Arndt Freiherr Freytag von Loringhoven couldn’t have had a worse start as Germany’s ambassador to Poland. Germany’s fraught historical legacy with the country – six million Poles killed in the Second World War and Prussia’s role in wiping Poland off the map from 1795 to 1918 – inspired Freytag von Loringhoven in his final posting to push hard to improve ties with Warsaw. But the Polish government saw things differently.

His approval as ambassador – a role he finally took up in 2020 – was delayed by members of Poland’s then ruling PiS party, who campaigned against him using Nazi slurs. They targeted him because his father, Bernd, was a junior officer in Hitler’s bunker during the final months of the Second World War. Ignored by PiS was that Freytag von Loringhoven’s uncle, Wessel, obtained the explosives used in the attempt to kill Hitler on 20 July 1944, and, after the plot’s failure, committed suicide.

They targeted him because his father, Bernd, was a junior officer in Hitler’s bunker

Posters went up in Warsaw with the ambassador’s picture next to those of Joseph Goebbels and Hermann Göring. ‘It hurt…to get hate-emails which addressed me as AmbaSSador,’ he says. The Nazi slurs were unjust – so, too, was the perception of Freytag von Loringhoven as a nodding dog from Berlin.

Despite spending much of his career in the shadows of the intelligence services, Freytag von Lorginghoven is startlingly outspoken about the flaws in Germany’s policies, not least towards Russia. Having served as Nato’s first intelligence chief, deputy head of Germany’s Federal intelligence service (BND), and also undertaken postings in Moscow and Paris, Freytag von Lorginghoven has now retired. Free from the constraints of diplomacy, his book Nie Budujemy Iv Rzeszy, or We are not Building a Fourth Reich, makes for damning reading in Berlin, not least over what he calls Germany’s ‘catastrophically flawed’ policy towards Moscow.

Freytag von Loringhoven tells me that, while he once pushed for cooperation with Moscow, he became a hardliner on Russia after the 2014 Crimea annexation. ‘We thought a rationally-thinking Kremlin would want close ties with the West to develop the economy and security ties with the West to safeguard against China,’ he says.

That assessment, shared by a succession of German leaders, was wrong. And Freytag von Loringhoven is particularly critical of Gerhard Schröder, who backed the Nord Stream 1 natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany built under the Baltic Sea, and would later become the project’s chairman, as well as a supervisory board member of Russia’s state-owned oil company, Rosneft. His successor Angela Merkel comes in for heavy criticism too. Brushing off Putin’s annexation of Crimea and the Ukraine war, she and her SPD vice-chancellor, Sigmar Gabriel, rammed through a second pipeline, Nord Stream 2 – in spite of fear and opposition to Nord Stream from Poland and the Baltic states, which was cavalierly dismissed. Then Polish defence minister (now foreign minister), Radek Sikorski, said the deal was like the Nazi-Soviet Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that carved up Poland in 1939. But few in Berlin’s government cared. Poland and ‘the Balts’ were seen as flyover country on the way to Moscow, where Berlin could wheel and deal with the big boys.

Arndt Freiherr Freytag von Loringhoven was Nato’s first intelligence chief (Credit: YouTube/ AHK Polska)

Also guilty of kowtowing to Russia is Germany’s mainly ceremonial SPD president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who earlier served as Schröder’s powerful chief of staff. In 2016, Steinmeier, as Merkel’s foreign minister, took the extraordinary step of trash-talking Nato exercises held in response to Putin’s war in Ukraine.

‘What we shouldn’t do now is inflame the situation further with loud saber rattling and war cries,’ said Steinmeier. ‘Anyone who believes that symbolic tank parades on the alliance’s eastern border can create more security is mistaken.’

Steinmeier now admits he made an error. But, like most SPD leaders who backed business with Putin, he never considered resigning. As for Merkel, she doesn’t even concede she made a mistake. Merkel says she was convinced trade with Russia would change the Kremlin and make conflict impossible. Her talks with Russia in a bid to stop the war ‘didn’t work but this does not mean it was wrong to try.’

‘Steinmeier is largely responsible for the policy towards Russia before the invasion of Ukraine,’ says Freytag von Loringhofen, who is merciless with the magnitude of Berlin’s Russia follies. ‘This, in my view, was the biggest failure of German foreign policy since the Second World War,’ he writes. ‘German policy towards Russia ended in spectacular failure on 24 February 2022.’

He sees indirect similarities between Merkel and Trump

Yet while the truth about Putin is plain for all to see, Freytag von Loringhofen says Germany continues to repeat its mistakes. Chancellor Scholz continues to drag his feet about every new weapon system that Berlin is asked to send to Ukraine. Scholz even shies away from saying that Ukraine must ‘win’ the war. Instead he mumbles that Ukraine must not lose and must continue to exist.

