Word: bundeswehr
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Ever since West German Defense Minister Manfred Wörner announced last month that General Günter Kiessling, 58, had been dismissed from the Bundeswehr because of charges of homosexual activity, the case against the four-star general had been crumbling away like stale cake. Initially, Wörner grandly asserted that Kiessling had been mixing with "criminal elements" at seedy gay bars in Cologne for more than a decade and that this had left him open to blackmail. Kiessling, a bachelor, stoutly denied that he was homosexual or that he had ever visited the bars in question. Gradually...
...allegation came as a surprise to colleagues who had followed Kiessling's career. He became the youngest general in the Bundeswehr in 1971, took command of an armored tank division in 1976, then moved to a high-level staff job at the defense ministry in Bonn. In 1982, after Kiessling became a deputy to U.S. Army General Bernard Rogers, the NATO Commander, his progress was halted. A personality clash with Rogers apparently encouraged Kiessling to take early retirement effective next April. In September, Kiessling cleaned out his office at NATO headquarters in Casteau. Belgium, and shortly before Christmas...
Perhaps the most startling scene of all occurred in Bonn, where some 200 members of the country's armed forces, the Bundeswehr, paraded through the streets to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the organization. Fully 6,000 police were on hand to protect the soldiers from civilian abuse. Similar public military displays are now being largely abandoned...
...length of service varies from a brief nine months in Denmark to two years in Greece and is followed by time in the reserves. Many West Europeans also volunteer for their country's armed forces, of course; of the 495,000 members of West Germany's Bundeswehr, for example, 270,000 are volunteer, and over half of the 590,000 Frenchmen in uniform joined voluntarily...
...than $50 million, which he used to build an even more prosperous empire based on petrochemicals, paper, steel-and Daimler-Benz stock. Today the Flick Group is a $4-billion-a-year conglomerate of some 100 companies that make products as diverse as bathtubs and Leopard tanks for the Bundeswehr. After Papa died...