The troops manning both the Wall and the inner-German border were German. The Grenztruppen grew out of the immediate postwar period as the Soviet military government used the raising of police forces as a means to establish a proto-East German army. The GDR government shuffled the Grenztruppen to various ministries such as the interior ministry, the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Ministry for State Security. MfS, aka Stasi), and finally the defense ministry in 1961. Although nominally part of the Nationalvolksarmee (GDR military/NVA) until 1971, the Grenztruppen still had strong institutional linkages with the MfS as its portfolio of border control overlapped with the MfS. The Grenztruppen drew their recruits from the NVA. but it was an all-volunteer force. The ruling SED party saw that it was imperative to have its border control consist of loyalists, lest it lose control of the border. Thus the Grenztruppen received a mixture of both suspicion and perks from the state.

Whether or not the Grenztruppen were soldiers was actually a bone of contention during the Cold War. Despite their military bearing and equipment, the GDR held that its border guards were not part of the formal German military and just a police force. Thus keeping the Grenztruppen in an ambiguous position inside the defense ministry was not just a way to ensure it was isolated from the rest of the NVA, and the rest of the population by default, but also so that its numbers did not count in Cold War arms negotiations and diplomacy. Despite this, the Grenztruppen were integrated into the Warsaw Pact's war plans and many Grenztruppen likened their role in a NATO war as "suicide soldiers of the first hour" in which the lightly-armed border troops (at least in comparison to formal military units) would have suffered massive casualties.