With the threat of conscription looming over their heads, tens of thousands of young people have built an impressive anti-war movement in Germany over the last year. School Strike Against Conscription, a student movement, has held three nationwide protests, each drawing about 50,000 people. Following demonstrations in December and March, a protest in May attracted up to 150,000 people taking a stand: 10,000 in Berlin and rallies in more than 150 cities. Several international solidarity actions were also held across Europe.
A “die-in” protest which disrupted the National Veterans’ Day celebrations in Berlin on 21 June gained a lot of attention. Immediately after Defence Minister Boris Pistorius finished his speech, young leftists wearing red-splattered t-shirts lay down on the ground and shouted anti-militaristic slogans.
The next major strike is planned for (northern) autumn.
The immediate issue is the Military Service Modernisation Law brought in by the German government last November. Under the new rules, every 18-year-old German receives a compulsory questionnaire to assess their “interest” in military service. While enlistment is voluntary at this stage, there is widespread agreement that formal conscription will be the next step. This is supported by the latest data. Until now, the government has distributed almost 300,000 questionnaires—but only 530 people have volunteered to join the army as a result.
The questionnaire is accompanied by a school and university visiting program by the Bundeswehr (German army). In the first three months of this year, soldiers made over 2,000 visits, more than double the number for all of 2025. Targeting students approaching recruitment age, the “youth officers” join classes in political subjects such as social studies, history and ethics and lead discussions on such topics as “national and alliance defence” and “collective security”.
The energy the movement has unleashed is impressive. Many in the movement are completely new to political activism, and for many these protests were their first demonstration ever.
The numbers on the streets are the result of serious organising efforts by activists in the Nein zur Wehrpflicht alliance (“No to military conscription”). Nessa, one of the leaders in Berlin, told the website The Left Berlin, “We worked our asses off trying to reach as many people, as many schools, as many students as possible”. They postered and leafleted schools, and talked to student representatives, principals and parents’ committees. The alliance has multiple committees based in different localities, with stronger schools helping the weaker schools to organise.
The activists plan to keep up the pressure with a range of activities over the summer to build for the next strike. They hope to reach a wider audience through social media promotion and by hosting networking activities and workshops covering areas such as media production and dealing with the police, plus fun activities for bonding. There will also be a conference in Essen this month.
One achievement has been the close cooperation with the teachers’ union GEW (German Education Union), which is part of the planning meetings. The Teachers Alliance, which includes both unionised and non-unionised teachers, plays an important role in educating and supporting the students at school. They facilitate anti-war projects such as panel talks and therefore reach more students in spite of opposition from principals and parents.
A May protest was scheduled for Victory in Europe Day to connect the anti-war sentiment to anti-fascism and the rise of right-wing extremism. (VE Day marks Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender at the end of World War Two.) Hannes Kramer, spokesperson for the movement, told the Guardian, “We use this date to make clear the consequence of war and what the consequences of rampant militarisation can be”.
The slogans on the banners show the strength of feeling. “The rich want war, the youth want a future”, “Dying is not on the timetable”, “Friedrich Merz to the front!”, “Our only war is the class war” and “Education instead of army physicals”.
A popular chant in March was “Merz, lick my balls”, referring to the Chancellor Friedrich Merz. This riled the police so much that a student was arrested for holding a sign with the slogan. He is currently facing criminal charges for insulting the chancellor. Meanwhile, the slogan continues to appear, including as graffiti on the offices of Merz’s Christian Democratic Union, the country’s main conservative party.
As documents released in April demonstrate, the recruitment drive is to support planned massive changes in the Bundeswehr. The government plans to increase the number of active-duty soldiers from 185,420 to 260,000 by the mid-2030s and more than triple reservist numbers from 60,000 to at least 200,000.
The move towards conscription comes as part of a major militarisation push. Announcing the package in November, the defence minister framed the plans as a historic turning point. Entitled “Responsibility for Europe”, the government deems Russia the main military threat and foresees potential attacks on North Atlantic Treaty Organization members. Uncertainty about the US’s future role in the region contributes to a general atmosphere of alarm in the government. Overall, Germany aims to position itself as the leading player in European power relations and as the strongest conventional fighting force in Europe by 2039.
Germany is already the world’s fourth largest military spender, with an increase of 28 percent to €77.6 billion in 2024. The government recently amended spending rules to allow for a new increase to €152 billion by 2029, equal to 3.5 percent of GDP and more than the projected defence budgets of France and the United Kingdom combined.
With Germany now the largest European military supporter of Ukraine, the so-called Operation Deutschland plan situates Germany as a logistical hub for NATO operations in Europe, with military resources and also related infrastructure being developed to ensure a “war-ready” Germany.
These developments also tie in with Europe’s highly militarised and guarded borders. Known as Fortress Europe, these operations officially target asylum seekers and refugees. But they add fuel to the continent’s increasing militarisation.
