General YouTube: Germany’s newest military chief is a warlord of his own Ukraine-cheering fantasyland

The new head of Berlin’s army is a YouTube star famous for cheering on losing battles

Let’s face it: For outside observers, who are not getting a direct boost to career and income, promotions inside ministries can be about as exciting as trainspotting on an abandoned railway branch.

But this time is different: Recent changes at the German Ministry of Defense matter, if in a disturbing way. Berlin’s energetic, ambitious, popular, and resolutely narrow-minded minister of defense Boris Pistorius has just made some high-level personnel moves. 

By far the single most politically significant of Pistorius’ new appointments is that of Major-General Christian Freuding as the new “Heeresinspekteur,” the head the land forces (in German: Heer), that is, the army in the strict sense of the term. This is a position of major influence because of the structure of Germany’s military and current rearmament plans, both with a key role for the army. Formally, Freuding has not (yet) scored the highest possible military rank. That would be the “Generalinspekteur der Bundeswehr,” responsible for all four current service branches (army, navy, air force, and the new cyber and information units).

But, in reality, Freuding may well already have more political influence than any other German officer. This is due to two factors: Freuding clearly is a favorite of Pistorius. Indeed, his predecessor, General Alfons Mais, was not. Ironically, Mais was no less Russophobic than the worst of them. His bizarre, simplistic, and stereotyped views of Russia as a country that doesn’t care about its casualties are now most welcome in Germany (again). But Mais also could be “inconvenient”: Instead of meekly waiting for the politicians to get debt-driven rearmament into economy-draining overdrive, this soldier had a habit of complaining about the wait and making demands.

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That is one reason Mais is out and Freuding is in. Freuding is a driven as well as rapidly advancing careerist who already served as adjutant to Ursula von der Leyen in those good old days when she was still only devastating the German political landscape. He clearly knows how not to antagonize but please his superiors.

One way in which Freuding pleases Pistorius – and virtually the whole German political and mainstream media establishment – is that he is a perfect hardliner with respect to Russia in general and, in particular, when it comes to the West’s proxy war against the latter via Ukraine. That has also made him a perfect fit to lead both a new, centralized Defense Ministry planning and coordination body established in 2023 and, at the same time, a special office busy, in essence, with pumping arms into Ukraine.

Yet Freuding is not just any die-hard bellicist. He also serves as a dis/information warrior in a class of his own. That’s why German mainstream media call him a “social-media star” and “the YouTube General” who went “viral.” Apart from Freuding’s presence on traditional TV, there are his frequent appearances on the German military’s YouTube channel which score hundreds of thousands of views, occasionally even a million.

What seems to have made the often wide-eyed – quite literally – general so popular is a combination of overly optimistic (polite expression) assessments of the Ukrainian and Western position in the Ukraine War, a certain boyish (also polite expression) but – it seems – infectious enthusiasm for arrows and tactical signs on maps, and, last but not least, a relentless insistence to fight this war, in effect, through to the last Ukrainian. And who knows, maybe even beyond that.

In the fall of 2022, after Ukraine recaptured some territories at unsustainable cost to men and materiel, Freuding went wild, enthusing about “incredible successes” and “euphoria.” Euphoria indeed.

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Last summer, when Ukraine started its predictably self-devastating offensive into Russia’s Kursk Region, Freuding replicated every single daft Kiev propaganda point, including the alleged “psychological effect” of invading “core Russian territory.” Incidentally, the excitable general seems to have a traditional German blind spot for just how big Russia is: In reality, the area temporarily seized by Kiev’s forces was miniscule – never more than one hundredth of a percent of Russian territory.

Freuding also touted this minuscule and doomed incursion as a great “Mutmacher” (untranslatable, roughly: motivation boost) for the Ukrainian home front. We all know how that Kamikaze operation actually ended. By now, Kiev even finds it financially and politically difficult to accept the corpses of its fallen soldiers when delivered back from Russia: Every single one should trigger major compensation to their families and is testimony to a reckless and lost gamble.

