After the Allies had fought two world wars in order to defeat and disarm Germany, West Germany began to rearm and to rebuild an army—not at its own initiative, but (incredibly!!) at Western urging and against a vote of the West German parliament itself, so that West Germany would have to share with the Allies the burden of defending Western Europe. From a 1945 perspective, that represented the most astonishing change in American, British, and French policy towards Germany.
