In the heart of Santiago, on the nineteenth of September each year, crowds gather to watch a spectacle that belongs, by all rights, to another continent and another century. The soldiers who march past are Chilean, but their uniforms, their weapons, their music, and even their helmets are unmistakably German—not the Germany of today, but the Germany of the Kaiser, the Reich, and even the Third Reich. A visitor transported to that parade ground might well believe they were standing in Berlin in the late nineteenth century, so faithfully has Chile preserved the military traditions of imperial Germany. The story of how this happened begins with Chile’s emergence as an independent nation.
After breaking from Spain in 1818, Chile developed into a stable but authoritarian republic, one that came to rely heavily on the strength of its army. That army proved its worth in the War of the Pacific from 1879 to 1883, when Chile defeated Peru and Bolivia and expanded its territory to the north. Success on the battlefield confirmed the central importance of a strong military, and Chile’s leaders began looking abroad for the best model to emulate. At first, they looked to France, hiring a French military training team in 1858.
But the Chileans were increasingly drawn to another authoritarian power half a world away: Bismarck’s Prussia. In 1881, Chile sent instructions to its legation in Berlin to find Prussian officers capable of retraining the Chilean army. Five years later, in 1886, Captain Emile Kerner, a veteran of the Franco-Prussian War and a graduate of the Prussian War Academy, was hired, along with thirty-six other Prussian officers, to train Chilean cadets at the military academy. The influence of these Prussian instructors was total.
They redesigned the Chilean army in the image of the German army, adopting German weapons, German general staff organization, German military doctrine, and even German-style uniforms, parades, and military music. The deepest legacy of that transformation is still visible today in the ceremonial parades of the Chilean armed forces. The music played during these events is straight from imperial Germany. One of the pieces is “Prussia’s Glory,” composed in 1871 to celebrate Germany’s defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War.
Another is the Prussian Inspection March, written in 1820 by King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia and still used during color presentations in the German Bundeswehr today. The visual spectacle is equally faithful to the old German army. The military school, the first cavalry regiment, and the first artillery regiment all wear the iconic German picklehaube, the spiked helmet. The first of these helmets appeared in Chilean service in 1900, and they were of the Model 1867, still bearing the imperial German eagle upon them.
Officers and cadets wear a white horsehair brush on the helmet, while the parade band wears one in red-orange. The helmets worn today carry a plate with the national coat of arms of Chile, but in every other respect they remain true to the imperial German design. For many years these helmets were manufactured in Austria, until that company went out of business in 2006; they are now produced in Eastern Europe with fittings sourced locally in Chile. The uniforms worn by the cadets of the military academy are those of the 10th Grenadier Regiment, King Friedrich Wilhelm II.
Their rifle is the Mauser Model 1895. The colonel director of the academy and his staff wear the uniforms of the German Guards Dragoon Regiment. The system of military music and ceremonial drill is preserved so completely that a parade in Santiago today would have been perfectly at home in Berlin at the end of the nineteenth century. An even more striking relic of German military tradition is worn by the non-commissioned officers school.
This unit uses the Stahlhelm, the German steel helmet, in a modified version of the M1935 helmet from the Nazi era. The uniforms of these soldiers are directly modeled on those of the German Wehrmacht of the 1930s and 1940s. This particular uniform, with its distinctive style and color, became the one most closely associated with the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, whose rule from 1973 to 1990 shaped modern Chile. The first artillery regiment, meanwhile, wears a distinctive variation of the picklehaube: instead of a spike, the helmet is fitted with a cannonball, marking the soldiers’ branch of service.
The regiment is still armed with a battery of nineteenth-century Krupp artillery guns, another direct link to the German military technology that Chile adopted in the late 1800s. The reason these traditions survive is rooted in the historical moment when Chile chose its military model. Having built its power on the strength of its army, and having admired the discipline and effectiveness of Prussian militarism, Chile made a deliberate decision in the 1880s to remake its army in that image. The Prussian officers who arrived in 1886 did not simply offer advice; they reshaped an entire institution, from its weapons and organization down to the smallest details of its ceremonial life.
Generations later, those changes have never been reversed. The result is a remarkable historical preservation that has become a defining feature of Chilean national ceremony. For anyone interested in the military traditions of imperial Germany, the most authentic surviving display is not found in Berlin but in Santiago, on the nineteenth of September, when Chile’s soldiers march out in the uniform, with the music, and under the helmets of an army that no longer exists anywhere else in the world.