When, a month ago, Ukraine launched its criminal (as in the war crime of perfidy) Spiderweb attack on Russian nuclear bombers from within Russia, Freuding detected “impressive success,” most likely simply following – deliberately or not – initial Ukrainian exaggerations. In reality, the attack did far less military harm than Kiev claimed at first, as even Western mainstream outlets have admitted. Politically, of course, it was devastating – but for Ukraine, whose leadership scored a fleeting PR stunt but provoked a massive Russian response.

Freuding has been prolific. Examples of his bizarrely wrongheaded analyses and flatly failed predictions could be multiplied ad infinitum. But you get the gist: One thing his promotion shows is that Germany is once again a country where realism won’t get you far in a military career. But wishful thinking wrapped in tactical jargon and scrawled on big maps will. As a German and a historian, I wished I had not seen that pattern before.

Freuding’s other forte, his enthusiasm for fighting to the last Ukrainian is equally well attested. In his own misguided and euphemistic terms, Freuding is a top representative of those Western friends from hell who have pretended that feeding ever more Ukrainians into this meatgrinder of a proxy war would “improve Kiev’s negotiating position.”

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Obviously and – again – utterly predictably, the opposite has happened: Ukraine’s position is weaker than ever and constantly deteriorating, all at the cost of massive losses. By now, Ukrainian officials and the Western mainstream media have been compelled to admit that “Ukraine has lost around 40% of its working-age population due to the war” and is facing a “deep demographic crisis.” And that is an understatement. Yet Freuding sticks to his “strategy” – if that is the word – of playing for time.

It is also important to see Freuding’s implausible but apparently (for now) unstoppable rise in a broader context: Bellicist German mainstream media, such as the news magazine Spiegel, now admit that the US is gradually retreating from the proxy war it provoked, abandoning both its Ukrainian proxies and European vassals. German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul, meanwhile, oddly combines an obstinate and somewhat delusional urge to keep fighting Russia – for now indirectly – with the realistic, if very late, insight that Ukraine may be reaching its limits.

Wadephul’s response to this self-imposed absurdity is simple: Germany must do even more for Ukraine. Never mind that the German military has already handed over, for instance, a quarter of its own 12 Patriot air defense systems. After all, there also is the option of buying new ones in the US and shipping them directly to Ukraine, at Berlin’s expense, of course.

To justify such measures, the German government, with Chancellor Merz in the lead, has dialed up its already hyperventilating war scare rhetoric again. Until recently, the key dogma of the bellicist party line was the unfounded speculation, sold as virtual certainty, that Russia would be ready and willing to attack within a few years from now. Initially, the head of the German military, General Christian Breuer, had started fetishizing the year 2029 into the sum of all hysterical fears.

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Yet that is no longer good – really, bad – enough. With support from Germany’s trusty intelligence services – the same ones that helped the US fake a pretext to launch a devastating war of aggression against Iraq in 2003 and that can’t find out who blew up the Nord Stream pipelines – Merz has updated the national panic attack: Now, he has informed his people, we must no longer fear that the Russians are coming because – drum roll – they are already here!

Merz, in short, has opined that the definition of “war” is a major philosophical challenge, that Russia is already attacking Germany in multiple sneaky ways, and that hence, so the clear implication, the two countries are already at war. Not much to lose, then, if we escalate even further: that seems to be the message.

This is the stage on which Major-General Freuding has now been called upon to play an even larger role. He is, in a way, the right man for the job and for the moment. Only that the moment is one of officially sanctioned hysteria and delusion, and the job will consist of pretending that Ukraine can still, if not win, somehow improve its situation, while feeding more arms and money to it so that more of its people and territory can be lost.

Freuding, in sum, may be quite mad, but his whole career shows that he is a team player. His madness, at this point, is that of the whole German establishment. He is a good fit for a very bad set of ideas and policies. How ironic. And how German, too, in a way.