Was there animosity between East and West German military units? Such as the feelings between NATO troops and Soviet troops, and we're there any problems when amalgamating the militaries during the reunification of East and West Germany?

PART I

The immediate aftermath of German unification led to something of a liminal period in the military occupation of Germany. Although it was clear to many observers that unification a massive geopolitical shake-up and an end to the Cold War, working out the details of the post-1989 military defense was something that took up a great deal of time. Therefore there was a strange period in which Germany still had two rather large military forces inside its borders whose states (both the GDR and the USSR) had collapsed.

One of the priorities for the Kohl government was to hasten the withdrawal of the Western Group of Soviet/Russian (after 1991) Forces Germany (WGF) from German soil. One of the fears of the German government was that a hardline coup or further turmoil inside Russia would lead to the WGF remaining in Germany. Not only would this be a threat to German sovereignty, but also a massive domestic headache for Germany as German public opinion generally held the WGF in very low esteem. While Gorbachev and later Yeltsin countenanced this move, this was much easier said than done. The WGF had some 300000 troops in the former GDR along with the various support networks and civilians. Moving such a force back to the former USSR was not an easy undertaking, nor did the USSR have the barracks which to house the soldiers of the WGF. The dissolution of the USSR added a further complication as it cut off Russia from other military bases it could have used for the WGF and added more military "refugees" from Ukraine and the Baltics. Handling its Cold War military was quite a tall order for a Russian state in fiscal crisis. The German government recognized that it could expedite the removal of the WGF by offering to pay for both housing in Russia and its withdrawal costs. The German government eventually paid approximately 15 billion DM for a withdrawal of the WGF by 1994.

Tensions between the German and Russian governments still remained rather fraught during this period over the WGF. Many of the Russian negotiators grumbled that while the Kohl government was hastily showing them the door, American and British forces were allowed to leave at their own pace. Bundeswehr inspection of WGF military installations was often quite intrusive and led to a minor incident in which a Bundeswehr soldier was shot inspecting a WGF nuclear facility prompting a revision of security arrangements. Eventually, Russo-German negotiations came up with a compromise solution that Russian forces had the right to fire within their bases, but not out of them. Another source of contention was the status of the WFG's unmovable property like bases and installations. There was a hope that the sale of this property through a joint Russo-German commission would help finance the withdrawal, but this was a problematic contention. There was not much use for such bases in the post-Cold War environment and many of the barracks used by the WFG were installations that dated back to the Third Reich. Russian negotiators valued these installations at 10 billion DM, but their actual market value was much less. Most speculators were interested in the land the installations were on, and not the barracks themselves. Moreover, one of the revelations that undercut the value of the property was the abysmal environmental record of the WGF and many of these sites were heavily polluted. German negotiators managed to have the costs of environmental cleanup deducted from the profits of the sale, which made a deep cut into their total value. The Russian estimate of 10 billion DM sharply fell and one German estimate was that the value of the property was equal to that of the environmental damage done.

For the soldiers of the WGF, the four-year lead-up to withdrawal was one in which they had little to do. The collapse of the USSR and chaos back home removed a number of institutional checks on the WGF and corruption among the officers, already a problem prior to 1991, became rather notorious. Western press accounts of this period were often filled with tales of the illicit sale of weaponry and other military equipment on the black market. In 1994, a briefcase bomb killed Dmitiriy Kholodov a Russian journalist who was investigating WGF corruption. WGF soldiers received their pay in DM at this time, and the prospects of being paid in Rubles on their return meant they would receive a significant pay cut. Desertions within the WGF remained a constant problem during this period and there were widespread accusations at the time that Russian deserters were responsible for an crimes in the former GDR. A 1990 Chicago Tribune report on the WGF quoted Potsdam police superintendent claim that crimes committed by Russian soldiers was up 65 percent and they were involved 409 crimes in the Potsdam area. Similarly, a 1991 Der Spiegel article reported that Russian organized crime had both penetrated the WGF and was recruiting among its members for crimes in Germany. Adding to this dim portrait of WGF soldiers, there were also photos of WGF soldiers rooting around trash piles and other areas looking for items to sell back in Russia once they returned. The problems of endemic indiscipline became publicly apparent in November 1990 when a Ukrainian conscript took an armored personnel carrier on a joyride in Berlin, prompting a major shutdown of the city's traffic.

The collapse of Soviet power and the activities of the WGF created an alarming number of incidents between former GDR civilians and the Russian troops. During the Cold War, the Soviet government often kept the WGF isolated from the wider GDR population and enforced this separation by force. The end of the Cold War brought these two populations into greater contact and the resentments over the Soviet's formerly privileged position often boiled over. As the costs of unification WFG spiraled, a number of Germans felt that the payment for the upkeep and removal of the WGF was too much. When asked about the German government's payment for the WGF, the NYT quoted one young East German saying "I wouldn't send them a red pfennig." Garrison walls often had graffiti demanding that the Russians leave. This period often saw a number of reported shooting incidents against WGF personnel. The nature of these shooting incidents remains rather murky with some WGF officers blaming Germans while the German press tended to note that such incidents may have been the responsibility of a criminal element within the WGF.

Not surprisingly given these circumstances, morale with the WGF plummeted. A 1990 NYT article reported that in a Weimar officers' club, many of the career soldiers were dispirited and one anonymous officer attacked Gorbachev as "that bald bastard who has let the country collapse." In 1991, the Russians replaced the WGF's commander, General Boris Snetkov, with a much younger man. Although Snetkov's tenure was highly problematic, the NYT reported that the speculation among the WFG officer corps was that it was undesirable for a veteran of World War Two to oversee such an embarrassing withdrawal. For a number of Soviet veterans, the withdrawal was disheartening. The Toronto Globe and Mail's Russian correspondent quoted Colonel Sergei Ermachenkov, a military historian at the Russian defense ministry as saying

Anything that revises the results of the Second World War is very painfully felt by the veterans. They don't understand it. They are asking, "What was I fighting for? Why did my comrades die?" Everything they achieved is now considered useless, and a big part of their life was spent in vain.

A number of Russian commentators grumbled in 1994 about not being invited to participate in a 1994 parade celebrating the withdrawal of British, French, and American troops from Berlin. Although Kohl had participated in Russia's separate celebrations, the German Chancellor had explicitly forbid the Russians from taking part in the latter celebration. To add insult to injury, the August 1994 celebrations also saw one of Yeltsin's more infamous drunken performances. Although Berliners' response to the parade of the Western Allies was relatively muted, the German tone towards the withdrawal of the WGF lacked much sentiments. A number of press reports about the August parades noted that the WGF took pretty much everything not nailed down in their installations, including concrete slabs.