The German government is being accused of stalling a compensation claim by hundreds of former soldiers who say they are dying of cancer caused by radar equipment. Derek Scally reports from Berlin
A pair of lead gloves could have saved Dietmar Glaner's left arm. But, in 1991, doctors had to amputate after finding the bone was riddled with cancer. "I thought I was an isolated case, someone who had just had bad luck," he said.
A decade later he found out that he was not alone. He was one of thousands of soldiers in the German army, the Bundeswehr, who worked with radar equipment in the 1960s and 1970s. Now more than 2,000 of these men have come forward, all with one thing in common: they are seriously ill. Some have brain tumours, others have heart problems. But the most common illness is cancer: skin cancer, intestinal cancer, testicular cancer, prostate cancer and leukaemia.
Last year a government investigation confirmed the worst fears of these radar operators and technicians, concluding that they were exposed to dangerous X-rays and microwaves from the radar equipment.
A year ago, the German defence minister promised those affected "swift and generous" help, but the men are still fighting for recognition and compensation.
Glaner, a 54-year-old father of three from Lohmar, near Cologne, worked for 25 years as a soldier in the Bundeswehr. From 1969 to 1975, he was a technician servicing on-board radar in Bundeswehr aircraft. Only now does he know that for at least five hours every day his body was exposed to X-rays and microwaves, flooding his body with radiation. He should have been wearing lead-lined protective gear and a radiation dosage meter.
When his left hand began to hurt in 1990 he never associated this with his time as a radar technician. But when he heard about former colleagues who were falling ill with cancer, he began to do some investigating. In a military base near Nuremberg, he tracked down the last two Bundeswehr Starfighter F-104s (the planes he worked on two decades earlier) still in service. He remembers the shock of seeing radar technicians wearing lead gloves, as they did the work he had once done with his bare hands.
His concern grew when he obtained a classified manual about F-104 radar equipment, warning of the radiation dangers of servicing it without protective gear. He later gained access to his Bundeswehr medical file and discovered he had been exposed to doses of radiation 30 times higher than the Bundeswehr had previously admitted.
"There was no information," he says quietly. "There were times when we took apart entire radar machines on workbenches. If I had known how dangerous it was I would have paid for a pair of lead gloves out of my own pocket."
The Bundeswehr granted him a disability pension of €206 a month and kept quiet about the reasons for his illness. Glaner's initial gratitude soon turned to anger; only his own doggedness turned up information about the real cause of his condition. He turned to the newsapers and television in his campaign for compensaton and soon hundreds of former soldiers had come forward to tell their stories.
One of those was Alexander Biedermann (53), from Thuringia in central Germany. As a young soldier in East Germany's National People's Army (NVA), he had operated a Soviet-built radar designed to track enemy aircraft.
He soon noticed that sitting in front of the radar gave him a bright red face, as if sunburnt. Later, his blood pressure began to rise dangerously and he suffered from thrombosis in his legs. By 1978, he was so ill that he was discharged from the army.
A decade later, worse health problems began, with two strokes within months of each other. Doctors discovered a hole in one of his retinas in 1992 and two years later he suffered kidney failure. Last year he underwent surgery to replace a vein in his neck to prevent a further stroke. Biedermann's health problems and the 13 tablets he swallows each day are a bitter reminder of his part in the Cold War.
"No one said a word about the dangers," he told Stern magazine last December. "From 12 men that I knew in my department, only eight are still alive."
The German media began to report the soldiers' stories last year. By January 2001, 100 soldiers had come forward; by the end of the year, that figure had jumped to more than 800.
Last December, Stern magazine printed pages and pages of men's faces, some young and healthy, others prematurely aged and emaciated. All soldiers, all sick, dying or, in the case of more than 200 men, already dead. The names merge with the recurring illnesses - leukaemia, lymph-node tumours, nervous system disorders, irregular heartbeats - in a repetitive litany of horror.
"These men trusted their superiors and now their existence and families are destroyed," says Peter Rasch, head of an association set up to represent the soldiers.
Rasch's files contain even more horrific stories of hereditary defects in babies, which may have been caused by the excessive exposure of the babies' fathers to X-rays. Soldiers tell of how their wives miscarried babies that lacked organs and limbs. One Bundeswehr radar mechanic in Lower Saxony told how his daughter was born with six fingers on each hand.
