Born in
Munich, Bastian volunteered for the
Wehrmacht in 1941, at the age of nineteen. In
World War II he served on the
Eastern Front, being wounded by a bullet in the right arm and in the head by a grenade fragment. He was also hit by American machine gun fire in France. After the war, he started a business that failed and then rejoined the military. From 1956 to 1980 Bastian served in the
Bundeswehr—joining as a first lieutenant, promoted in 1962 to the position of general staff officer/officer in the army command staff, and in 1974 promoted to the rank of
Brigadier General, chief of staff in the army office—ending his service as a
divisional commander with the rank of
Major General. During this period Bastian's politics changed radically. In the 1950s he had been a member of the
Christian Social Union in his native
Bavaria. Yet Bastian was also an opponent of the planned stationing of medium-range missiles with nuclear warheads in Europe and joined the peace movement. In 1980, he outlined those views in a memorandum to the West German government, asking to retire in the face of what he considered unacceptable military policies; his request was rejected and he resigned. In 1981 he was the joint founder of a group called "Generals for Peace". In the 26 April 1994 edition of
The Independent newspaper, Günter Bohnsack, who spent 26 years in the
Active Measures Department of the
Stasi, claimed that "Generals for Peace was conceived, organised and financed by the Stasi ... This created a real power that was in line with Moscow's ideas ... and we always controlled this through our intelligence services in Moscow and East Berlin." In the 1980s, Bastian was, together with his partner
Petra Kelly, one of the most important West German supporters of the opposition in the
German Democratic Republic. ==Death and killing of Petra Kelly==