German Army Deserters During World War II

It took Germany six decades to come to terms with the harsh treatment that the Nazi regime meted out to German army deserters during World War II. Upwards of 22,000 German soldiers were executed after Wehrmacht military courts pronounced them guilty of desertion and “undermining the military spirit.”

Whether this is an accurate figure is by no means certain. The German armed forces’ archives in Potsdam burned to the ground following an Allied air raid on April 14, 1945, destroying desertion records.

In the wake of the war, nevertheless, Germans in the successor states of West Germany and East Germany were embroiled in a heated and lengthy debate about the treatment of soldiers who had abandoned their posts. This impassioned debate engaged a wide spectrum of German society and sparked a contentious question: had the deserters been cowards or victims?

In West Germany, a capitalist state, former Wehrmacht commanders claimed that deserters, having betrayed their comrades and the German state, had been justly punished. Left-wing literary figures like Heinrich Boll disputed that narrative. The debate became increasingly complex when critics wondered why West Germany had honored Claus von Stauffenburg, the high-ranking army officer who attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler, while continuing to stigmatize deserters.

A far different story line emerged in East Germany, a Marxist entity aligned with the Soviet Union. Insisting that the Wehrmacht had been an instrument of the Nazis, which planned a war of aggression in Europe, the East German leadership commended the soldiers who had deserted.

Douglas Carl Peifer, an American historian, deals with this charged topic in Hitler’s Deserters: Breaking Ranks With The Wehrmacht (Oxford University Press), the first English language work on it.

Peifer, a professor of strategy and history at the U.S. Air War College, draws on previous scholarship and archival sources in Germany, Switzerland and Britain, all of which support his belief that there was not a typical deserter in the 18-million strong Wehrmacht.

He limits the scope of his rigorous study to the Wehrmacht, omitting deserters from the SS and the Waffen-SS.

As he points out in his readable work, desertion is a fairly common phenomenon in all armies. Citing an example, he says that more than 50,000 British soldiers deserted from 1940 to 1942. None, however, were subjected to executions, the death penalty having been abolished for service members in 1930.

Deserters were motivated by, among other reasons, war weariness, homesickness, shoddy treatment, moral reservations and fear of injury. The drastic decision to desert was, in some cases, carefully planned, while spontaneous in other instances, he writes.

The vast majority of deserters (90.5 percent) were from the army, with Luftwaffe (7 percent) and Navy personnel (2.5 percent) accounting for a far smaller proportion. Most deserters were between 21 and 30 and hailed from the enlisted ranks. Non-commissioned officers and officers comprised a minuscule percentage of the total. No less than 17 percent were ethnic Germans from outside Germany’s 1937 boundaries.

In passing, Peifer zeroes in on a special class of deserters. He estimates that 150,000 Wehrmacht soldiers may have had a trace of Jewish ancestry, a statistics he gleans from Bryan Mark Riggs’ book, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story Of Nazi Racial Laws And Men Of Jewish Descent In The German Military. Known as mischlings, they were perceived as racially inferior and regarded as suspect. Peifer assumes that some of them “took the opportunity to desert” when the opportunity presented itself.

According to Peifer, Switzerland, a neutral power, was the favorite destination of deserters. German was widely spoken in Switzerland, it was easier to reach, and unlike neutral countries such as Sweden, Spain and Turkey, the Swiss government did not return deserters to Germany.

Despite the Swedish government’s policy of returning deserters, many German soldiers fled to Sweden, whose neutrality Germany exploited to the hilt. Unwilling to alienate the Nazi regime, Sweden allowed Germany to use its railway network to move soldiers and materiel, a clear violation of its neutral status.

By no means is this a book only about dry statistics. Scattered throughout are brief biographies of deserters.

Wilhelm Hanow, a veteran of World War I who had a criminal record, surrendered to authorities in the summer of 1942, two and a half years after his desertion in Poland. He was executed 1943, his pleas for clemency having been rejected.

Ludwig Metz, a lieutenant, fled into neutral Switzerland in 1942. He claimed that the unprovoked murder of Russian civilians and Jews weighed heavily on his conscience. He returned to Germany after the war.

Stefan Hampel, who was of German and Polish descent, deserted from his unit in East Prussia in 1942. He told interrogators he had been deeply shaken by an incident in Poland during which 2,000 Jews were shot in cold blood.

Helmut Gustav Gaebelein, the son of a bank director, defected to Switzerland in 1942 after having served in Poland. He said he had been disillusioned by the absence of free expression in Germany, but he made no effort to conceal his antisemitism.

Oskar Kusch, a U-boat commander, got himself into trouble while on a patrol in 1943. He made disparaging remarks about Hitler, claimed that the “international Jewish conspiracy” was a figment of the Nazi propaganda machine, and expressed doubts whether Germany could win the war. A fellow officer reported him, culminating in Kusch’s court-martial and execution.

A handful of independent minded officers like Kusch could be found in the highest echelons of the Wehrmacht and security services.

Ludwig Beck, the chief of staff of the army’s general command, resigned in 1938 out of fear that Hitler would plunge Germany into a disastrous war. Generals like Beck were “few, isolated and ineffectual,” in Peifer’s estimation.

Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the director of military intelligence, tried to convince Beck’s successor to stage a coup. Initially an ardent supporter of Hitler’s Nazi movement, Canaris endorsed his suppression of parliamentary democracy, his racist concept of a racially pure German community, and his antisemitic policies.

A conservative nationalist, Canaris parted ways with Hitler as he steered Germany into war in the late 1930s and after he learned that the Wehrmacht had participated in the mass shootings of Poles and Jews during the offensive in Poland.

Having been implicated in Stauffenburg’s plot to overthrow Hitler, Canaris was arrested, beaten and starved. He was executed a month before Germany’s unconditional surrender in May 1945.

Taking a deep dive into the values of the Wehrmacht, Peifer correctly contends that it was “an instrument” of the Third Reich, incorporating its intrinsic views.

The director of the Wehrmacht’s personnel division, Rudolf Schmundt, dispatched an antisemitic directive to commanders warning them not to socialize with Jews in German-occupied areas. “There is no difference between supposedly ‘decent’ Jews and the rest,” he wrote.

In the field, the Wehrmacht assisted Einsatzgruppen mobile killing squads in the massacre of 1.3 million Jews in Eastern Europe. And under the guise of anti-partisan warfare, the Wehrmacht provided logistical support and directly engaged in massacres against civilians. The Wehrmacht, too, shot tens of thousands of Greeks, Serbs and Poles and subjected millions of Soviet prisoners of war to appalling conditions that led to their deaths.

“The myth of a clean Wehrmacht, fighting honorably at the front and unaware of … massacres … has been thoroughly debunked,” he concludes.

Peifer suggests that the Wehrmacht’s bloody record was etched into the DNA of postwar German governments.

In West Germany, the Bundeswehr, the new German army, developed the concept of “inner guidance,” the idea that a soldier should be guided by a moral compass. “Not only did one have the right to disobey illegal and immoral orders, one had the responsibility to do so.”

Germany, in plain language, turned its back on Prussian concepts of “instinctual military obedience.”

Peifer does not delve into the question concerning desertion from the Bundeswehr. But one assumes that its code of conduct enables discontented soldiers to desert from the ranks under certain conditions.