WEST GERMANY: Military Realism

In old Munich there was a butcher named Strauss who bought poultry from a breeder named Heinrich Himmler. Opposite the Strauss butchershop, at No. 50 Schellingstrasse, Heinrich Hoffmann owned a photographic shop; a frequent visitor was a pale man with a wispy mustache named Adolf Hitler, who wore a trench coat and nervously slapped his boots with a dog whip. A goggle-eyed witness of the spectacular rise of Hitler, Himmler & Co. was the butcher's stocky son, Franz Josef. Catching his son distributing Nazi propaganda one day, Butcher Strauss, a staunch Catholic, gave the boy a thrashing right there in the Schellingstrasse. Said Franz Josef Strauss, recalling the incident recently: "That was my first experience in politics. I've never been able to get away from politics since."

Last week Franz Josef Strauss. 41. no Nazi but a veteran of Bavarian beer-hall politics in his own right, became West Germany's new Minister of Defense. He got his job from old Konrad Adenauer-but he is a symbol of the kind of Germany that will replace Adenauer's Germany. He is also a symbol of the kind of military thinking that Konrad Adenauer once stood resolutely against.

The Tiger Tank. Like a great many other Germans, Defense Minister Strauss learned about armies the hard way. The butcher's son dodged the early Nazi draft by entering Munich University, where he topped the examination lists, joined a Catholic students' organization and brawled with young Nazis. When the call-up for World War II carne in 1939, he talked himself out of the infantry ("Because I don't like walking") and into the artillery. He was almost court-martialed for calling his uniform a Klufterl (a childish masquerade). But he served in Poland, France, Russia, and at the Battle of Stalingrad he led his platoon out of encirclement, fighting a rearguard action for 50 miles.

Taken prisoner by the U.S. Army at war's end, he spent a couple of months in a P.W. camp before being appointed a top county official in Schongau by the American Military Government. He took naturally to politics. He advocated uniting Catholics and Protestants into a political party, ultimately founded the Christian Socialist Union in Schongau and was one of the founders of the greater Bavarian C.S.U. Elected to the West German Bundestag in 1949, he charged onto the national scene like a Tiger tank on the rampage.

A heavy-set man (5 ft. 9 in.. 205 Ibs.) with a powerful chest and wide shoulders, he walks with the stiff gait of a Bavarian peasant. His eyes are small and blue, and his head is square and massive, with thick, dark blond hair. "He has the manners of the Munich Tal," says Free Democrat Leader Thomas Dehler (the Tal is Munich's slum district). But inside Franz Josef Strauss's square head is a fast-thinking brain gifted with a photographic memory. His bachelor apartment near Bonn, his office and his automobile are jampacked with books, which he reads voraciously and from which he can often quote whole pages of text. He is probably the best extempore speaker in Germany today, and he rates as the German politician with the biggest future.