"There's a nice saying: tough times make strong people and strong people make good times. But good times make weak or naive people, and that's where we are right now," explains Daniel Schäfer, a survival expert based in Berlin. 

He's discussing Germany's overall preparedness for war and crisis situations both at home and abroad and it is fair to say he has some concerns.

Schäfer is a former reservist with Germany's Rapid Reaction Force (KRK), served in Yugoslavia, and later worked for Berlin's Criminal Police Office. Today he runs survival training camps and is the author of a survival handbook.

His company SurviCamp trains around 2,000 members of the public a year on courses ranging from all-weather survival weekends in the German wilderness to bushcraft training days where participants can learn how to butcher wild animal carcasses and light fires the old-fashioned way. 

These are all skills he believes more people should acquire as a matter of basic homeland security, and says Germany could learn a thing or two from Finland where the military trains civilians without them having to become soldiers. 

During a closely-watched debate in the Bundestag on Thursday, conservative Christian Democrat (CDU) leader and would-be Chancellorr Friedrich Merz tried to win the support of the Greens for his proposed changes to the debt brake by also offering to expand the scope of defense spending to include civil defense and intelligence agencies.

Moves to bolster homeland defense capabilities 

With the United States' recent policy shift towards Europe, alarm bells are ringing about the state of the country's homeland defenses. 

During a testy debate in the Bundestag on Thursday, conservative Christian Democrat (CDU) leader and would-be Chancellor Friedrich Merz tried to win support for his proposed changes to the debt brake, which would allow for more spending on defense and infrasctruture, by also offering to spend more on civil defense and intelligence agencies.

As a reaction to Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, German Defense Minster Boris Pistorius last year had already ordered a reorganization of the Bundeswehr with the aim of strengthening the country's military capabilities. 

From April, the homeland defense forces, the Heimatschutz, will be moved from the Bundeswehr Homeland Defence Command, a joint headquarters which is being disbanded, to the army under a new Homeland Defence Division. This is partly in anticipation of existing army divisions being deployed to elsewhere, for example to NATO's external borders.

The Heimatschutz is currently divided into five regiments staffed by reservists, with each regiment under regional state control. A new sixth homeland security regiment will now be combined with the existing five regiments consisting of active soldiers and reservists — initially 6,000 men and women, but with plans to grow this number to the tens of thousands. 

It will be tasked with protecting ports, rail facilities and freight transit points in the event of a crisis or heightened threat. This includes the protection of pipelines, roads for troop deployment, bridges, transport hubs and digital infrastructure. 

Helge Adrians, an expert on defense and security policy at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) welcomes the restructuring efforts, but also says that there is a lack of clear plan for how exactly Germany should prepare for the new types of threats it faces. These include propaganda, espionage and sabotage. 

"There has to be a clear plan behind it. What do we primarily want to achieve by strengthening the reserve? Protecting our homeland? Providing host-nation support for our allies? Reinforcing the active troops? What's missing for me is a concrete priority of what should be achieved through this reserve," Adrians said.

"I think the readiness to serve is there, but a real sense of purpose also needs to be communicated in simple words."

Not enough personnel, medicine or bunkers

Last year, the German Association of Towns and Municipalities, which represents the country's 14,000 local councils, called the federal government other €10 billion over the next decade in civilian protection. The proposal was to use the money to make the 2,000 Cold War-era bunkers scattered across Germany fit for purpose again. 

However, the Federal Office of Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance told DW that only 579 of those bunkers are still designated as public shelters, and they would have space for around 478,000 people (or 0.56% of the German population).

With reference to an increase in the number of hybrid attacks on critical infrastructure such as hospitals, Ralph Tiesler, President of the Federal Office of Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance (BKK), told experts at a conference in early March this year that "the healthcare system is not sufficiently prepared for the new reality."

The German Red Cross has also warned that there is a lack of accommodation, medicine and aid workers and is calling for a €20 billion ($22 bn) special fund to rectify the issue. The promised turnaround or "Zeitenwende" in civil protection after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine had not materialized, German Red Cross General Secretary Christian Reuter told the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper. 

"Three years later, we are still bare, civil protection is not prepared for a case of defense," he is quoted as saying, pointing to a lack of people trained in civil protection, emergency capacities in hospitals and a secure supply chain for antibiotics. Reuter described the current civil protection budget of €500-600 million a year as "pathetic."

The German Red Cross is in the process of building one of largest and most modern civil protection centers in Germany, in Luckenwalde, south of Berlin, using its own funds due to a lack of financial support from the federal government. 

The center will house a "mobile care module" which will be able to provide 5,000 people with everything they need to survive in the event of an emergency, including accommodation, electricity and water. The government initially promised 10 of these modules but so far has only fully funded one. 

New awareness about need for survival skills and supplies

Reuter also emphasized the need for private households to have durable supplies of food, water, hygiene products, battery-operated radios and other emergency supplies and the need to better educate the population on this issue. 

As a member of the so-called "prepper" scene, Daniel Schäfer is prepared for every eventuality and says demand for his training courses is growing. 

The prepper scene has been the subject of both controversy and derision because of what Schäfer calls certain "conspicuous elements" with paranoid doomsday fantasies and among radical fringe groups, a desire to overthrow the state. 

Schäfer explicitly distances himself from those elements and says the majority of preppers are concerned with the basics of how to protect the civilian population in the event of war or catastrophe. And he says the increasingly tangible impacts of climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic and the fallout over Ukraine have all prompted a rethink.

"There's simply a new awareness that the state won't necessarily put a pizza in your mouth the second you open it, but that you have to learn to take care of yourself even in crises and continually acquire these skills," Schäfer told DW. 

For Schäfer that includes crisis preparedness in terms of communications, supply and social networks too. 

"Sure, knowledge is a head start, and of course a certain amount of security, but it's a lot about leadership, it's about stress resilience, it's about what you do in dangerous situations and most people don't know that," he says.

"The duty needs to put back on citizens to be able to serve their country." 

Edited by Rina Goldenberg

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