Fritz Kraemer
10 Nov 2003
"Guides us to the transcendental"
Fritz Kraemer, who has died aged 95, was a refugee
from Nazi Germany who became chief civilian adviser to successive US Army
Chiefs of Staff and Secretaries of the Army; for much of the Cold War he
wielded an influence out of all proportion to the formal position that he held.
Kraemer's role was to teach the American
politico-military elite how to think geo-strategically and historically. Most
senior officers believed that the way of winning wars was through superior
firepower, underpinned by prodigious levels of industrial production. By
contrast, Kraemer sought to remind them of the unquantifiable, even irrational,
factors that governed the outcomes of conflict - such as culture, ideology and
psychology.
In his formal and informal seminars at service staff
colleges and at the Pentagon, Kraemer found a ready audience amongst the more
unconventional officers. His circle of admirers included Army Chiefs of Staff
such as Gen Creighton Abrams; Gen Alexander Haig (later US Secretary of State),
whom Kraemer met as a young major; and other luminaries of the Cold War such as
Lt-Gen Vernon Walters, later Ambassador to the UN and to West Germany; Lt-Gen
Edward Rowny, later chief strategic arms negotiator; and Maj-Gen Edward
Lansdale, a founding father of US counter-insurgency and reputedly the model
for Graham Greene's Quiet American.
The appeal of Kraemer owed much to the rigour of his
thought, but also to his dramatic appearance. With his monocle, riding crop and
strong German accent, Kraemer's Willhelmine-era style was already outmoded
during his student days in Weimar Germany - let alone in the strait-laced
bureaucracy of the post-war Pentagon. Inevitably, he acquired the sobriquet of
"the Prussian".
In fact, Fritz Gustav Anton Kraemer was born a
Rhinelander, at Essen, on July 3 1908. His father was a state prosecutor and
his mother the daughter of a Ruhr industrialist, and young Fritz was educated
at Berlin's Arndt Gymnasium, the LSE, and Geneva and Berlin universities.
Later, while studying for the first of his two
doctorates, at Frankfurt University, he could be spotted kayaking on the Main
river, wearing the scantiest of black bathing trunks and his trademark monocle
- with the pennant of the Imperial Navy fluttering on the stern in the rainy
breeze. Kraemer was known to take this to even more daring lengths. He would
pile solo into both Bolshevik and Nazi thugs in inter-war street brawls,
carrying the standard of the Hohenzollerns (the Maltese cross was the
antithesis of the anti-Christian Hakenkreuz, or Swastika, of the Nazis).
Inevitably he would come out bloodied, but unbowed. As a pre-Bismarckian
conservative of profound Lutheran faith, he regarded both Godless Communism and
Hitlerism as two sides of the same coin.
Kraemer left Germany in 1933 to work for the League
of Nations in Rome, where he wrote eight books on international law. In 1939 he
fled to the United States, leaving behind his Swedish wife Britta Bjorkander
(whom he had married in 1933) and an infant son. In 1943, he was drafted into
the US Army. One day, his commanding officer, Maj-Gen Alexander Bolling of the
84th "Railsplitter" Division came upon Private Kraemer dressed in
Wehrmacht uniform at an exercise in Louisiana, where he was shouting commands
in German.
"What are you doing, soldier?" inquired
Bolling. "Making German battle noises, Sir." They struck up a
conversation and Kraemer was soon assigned to his headquarters. When a new
detachment arrived, Kraemer told Bolling: "We've got 2,800 new
intellectuals in this division. Permit me to address them; otherwise, they will
not understand why they are here." One of them was a German-Jewish refugee
called Heinz Kissinger, and Kraemer rapidly became his patron; it was almost,
at times, a father-son relationship.
After fighting in the Battle of the Bulge, Kraemer
was captured by the defenders of Geilenkirchen. He nonetheless persuaded the
German commanding officer that an Allied victory was inevitable and the town
duly surrendered. For this, he won a Bronze Star and a battlefield commission.
