At the start of the year, German males aged 18 began receiving a mandatory questionnaire to register their fitness for military service under a law passed last month.
Joining the army is currently voluntary, but the law allows the government to introduce compulsory service for the first time since World War II to meet its goal of making it the strongest army in Europe.
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Last November, active duty personnel stood at 184,000 troops, a jump of 2,500 from May, when Chancellor Friedrich Merz first told parliament that the army, or Bundeswehr, “must become Europe’s strongest conventional army”.
“It’s the biggest they’ve had in a long time and it’s the strongest force we’ll have from 2021,” Timo Graf, a senior researcher at the Bundeswehr Center of Military History and Social Sciences in Potsdam, told Al Jazeera.
The government is luring voluntary service members to 23-month contracts, with generous salaries and allowances. Those contracts can then be extended indefinitely for commercial service.
“The salary is 2,600 euros ($3,000), and since housing is free, medical insurance is free, they will get something like 2,300 euros ($2,700) after taxes and deductions. That’s a lot of money for young people,” Graf said.
Germany has made a NATO commitment to reach 260,000 active duty personnel by 2035 and double the number of reserve personnel to 200,000. This would bring it closer to the half-million-strong army it had at the end of the Cold War.
Moscow is upset by this news.
“Germany’s new government is accelerating preparations for a full-scale military conflict with Russia,” Russia’s ambassador to Germany, Sergey Nechayev, said in an interview with the German news portal Apolat last month.
However, from the German point of view, Russia’s refusal to withdraw from Ukraine has increased the political will to spend 108 billion euros ($125bn) on rebuilding the armed forces this year, 2.5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), and more than double the 2021 budget ($58bn).
“In just one year, we’ve gone from 58 percent to 65 percent of the increase in defense spending,” Graf said.
By 2030, Germany will spend 3.5 percent of its GDP on defense.
Eight in 10 Germans are now convinced that Russian President Vladimir Putin is not serious about pursuing a peace deal in the war in Ukraine, according to a December poll by German polling and television program Politbarometer, and many are beginning to believe warnings from intelligence officials that Russia plans to eventually expand its war into NATO countries.
“The year 2029 has been presented as a possible date for Russia to attack NATO and it has become a reference date for the public”, Graf said. “We can see in the last four years of this war that we have fallen asleep realizing the gravity of the situation. Here the future of Europe is at stake.”
Germany lost faith in Trump’s America
Threat perception from Russia is only one side of the equation. Over the past year, German society has been equally transformed by the loss of trust in the United States.
A June 2025 poll conducted by state channel ZDF asked Germans, “Will the USA continue to guarantee Europe’s security as part of NATO?” Seventy-two percent said no. By December, this majority had reached 84 percent.
Nine out of 10 Germans now see US political influence in Europe as harmful, fearing the overt encouragement of far-right, Russia-friendly parties, as happened in Germany’s federal election In February last year.
In US President Donald Trump’s national security policy, published last November, Europe faces the “erosion of civilization”, as Brussels and “continent-changing and conflict-generating migration policies, censorship of free speech and repression of political opposition, increasing birth rates and the loss of self-identity held by national self-communication” – lectured. Europe’s far right.
“They know … Trump has absolutely no interest in helping Germany,” said Gen. Ben Hodges, who heads U.S. forces in Europe. “The national security policy was terrible… it was a big middle finger from Trump to Europe,” he told Al Jazeera.
Germans have so little trust in Washington that six in 10 no longer trust the US nuclear deterrent, and three-quarters want to see it replaced by an Anglo-French deterrent.
“People who value NATO and who are pro-EU come together in the idea of a European NATO,” Graf said. “The Germans still value NATO as a defense organization, it’s just that they don’t trust the Americans to play their role in NATO and they support the idea of a European NATO.”
Graf said Bundeswehr polls showed support for the European military, always a draw in Germany, for whose security NATO was ostensibly built in 1949, rose 10 points to 57 percent last year.
Will Germany get the job?
The promise of merger is not new.
His predecessor, the Social Democrat Olaf Scholz, also promised to build the strongest army in Europe by 2022, the year Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
But even though Scholz approved a one-off $120 billion in defense spending by 2024, the extra money only began to trickle in later.
Scholz’s government at the time blamed bureaucratic processes, but some say there were also cultural barriers.
“The Bundeswehr was not viewed positively and therefore, no one in their right mind would choose it as a career. So it would be a more specific thing for people on the right side of the political spectrum to do,” Minna Allender, a fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, an expert in security and defence, told Al Jazeera.
“Educated Germans, older Germans, grew up hearing how terrible Nazi Germany was,” said General Hodges, who now lives in Germany. “And for older Germans who were children during the war, their worst nightmare would be a war with Russia or without the United States.”
But from 2022 perceptions have changed rapidly.
Marz came to power Both Moscow and Washington denounced the country, calling for “independence” from the US.
Parliament had already approved the constitutional suspension when he took office Deficit Limits To give him a huge, permanent increase in defense spending. Last month, Parliament approved roughly $60 billion in defense purchases.
‘We have never depended on the European process’
Analysts believe pro-Kremlin stories will try to capitalize on whatever lingering suspicions remain.
“The sensitivity to conscription is something that the Russians are packaging in their propaganda narrative in many societies in Europe,” said Victoria Vdovichenko, a hybrid warfare expert at Cambridge University’s Center for Geopolitics.
“Germany is one of them, so basically, you will see an increase in the news in terms of how bad it is that Germans are sending children to be killed,” she told Al Jazeera.
She is also wary of the time it takes for money and political will to translate into industrial capacity and power.
Scholz pledged to create a brigade to defend the Suwalki Gap, an unguarded neck of Lithuanian land between Russian-held Belarus and Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea, but recruitment, training and equipping are still ongoing.
“We are not stupid people, so we never rely on the European process, (thinking) anyone will come as a god to help us,” said Vadovichenko, who is Ukrainian. “We definitely understand, our people will always be at the forefront.”