It was probably a German road planners’ joke. The road sweeping through the beautiful, pine-wooded valleys of southern Germany towards Baumholder — the largest American army base outside the United States — is called the B52.
Last week US President George Bush threw the lives of the town’s 4 000 German residents into disarray when he announced a major restructuring exercise that will see 70 000 US troops sent home from Europe and Asia — 30 000 of them from Germany.
Baumholder — a place where Americans outnumber Germans three to one — will be transformed by the redeployment that aims, from 2007, to cleanse the last of the Cold War spirit from the US fighting mentality and introduce a sleeker system of rapid intervention from bases chiefly in the US.
”The decision was overdue,” said Sergeant Dale Rosler of the First Armoured Division Artillery as he chewed on a hamburger in Baumholder’s high street. ”The Germans can take care of themselves, so can the South Koreans. We are the only superpower left and Russia is not a problem any more.”
Rasler (49) has recently returned from 15 months in Iraq. His German wife, Petra, said she is looking forward to settling down in Washington.
”This will be a ghost town, there is no doubt about it. The Americans are the ones who make us live,” she said.
The 41-year-old, who has a son, Ruben (17), married Rasler in April last year. She said every woman in Baumholder wants her own GI.
”Let’s be honest, it means no need to work, free accommodation, free schooling and all the perks you can get from an American passport.”
Rasler, who has four children from previous relationships, intends to retire and become a salesperson when the couple leave.
”Ruben will get a US army scholarship to put him through college and then he will have to give three years back as an officer in the US army,” he said proudly.
In Baumholder, off-duty soldiers cruise around in American cars with tinted windows and German plates. In the centre of town at Roland’s Bar, only the Bavarian-style pine furniture and the German spoken by the staff offer a hint that this is not middle America. The hills around the town are lined with six-storey blocks of flats — troop accommodation — and local businesses advertise with bilingual signs.
Baumholder has been a garrison town for nearly a century and there is no industry in the area. The town, in the Rhineland-Palatinate, just an hour from the borders with France and Luxembourg, does not even have the cachet of being a former steel-works town.
Everything changed in this farming area in 1937 when the Nazis evacuated 13 villages and 4 000 people to create the wehrmacht‘s biggest training zone. After the war, French troops occupied the military installations until 1951, when they were turned over to the Americans.
”There’s not a single person alive in Baumholder who remembers what this place was like before it began living from the leisure spending of soldiers,” said 77-year-old Manfred Müller, who was enlisted at 16 and spent a year in a British prisoner-of-war camp in The Netherlands.
Müller, a retired textile representative, said the Americans cannot be blamed for leaving.
”This place will be a desert. We had a taste of it when they all went off to Iraq. But times have changed. We are lucky they stayed this long,” he said.
German trade union Verdi says Baumholder and two other towns, Birkenfeld and Idar-Oberstein, will be worst hit by the US plans that, across the country, will lead to an estimated 80 000 German job losses.
Bruno Zimmer, the union’s district representative, said: ”We are hoping to keep some American units, but there’s no doubt that Baumholder is going. A US private soldier — who has no expenses, no rent to pay — receives $1 000 a month and spends at least 30% of that in Germany.”
Baumholder’s 13 000 US troops and their families have instilled a powerful pro-American culture in the town.
At Roland’s Bar, regulars speculated that it was German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s stance against the war in Iraq that led to the country being punished by the US. Others said this is nonsense, but added that, had the German government been more supportive of the war, perhaps the pill would have been sweetened. — Guardian Unlimited Â