But Kraemer was best known for outperforming the Russian champions in Cossack
dance when the 84th met the Red Army at the Elbe; he remained a top-drawer
tango dancer until well into his eighties.
Kraemer was also reunited with his family; his young
son, Sven Kraemer, was the only boy in that small Rhineland village whose
father survived the war. He inherited the family tradition of public service,
and enjoyed a distinguished career on the National Security Council staffs of
four presidents and 10 national security advisers - a 16-year unbeaten record.
A daughter was also born after the after the war.
In 1947, the "old Spartan", as Kraemer
dubbed himself, returned to America and from 1951 until his retirement in 1978
worked in his small office at the Pentagon. But Kraemer was no cold-hearted
advocate of Realpolitik. For him, the moral aspect of the struggle against
Communism and Nazism was crucial; it was the neglect of this dimension of the
Cold War which helped cause the breach with his one-time protege Kissinger, who
in 1969 had been appointed National Security Adviser by President Richard
Nixon.
After the breakdown of the near monolithic
anti-Communist consensus over Vietnam, Nixon and Kissinger concluded that the
American public would no longer tolerate the same level of overseas commitments
and began a policy of detênte with the Soviets - as embodied by the SALT I and
ABM Treaties of 1972. Kraemer disagreed with Nixon's and Kissinger's
pessimistic assessment of American grassroots opinion. He believed that the
problem lay, rather, with the country's intellectuals, who had succumbed to the
same kind of appeasing mentality as their predecessors in Weimar Germany.
Kraemer soon came to the attention of Kissinger's
main bureaucratic rival, the Defence Secretary, James Schlesinger, who urged a
tougher public line on the Soviets. But when Schlesinger was sacked by
President Ford in 1975, Kraemer contended that Kissinger was partly
responsible. The two men did not speak for 28 years until 2002, when Kissinger
rang Kraemer. Subsequently, the family invited Kissinger to deliver an address
at Kraemer's funeral.
Kraemer, who died on September 8, continued to be a
formidable presence in Washington until well into his nineties. At a packed
seminar at a State Department auditorium, a young official asked him:
"Isn't diplomacy the answer?" Kraemer whipped out the ceremonial
dagger which he had taken from a German officer. "You clearly have never
walked down a dark wharf at night and heard footsteps behind you,"
suggested Kraemer, pointing the implement ever closer to his now-terrified
questioner. "You have seen by your reaction that fine diplomatic words
don't really help in a dangerous world."
Henry Kissinger writes: Fritz Kraemer was the
greatest single influence of my formative years. We met in 1944 at Camp
Claiborne, Louisiana. We were both privates in the 84th Division. We were both
refugees from Germany, I by necessity, Kraemer by choice. He was 36 years of
age, I 19. He had two Phd degrees, I had two years of night college in
accounting. Kraemer spoke to us in German uniform with such passion and
erudition and on the moral and political stakes of the war that it was as if he
were addressing each of us personally. For the first time in my life - and
perhaps the only one - I wrote to a speaker how much he had moved me. A few
days later Kraemer invited me to have dinner with him at the enlisted men's
club at which he questioned me about my views and spoke to me about his values.
Out of this encounter grew a relationship that changed my life.
After the 84th reached Europe, Kraemer arranged to
have me transferred to the intelligence section. We worked together and after
work we walked the streets of battle-scarred towns at night during total
blackouts, while Kraemer spoke of history and post-war challenges in his
stentorian voice - sometimes in German, tempting nervous sentries. Kraemer
awakened my interest in political philosophy, inspiring my undergraduate and
graduate theses.
Kraemer's values were absolute. Like the ancient
prophets, he made no concessions to human frailty or to historic evolution; he
treated intermediate solutions as derogation from eternal principle. And
therein lay the source of our later estrangement. For the prophet, there can be
no gap between conception and implementation; the policymaker must build the
necessary from the possible. The prophet thinks in terms of crusades; the policy-maker
hedges against the possibility of human fallibility.
Kraemer could not accept this distinction - but he
will remain to me a beacon that, amidst the turmoil of the moment, guides us to
the transcendental.
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