Last year, the defence ministry bowed to growing media pressure and set up a commission to investigate the soldiers' claims. The commission found that the Bundeswehr had neglected to provide soldiers with adequate protection from dangerous radiation in radar installations.
"Members of the Bundeswehr, soldiers and civilians have without a doubt been harmed by X-rays from radar equipment," the commission's report concluded.
A year ago, Rudolf Scharping, the defence minister who was sacked last week, promised that everything would be done to help the soldiers. "We will try to help victims as quickly as possible, and with as little controversy and as much generosity as possible," he said. His promise of unbureaucratic understanding is yet to be honoured.
The defence ministry has received more than 2,600 applications, but has recognised the claims of just eight soldiers.
"Every application that arrives in the finance ministry is pounced on by 20 laywers," says Glaner. He has been battling defence ministry lawyers for eight years.
When he started his campaign, officials said the defence ministry hadn't known at the time that the radar machines emitted harmful X-rays. After Glaner had found documentation to disprove this claim, he was told the X-ray emissions were not high enough to pose a health risk. Again Glaner proved the opposite.
Finally, the defence ministry claimed it had, in fact, issued safety warnings about X-rays to all radar operators at the time. Glaner produced his training and work manuals and showed there was no mention of X-ray health risks or safety precautions.
Earlier this year, nearly 800 soldiers launched a class-action lawsuit seeking €100 million in damages from the government for "systematically" exposing them to X-rays.
"This isn't about individual guilt; it happened too long ago," said Dr Reiner Geulen, the lawyer handling the action. "Neither do we want the ministry on its knees. But we want the ministry to admit that it played around thoughtlessly with soldiers' health."
The class action is expected to go to court next year. If successful, individual payouts will range from €60,000 for sick soldiers to €1 million for children of soldiers with hereditary defects.
Geulen has filed a second lawsuit in the US seeking $350 million in damages from the manufacturers of the radar equipment, firms that include Lockheed-Martin and General Electric.
Staff from thesecompanies trained hundreds of German soldiers over two decades and, next month, lawyers for the soldiers will argue in court that the training gave no information on the health risks from the radar equipment.
GEULEN says the lawsuits are a last resort for the sick soldiers, many of whom have been fighting the bureaucracy of the defence ministry for up to a decade. "The Bundeswehr is not used to being sued. Its chief argument against the action seems to be 'you can't sue us, we're the military'," says Geulen.
The soldiers hoped the change of government in 1998 and a new Social Democrat defence minister would change the ministry's approach. But even before his sacking for misconduct, Scharping was seen as a weak minister with a serious credibility problem. Soldiers say the ministry is run by conservative civil servants, many of whom believe that a soldier shouldn't complain if he is injured in the line of duty, even if that injury should have been prevented.
Glaner is accustomed to Bundeswehr arrogance and bureaucracy, but even he was taken aback when a Bonn newspaper published a letter from a senior Bundeswehr official who had read an article about him.
"A soldier who is used to observing procedural regulations and to behaving obediently should show understanding and not take part in an unobjective hounding," wrote the official. Elsewhere, a former East German official told a sick soldier who filed a claim that he "shouldn't bite the hand that fed him".
A defence ministry spokeswoman in Berlin claims the government is in a no-win situation.
"It is very difficult to argue our side because we are depicted as cold and heartless, while the emotional stories of the victims is pushed to the fore," she says. "These people have terrible stories and deserve our sympathy, but the Bundeswehr is not responsible for every soldier with cancer."
For Geulen, this is a fight for justice on behalf of obedient soldiers who endangered their health in the line of duty over two decades and now expect their loyalty to be repaid.
"These men are the last victims of the Cold War. Nazi soldiers get compensation, these men get nothing," he says.
Glaner is luckier than most of his former comrades. Despite losing an arm to cancer, the disease is in remission and he has the energy and determination to fight his case.
"They actually want us to use every legal means open to us, because that will take years," he says. "You don't need to be a mathematician to see why they are doing that. One or two soldiers seeking compensation are dying a week. Do your sums . . ."
