When the FLN launched its insurrection in November 1954, no one – not even the movement's own militants – could have guessed that West Germany would become a sanctuary and base for Algerian nationalists. After all, the Algerian war coincided with a period of unprecedented rapprochement between France and the FRG. By 1956 the Bonn and Paris governments had forged an alliance that became the driving force of European cooperation and integration. To what extent did the worsening conflict in Algeria help to shape this budding entente? Indeed, did the ‘events’ in Algeria affect West German diplomacy in other ways? Almost from the outset, this chapter argues, the Algerian war undercut two of the Bonn government's most vital foreign policy axioms. By destabilising the French political system, weakening NATO's defence potential and dividing the Atlantic alliance, the conflict impinged on Chancellor Konrad Adenauer's policy of Westbindung, or Western integration, threatening to derail its central tenet: the all-important process of reconciliation with France. That very process, meanwhile, jeopardised West German efforts to forge strong relationships with newly independent states in Asia, Africa and the Middle East, many of which sympathised with or even supported the FLN. The Algerian war thus also risked undermining the Hallstein doctrine through which Bonn's Auswärtige Amt, or Foreign Office, sought to isolate the GDR and uphold the Federal Republic's claim as the only legitimate German state. Filtering the Algerian question largely through a Cold War optic, policy-makers in Bonn grew ever more alarmed by the conflict's impact on West German foreign relations and national security. The government soon realised that West Germany could not avoid the Algerian war's increasingly global reverberations.

A foreign conspiracy?

At first, the FLN's liberation struggle barely registered in Bonn. Observers who paid attention depicted the uprising as the latest crisis in a chain of tribal uprisings spanning across French North Africa. This indifference did not last long. By December 1954, Wilhelm Hausenstein, Bonn's chef de mission in Paris, presented the situation in Algeria as a ‘reason for concern from a political and military perspective’. Hausenstein's alarm had been triggered by comments made by Commandant de Torquat, chef de cabinet to Marshal Alphonse Juin, one of France's highest military authorities.