Dienst (retired) in official correspondence, which is a prerogative of all retired Bundeswehr officers. . Beyond the sting of official non-recognition, NVA pensions in the Berlin Republic are usually less than their counterparts and many NVA officers were forced to retire several ranks lower. Nor did the NVA have many vocal advocates in the reunified Germany. The NVA's unsavory association with the Grenztruppen and the Soviets in the public eye meant that it was much more difficult to apply Ostalgia to the East German military experience as it was for other aspects of East German life in two decades after unification. especially for the NVA officers, reunification has been a bitter pill to swallow.
Sources
Clarke, David, and Ute Wölfel. Remembering the German Democratic Republic: Divided Memory in a United Germany. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
Herspring, Dale Roy. Requiem for an Army: The Demise of the East German Military. Lanham [u.a.]: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1998.