A Fitting History

he Marshall Center facilities in Garmisch, Germany, uniquely reflect the evolving national security environment of the 20th century.

First built in 1937 to house German airborne troops, the installation was taken over by the U.S. Army in 1945 and turned into a prisoner-of-war camp to hold German officers captured during World War II. The installation's idyllic location in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps eventually made it the obvious choice for the headquarters of the U.S. Armed Forces Recreation Center, which served the millions of U.S. troops stationed in Europe over the course of the Cold War. In 1964, the installation also became home to the U.S. Army Russian Institute, a center for studying Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, providing intensive training to U.S. military personnel specializing in Soviet Bloc security studies.

In August 1991, during the failed Russian coup attempt, Defense Department officials saw the need for developing and expanding security contacts in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Officers at U.S. European Command developed a proposal for incorporating the Russian Institute into a training center to influence the development of security structures in newly democratic states.

The plan was endorsed by former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Colin Powell in 1992, and in 1993, the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies was dedicated. It became a German-American partnership the following year. The facilities of the former Russian Institute and the Armed Forces Recreation Center were transferred to the Marshall Center.

At the center's entrance, a statue of Gen. George Marshall, architect of the Marshall Plan that revitalized a devastated Europe after World War II, shows the general walking eastward over a bridge, hand outstretched.

It is an important symbol, says German Maj. Gen. Franz Werner. The Marshall Center is offering a similar opportunity to emerging democracies as the Marshall Plan did to Europeans more than 50 years ago, albeit on a vastly smaller scale.

"A common and stable Europe is critical to the future," he says. "Europe has to look different in the future. We cannot build up Europe without the United States, and not without Russia either."

To Werner, who was a child at the end of World War II, the Marshall Plan, rejected by Russia and her satellites, offered Germans and other Western Europeans a new lease on life. He tells this story:

"In 1945, I was living in Garmisch, where I went to elementary school. My uncle was a POW here. My mother and I came to visit him and he gave me this crust of white bread. I had not seen bread like that before and I put it in my pocket. When we were leaving, an American guard, a black man, stopped me. He said 'What do you have?' I gave him the piece of white bread. When he saw it, he just gave it back and said. 'Go on.'

"I will always remember that."