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ABSTRACT
In concert with the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries, the East German government vigorously opposed the Vietnam War in the 1960s and early 1970s and supported North Vietnam politically and economically. Concurrently, it sponsored ongoing solidarity campaigns in support of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) against the LTS-led coalition. As the American war effort deteriorated, the East German government reaped a significant boost both internationally and domestically as a result of these campaigns. This "Vietnam Bonus" helped to enhance the international stature of the GDR and increased the domestic stability of the SED government in the early 1970s.
The Vietnam War provided the East German government with a golden opportunity. No functionary of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, SED) could have dreamed up a better script for the country's Cold War propaganda. It had all of the ingredients and characters for a gripping and winning formula: an aggressive capitalist American intruder who became all the more menac- ing as the war went on; the evil West German ally who assisted the imperialist bully and became implicated in its destructive actions; a socialist Vietnamese underdog whom much of the world and the East German population eventually supported; and a benevolent Soviet neighbor who supplied and aided the Vietnamese victim at the same time as it was seeking to bring all sides to the negotiating table. Even the ongo- ing conflict between the two great Communist powers, China and the Soviet Union, which intensified during the second half of the 1960s, could not spoil this powerful narrative. While the GDR followed the lead of the Soviet Union and worked in close collaboration with its East Bloc allies, the propaganda value of the Vietnam War was all too good to be true, and certainly too good to pass up.1
Best of all, unlike the building of the Berlin Wall, which was allegedly constructed in 1961 to protect the East German population, or the Soviet invasion of Czecho- slovakia in 1968, which was justified as brotherly assistance for a neighbor facing an alleged threat of a "counterrevolution," this Vietnam War narrative did not have to be invented nor stubbornly defended against the better knowledge of an ever skepti- cal East German...