The flowers will be laid today. The cameras will be there. The speeches will say what they always say — liberation, never again, the long peace that followed the darkest chapter. Eighty-one years of the same ceremony, the same language, the same careful framing of what May 8th, 1945 means.
None of the speeches will mention the number 370,000.
On September 12, 1990, the foreign ministers of six nations signed a treaty in Moscow. Two German states, four occupying powers. The document handled the foreign policy architecture of reunification — borders, sovereignty, alliance membership, the withdrawal of Soviet troops. It also set a ceiling on the armed forces of the newly united Germany: 370,000 soldiers. Not a suggestion. A treaty obligation, the price paid for full sovereignty, binding under international law.
That number was the result of hard negotiation. It reflected a deliberate political calculation: a Germany strong enough to contribute to collective defence, but not so strong that it rekindled fears no one wanted to name aloud. Every government since 1990 has known the number. No government has sought to formally renegotiate it.
The Bundeswehr today fields approximately 184,000 active troops — well below the ceiling, the result of two decades of drawdown and underfunding that followed the Cold War’s end.
NATO’s current wartime target for Germany: 460,000.
That figure exceeds the treaty cap by 90,000 soldiers. No public explanation has been offered for how this squares with the 1990 commitment. No debate has been held. The number has simply appeared in planning documents and press releases, as though the treaty either no longer exists or no longer applies.
In July 2024, then-President Biden and then-Chancellor Scholz announced that the United States would deploy long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles to Germany beginning in 2026 — a bridging measure, officials said, until European-built systems came online. On May 4th, 2026, Chancellor Merz confirmed on ARD that this plan is effectively dead. “The Americans themselves don’t currently have enough,” he said. The missiles were expended in the Iran campaign. Germany must now accelerate its own long-range strike development — the Taurus Neo upgrade, and a joint European deep-strike programme whose initial capability is projected for the mid-2030s at the earliest.
An occupied country, whose sovereignty was purchased in part by accepting limits on its military capacity, is now developing its own long-range strike weapons. The treaty that set those limits has not been amended. These two facts have not been placed in the same sentence in any German newspaper this week.
On January 1st, 2026, the Wehrdienstmodernisierungsgesetz — the Military Service Modernisation Act — entered into force. It does not yet reintroduce full conscription. What it does: mandatory registration and questionnaire for all men born from 2008 onward, compulsory medical examination from 2027, and a provision requiring men aged 17 to 45 to obtain Bundeswehr permission before leaving Germany for longer than three months. The Defence Ministry confirmed this applies in peacetime.
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Join Now →The law explicitly accounts for dual nationals. There is no exemption. A German-Turkish, German-Syrian, or German-Lebanese man living in Germany holds the same obligation as a man whose family has been in the same village since the Thirty Years War.
The Federal Statistical Office’s 2024 figures: 30.4% of Germany’s population has a migration background. Among those under 20 — the cohort the new law will first reach — the figure is 42.4%.
These are not opinions. They are official numbers from official sources, published without fanfare, sitting in plain sight.
The question they raise is not answered by any May 8th speech.
A nation whose sovereignty was legally defined by a treaty now plans to exceed that treaty’s military limits. It is building weapons the treaty’s architects never envisaged it building. It is registering for potential military service a generation nearly half of whom hold roots, families, and in many cases second passports in countries other than Germany.
Who are these soldiers being prepared to fight for? What is the state they would be defending? And under what authority — legal, historical, moral — does a country whose full sovereignty has been questioned in its own courts send the children of 2026 to a war whose architects sit in buildings that were never elected?
The flowers will be laid today. The speeches will be given.
The questions will not be asked.
Related: Is Germany Still Occupied? — Germany’s Own Court Ruled the Federal Republic Is Not Germany — Does the Energy Crisis Serve a Purpose?