All of this constitutes the greatest cultural transformation in Germany since World War Two. In the postwar decades, anti-militarist politics predominated. But in 2022, Chancellor Olaf Scholz of the Social Democrats declared a pivot in national priorities, which he termed a “Zeitenwende”, or turnaround.
In March last year, a BBC reporter published an article with the astonishing headline “Germany decides to leave history in the past and prepare for war”. It was astonishing because Germany is supposed to pride itself on its memory culture; its awareness of what German militarism has led to in the past. But the German state, backed by the whole establishment, is now gearing up for the new orientation.
Scholz committed €100 billion to boost the country’s military, supposedly to keep Russian President Vladimir Putin in check. But the German generals now say that that was just pennies—a report to parliament last year declared that the Bundeswehr has “too little of everything”.
The present government under Merz is trying to soften up the population to go along with this militaristic turn. Reports and announcements are released almost every day. Senior military figures claimed in April, for instance, that the threat from Russia represents the most serious challenge since the end of the Cold War.
As commentator Gabriel Helfenstein notes in The Left Berlin, the idea that the war is coming has now been normalised—41 percent of Germans fear the outbreak of a third world war.
The direct military preparations are accompanied by a range of proposed social transformations. For instance, the government plans to reshape the healthcare system for military purposes, diverting resources from civilian care, tying medicine to warfare and developing plans on comprehensive civil-military cooperation. The government has also announced a €500 billion climate and infrastructure package, which includes war-related measures such as a network of public shelters and upgrades to the country’s transport systems to facilitate troop movements.
Bundeswehr officers have been travelling around Germany identifying war-related infrastructure such as bridges, restoring bunkers and establishing evacuation plans. In a large-scale military exercise in Hamburg, the scenario simulated the city as a hub for troop transports and used mock demonstrators to train for the suppression of civilian protests against militarisation.
The students protesting in the streets are very aware of this environment. “The government and industry are preparing for war and we, the young, are supposed to become the cannon fodder. Neither have we even been consulted”, Hannes Kramer, the movement spokesperson, told the Guardian.
“Currently almost half of the federal budget is being spent on tanks, bombs and infrastructure to prepare the country for war”, he continued, adding that then as now, “big German companies, arms factories as well as banks, stand to gain ... we are very afraid that we have not learned the lessons from our history”.
The political circumstances in which the protest movement operates have led to a shift away from a single-issue focus. While the threat of conscription gave the initial impulse, it is clear that other issues must be addressed. As Nessa, the student leader in Berlin, said: “Often there are single-issue demos, and people have one topic which they care about very much, so they only go to those kinds of demos. We try to build the bridges”.
One feature is the involvement of various political forces, including the youth group of the political party Die Linke, and climate activists from Fridays for Future. A consequence of this approach has been the increased visibility of demonstrators wearing keffiyehs and holding Palestinian flags.
The two topics are linked by much more than general sympathy among participants. Germany is Israel’s second-largest supplier of major arms after the United States. And the relationship will expand after a formal agreement of cooperation between Berlin and Tel Aviv was signed in February. A recent partial embargo imposed by the government, to protest military actions in Gaza, will be little more than token—“high value” products such as tanks are exempt and German manufacturers are threatening to shift production abroad to circumvent the restrictions.
Perhaps even more importantly, the highly militarised Israeli society is increasingly a model for Germany. Its much-vaunted Staatsräson (Reason of State), which prioritises support for Israel, is undergoing a shift in meaning. Today it is less a supposed politics of morality or support for Jewish life than a return to a politics of strength. As scholar Daniel Marwecki has said, German Staatsräson was “never pro-Israeli, but it was and is pro-German”.
Both school strikes and the antiwar movement have significant histories in Germany.
During the German revolution of 1919, students set up councils modelled on workers’ and soldiers’ councils, which called for a large-scale school strike to demand the abolition of corporal punishment and improved school conditions. More recently, Fridays for Future drew large numbers of school students into climate activism.
In the 1980s, there was a huge movement against the deployment of nuclear missiles in Europe, linked to the movement against nuclear power. The largest protest wave in German history occurred in 1981, with 350,000 people protesting in Bonn (then the capital of West Germany). In 1983, more than 1 million people joined four simultaneous protest rallies. In East Germany, a pacifist and anti-nuclear movement carried out significant acts of civil disobedience that, in the latter part of the decade, developed into the movement that eventually brought the East German regime down.
Anti-militarist sentiment remains strong among the population. On top of the students’ organising, many other anti-war activities are coming up. This month, for example, there are actions planned against Rheinmetall, Germany’s biggest arms company, building new weapons factories in central Berlin for the first time since World War Two. With the likely introduction of conscription, we can expect this anti-war movement to grow and broaden.
