Hooded and bound German army recruits had water pumped into their noses, were given electric shocks and were kicked and mocked in training exercises for combat missions, a court heard yesterday.

The allegations of abuse came at the outset of a trial being billed as the biggest and most serious in the 50-year history of the modern German Army, the Bundeswehr.

One captain and 17 noncommissioned officers are in the dock charged with causing grievous bodily harm to 160 recruits in the summer of 2004.

It is a spectacle that is deeply troubling Germany as the country is drawn into unaccustomed foreign operations from Afghanistan to the Balkans. There is growing concern that soldiers once labelled “citizens in uniform” are becoming increasingly brutalised.

Captain Ingo S — his name has been withheld for legal reasons — said that two sergeants-major approached him for permission to carry out a simulated hostage-taking. “They were the cream of the unit,” the captain said yesterday, wearing uniform. “I was confident in their abilities.”

But the prosecutor argues that there was no provision for conscripts to be trained for hostage situations because only professional soldiers are sent on overseas missions.

After a night march, the trainers seized the recruits, covered their heads with boot-bags, tied their hands with cable, threw them “like bags of potatoes” — according to one of the soldiers — on to a lorry and drove them to a sand quarry. There, they had to kneel and submit to a mock interrogation. A water pump, on display in the civilian court in Mönster, was allegedly used to shoot water into their noses.

The recruits were sprayed with water and had cables strapped to their thighs and stomachs, which were then given a light electric charge from a field telephone. Unloaded pistols were clicked next to their hooded heads.

One soldier had his hood removed and was forced to sing, in English, “I’m a little donkey-f***er”.

When he refused the masked NCO allegedly put a gun in his mouth and pretended that it was loaded. Lawyers for the defence argue that the measures were seen as necessary to harden the recruits; that they were broadly approved from on high, and that the training guidelines are vague.

Reinhold Robbe, the German military ombudsman responsible for monitoring abuse in the army, suggested that the German Army should return to its gentler 1970s identity. Training missions, he said, “should be carried out with the involvement of doctors, psychiatrists and chaplains”.

One of the defendants, Martin D, was typically twice decorated for his service in Afghanistan. The Bundeswehr problem, say professional military trainers, is that there are not enough war-fighting role models for young German soldiers. Germany remains a country where the very notion of war heroism is taboo.

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