Sadly, with words not followed by deeds, Talleyrand’s remark on the Bourbons applies to much of the SPD on Russia: ‘They have learned nothing, and forgotten nothing’. The exception being SPD Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, a straight-talker on the present danger who seeks a big rise in German defence spending. But any money he gets will be too little, too late. Freytag von Loringhofen points out that, while Merkel could publicly say that Germany could no longer rely on the US for security under Donald Trump, Berlin failed to put its money where its mouth is. ‘She never started to re-invest in defence or reduce dependence on Russian energy sources,’ he writes.

Merkel’s claim that her Minsk accords of 2014 and 2015, aimed at ending fighting in Ukraine’s Donbass, served the key purpose of allowing Ukraine to rearm, is dismissed by Freytag von Loringhoven. ‘There was no such strategy.’

What’s more, he sees indirect similarities between Merkel and Trump. Merkel, he notes, was very accurate in her analysis with regard to Putin’s Russia or Trump’s America. The trouble is that ‘the chancellor did not draw the necessary policy conclusions.’ Merkel, he says, was good at managing crises like euro debt but she failed when it came to ‘developing far-reaching visions.’

‘Russia is far more dangerous than the Soviet Union in its final decades’

Trump, on the other hand, made some relevant queries but then also drew the wrong conclusions:

‘A collaborator of Donald Trump once told me that the president often asked the right questions, but then gave the wrong answers. Bold and thoughtful questions are not asked by idiots. For the American president to ask why the US always spends proportionally two to three times as much as rich Europe on armaments is perfectly legitimate. However, the conclusion that Nato is obsolete is not.’

Freytag von Loringhoven’s book ends with three warnings. First, that German Social Democrats like Scholz are fatally misreading the party’s hallowed Ostpolitik, the hallmark of SPD chancellors Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt aimed at normalising ties with the East Bloc. Under Brandt and Schmidt, it was a two-track policy: a dialogue combined with determination and deterrence. Negotiating from a position of strength. But while defense spending under Brandt was as high as 4 per cent of GDP, chancellor Scholz, aside from one-time, off-budget measures, is failing to achieve Nato’s 2 per cent target.

Second, he rejects as simplistic naivete Germany’s post-1990 model that, as Constanze Stelzenmüller has noted, outsourced security to the US, cheap energy to Russia and export markets for German goods to China. These policies – based on lazy tactics, not strategy – now haunt Berlin with Germany’s economy, Europe’s biggest, in recession.

The three great chancellors who shaped post-war Germany, Konrad Adenauer (integration into the West), Willy Brandt (Ostpolitik) and Helmut Kohl (linking German unity to closer EU ties), were visionaries who developed ideas of strategic importance, he says. Subsequent German leaders set the bar lower and focused on prosperity and stability.

Germany’s security, energy and export models are being demolished, but Berlin lacks the leadership and vision needed to chart a new course. Failure to explain a German grand strategy to voters makes it easy for surging far-right and far-left parties. As Scholz flails to regain support, he’s resorting to what German leaders have done for the past 40 years: raising social welfare spending. ‘Germany’s model is dramatically challenged and our society has…not grasped this,’ says Freytag von Loringhoven.

Germans’ fear over challenging Putin is linked to history

Finally, he warns that, while Germans’ fear over challenging Putin is linked to history, the consequences of failure to defend Ukraine are almost beyond comprehension. ‘When Hitler realised that the war was lost, he decided that Germany had proved unworthy of his grand plans and began to destroy what was still left of the country,’ writes Freytag von Loringhoven. ‘This is the scenario in the back of people’s minds now. They imagine a situation where Putin loses the war and presses the nuclear button.’

Yet merely agreeing a truce in Ukraine poses grave dangers, he notes. This risks ‘Ukraine turning out to be a giant Kosovo: a country permanently living on a foreign drip, whose finances and economy will collapse without outside support.’

The massive difference being that Ukraine’s population is 38 million, with six million refugees who’ve already fled to other parts of Europe. Kosovo has a population of just 1.8 million. Ukraine as a failed state would be Kosovo on steroids, he warns, and would shake the EU, Nato and the Western partnership to their foundations. And this, the ambassador and former spymaster notes, is all part of Putin’s grand strategy because it ‘will, of course, play to Russia’s advantage.’

‘Russia is far more dangerous than the Soviet Union in its final decades,’ he says. ‘The USSR became a status quo power. Russia is now an openly revanchist and imperialist state.’

But is anyone in Berlin listening to Freytag von Loringhoven’s warning?

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