BERLIN — Germany’s president on Tuesday inaugurated the first national memorial to soldiers killed serving in the post-World War II military, which he lauded as a solid pillar of the country’s modern democracy.

President Horst Koehler acknowledged the military’s changing role as Germany has put soldiers in the line of fire in places such as Afghanistan. But he highlighted the sharp contrast between the Bundeswehr and the military of Germany’s Nazi past.

“Our soldiers who have lost their lives on deployment did not die as conquerors or occupiers, but in order to make possible help, protection and reconstruction,” Koehler said as he inaugurated the rectangular memorial alongside Germany’s defense minister and Catholic and Protestant bishops at the Defense Ministry in Berlin.

The monument, he said, “reminds us that our Bundeswehr is an irremovable part of our country’s good democratic development, and that our soldiers are people from the middle of society.”

The memorial, with the inscription “To the dead of our Bundeswehr: for peace, law and freedom,” was designed by German architect Andreas Meck. The 33-foot (10-meter) -high structure, with a perforated metal facade, includes a “room of silence” as a place of mourning; and fallen soldiers’ names will be displayed.

The Bundeswehr was founded in 1955, serving first as West Germany’s military and, from 1990, as that of reunited Germany — which has emerged gradually from its postwar diplomatic and military shell.

The military says some 3,100 soldiers and civilian employees have died in the service of the Bundeswehr since its inception.

Causes of death range from accidents to attacks in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Eighty-one have died during deployments abroad, 35 of them in Afghanistan.

Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung said he was inspired to push for the memorial when he saw an improvised monument built by German soldiers in Kabul to fallen comrades in 2005. He said it is “our patriotic duty to remember in dignity” the Bundeswehr’s dead.

Postwar Germany has generally been uncomfortable with militarism and war. However, the memorial has attracted little criticism — although some opposition politicians argued it should be placed outside Parliament, which approves Bundeswehr missions.

“We are aware that soldiers’ deaths have often been misused in the past for propaganda … particularly in Germany,” Koehler said. “But the Bundeswehr memorial pursues no wrongful hero worship, it serves no cult of victimhood and glorifies no war.”

The modern German military’s horizons have expanded considerably in recent years.

In 1992, then-Chancellor Helmut Kohl broke a taboo against sending troops abroad by deploying military medics to support a U.N. mission in Cambodia.

Today, the country has nearly 7,500 troops abroad — more than 4,200 in Afghanistan and 2,000 in Kosovo. Smaller contingents are deployed in Bosnia, in anti-piracy patrols off the Horn of Africa, and elsewhere.

This year, Chancellor Angela Merkel presented postwar Germany’s first bravery medals to four soldiers who rushed to aid injured soldiers and civilians after a suicide bombing in Afghanistan.

“Our Bundeswehr has become an army in deployment, an army in combat,” Koehler said. He added that a deadly German-requested airstrike in Afghanistan last week in which NATO says civilians likely were killed shows “how dangerous this task is, how difficult the decisions demanded from the individual.”

Echoing remarks earlier Tuesday by Merkel, he said the incident must be cleared up but there should be no “premature judgments.”

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