HITLER'S DESERTERS

Detailed history of the German soldiers who, for numerous reasons, left the ranks without leave.

In conservative West Germany, courts in the 1950s and ’60s ruled that the commanders of the Wehrmacht and the Nazi regime’s judiciary had ruled fairly when sentencing deserters to be executed, decreeing that “the Wehrmacht had not been any harsher in enforcing military law than had the Americans and British.” That’s not quite right, notes historian Peifer: Whereas an estimated 15,000 German soldiers were condemned to death for the crime, the U.S. “executed precisely one soldier for desertion in World War II.” Peifer begins with a few extended anecdotes on individual German soldiers and what prompted them to desert, even knowing the consequences: One officer who successfully fled to Switzerland enumerated several reasons, from the mass killing of Jews to watching his unit be chewed to bits on the Russian front. He did not, the author adds, “list fear and exhaustion as reasons for his flight…but surely they played a role.” Others had perhaps less noble reasons, simply preferring not to be killed; strangely, as Peifer notes, this proved a successful defense in at least a few cases, albeit in one a soldier was sentenced instead to 15 years of hard labor, enough to convince him to volunteer for frontline service again simply so he could get a bit of food and rest. “He barely survived the war,” Peifer writes, but at least the soldier lived. Interestingly, the author observes, the East German regime was somewhat more forgiving of desertion than was its western counterpart, considering desertion an act of resistance. In all events, and not at all surprisingly, as Peifer records, desertion rates climbed steadily as World War II went on and the morale of German soldiers and their auxiliaries declined.

Students of military psychology as well as historians will find Peifer’s work of value.