“After World War I, German commanders and military jurists drew the conclusion that the Imperial German Army had been too lenient in the crisis year of 1918. They vowed that if Germany ever went to war again, they would be pitiless in dealing with deserters.”

By Douglas Peifer

THE Wehrmacht executed somewhere between 16,000 and 18,000 deserters in World War II.^[1]  In contrast, Imperial Germany executed fewer than 100 deserters in the First World War, a number far lower than those executed for desertion by Italy, France, Great Britain or Russian during that conflict.^[2]

Why did the Wehrmacht punish deserters so much more harshly in World War II than had the Imperial German Army? The answer lies in how Germany came to terms with its defeat in 1918.

Rather than admit that the country had lost the war on the battlefield, a myth emerged in Germany after the Armistice, that the army was stabbed in the back by Jews, Bolsheviks, democrats, and others who had encouraged desertion from the front and revolution at home. It was a narrative popular among German nationalist politicians, veteran associations, the Nazi party, and even the Wehrmacht itself.

Indeed, the stab-in-the-back narrative can be traced back to the weeks before the surrender, even as the Kaiser’s army was being pushed back to the borders of Germany itself. As Allied offensives took their toll in the summer and fall of 1918, it became increasingly clear that many German troops were no longer willing to risk their lives fighting for a cause that seemed all but lost.

Ludwig Beck, then a major in Crown Prince Wilhelm’s Army Group, wrote home that German troops “did not hold anymore” because they simply didn’t want to. Erich Ludendorff later asserted that:

Loss by desertion was uncommonly high. The number that got into neutral countries — e.g., Holland—ran into tens of thousands, and a far greater number lived happily at home, tacitly tolerated by their fellow-citizens and completely unmolested by the authorities. They and the skrimshankers at the front, of whom there were thousands more, reduced the battle strength of the fighting troops, especially of the infantry, to which most of them belonged, to a vital degree.”^[3]

Instead of owning up to the bitter truth that Germany had blundered into the war in 1914 and had made a series of strategic errors during the course of the conflict, German nationalists preferred to blame domestic enemies for the country’s defeat. Ludendorff, who in late September of 1918 demanded that the government seek an immediate armistice, would later claim that the German military could have fought on for months, forcing the Allies to grant Germany more generous terms. He took no responsibility for creating the crisis that beset the German military after his 1918 spring offensives had failed and instead claimed that the army had been the victim of a “secret, planned, demagogic campaign” by Bolsheviks, socialists, democrats, Jews, and assorted “November criminals” who had stabbed it in the back.^[4]

William II, writing from his refuge in the Netherlands after the war, echoed the sentiment:

“After four and a half brilliant years of war with unprecedented victories, it [the German Army] was forced to collapse by the stab-in-the-back from the dagger of the revolutionist, at the very moment when peace was within reach!”^[5]

Ludendorff was dismissed by the Kaiser on September 29, 1918 and absconded to Sweden. Upon his return to Germany in early 1919, he engaged in efforts to overthrow the Weimar Republic. Ludendorff’s comments about the German military justice system in the First World War bear repeating because they were written in 1919, well-before his association with Hitler.

That many other nationalist officers shared his conviction that the German military justice system in the First World War had let them down is apparent in letters, journal articles, and the manipulation of post-war histories.^[6] In his book My War Memories, written in Sweden between November 1918 and February 1919, Ludendorff wrote the following about German military justice in the recently concluded war:

“The judges had come to regard military offenses with a leniency, which was often incomprehensible. A contributory cause of this was that the cases which had occurred at the front were not dealt with immediately by the unit, but further in rear [sic] in quite different circumstances and after a certain time had elapsed. It should always have been remembered that there were many men in the army who deserved no mercy whatever; of this the numerous deserters and skrimshankers are a melancholy proof. These people required severe punishment; that was demanded by the distress of our country, but also by consideration for those who were well conducted and brave.”^[7]

The Weimar Republic dissolved the entire military justice apparatus in the early 1920s, and it was only after Hitler’s ascent to power that the German military began to reassemble a core group of trained jurists. They drew from a judiciary staffed by nationalists deeply hostile to the left, favorably disposed to the right, and in many cases convinced that Ludendorff had been correct on this point. Both veteran jurists from the First World War and younger lawyers trained in the Weimar era internalized nationalist claims that Germany had been stabbed in the back in 1918 and concluded that Imperial Germany’s military judicial system had been too lenient in its treatment of deserters, malcontents, and “shirkers.” They were determined to learn from the mistakes of World War I, stifle unrest in its embryonic stage, and prioritize discipline and support for the war over individual rights and justice.

Heinrich Dietz, the editor of the Zeitschrift für Wehrrecht, hammered home these supposed lessons in the leading journal of the judge advocate community.^[8] Erich Schwinge, a professor of law at Marburg University who wrote the definitive commentary on Germany’s Military Penal Code, made the same point, reminding his readers that “It is now established that that during the World War the German lawgivers did not counter the forces of disintegration with the energy and ruthlessness required by the seriousness of the hour.”^[9] Hans Bockelberg, a senior military judge, reminded his subordinates at the outbreak of World War II that:

We should not forget that the army was stabbed in the back in the last war, leading to the war’s unfortunate outcome. This fact clearly underlines the importance of our assignment, and gives direction to our work […] The required goal we seek can only be achieved by swift and sharp justice. Secondary concerns and legalistic quibbling need to be avoided at all costs. Don’t be distracted by minutia.^[10]

References to the experience of World War I continually crop up in court martial records and psychological evaluations pertaining to Wehrmacht deserters, employing the same terms Hitler and the party used such as “November criminals,” “community parasites,” “weaklings,” and “asocials.” To interpret this sort of rhetoric as incursions of Nazi coarseness into a conservative and legalistic enclave is incorrect. The Wehrmacht’s military justice system was not radicalized because of National Socialism, but came to embrace National Socialist terms because they reflected attitudes and conclusions military jurists had formed independently.^[11]

After World War I, German commanders and military jurists drew the conclusion that the Imperial German Army had been too lenient in the crisis year of 1918. They vowed that if Germany ever went to war again, they would be pitiless in dealing with deserters. And they were.

The United States military, around the same size as the Wehrmacht, only executed one soldier for desertion in World War II, the unfortunate Private Eddie Slovik.^[12] The British Empire, fighting for survival in 1940-42, refrained from executing any of its deserters because Britain had abolished the death sentence for cowardice and desertion in 1930.^[13] The German military, drawing different lessons from the Great War, executed between 16,000 and 18,000 Germans for desertion over the course of the Second War.^[14]

Douglas C. Peifer is the author of Hitler’s Deserters: Breaking Ranks with the Wehrmacht. A professor of Strategy and History at the US Air War College, his teaching and research interests focus on European history, contemporary European security issues; the World Wars; and mutiny, desertion, and dissent. Peifer’s other books include Choosing War: Presidential Decisions in the Maine, Lusitania, and Panay Incidents; Genocide, Airpower, and Intervention; and The Three German Navies. His articles have appeared in Contemporary European History, European Security, German Studies Review, Journal of Military History, Naval War College Review, Orbis, War and Society, and War in History.

 

 

 

FOOTNOTES

^[1] Messerschmidt’s estimate that between 18,000 and 22,000 German military personnel were executed by the German military includes death sentences levied and carried out for desertion as well as other charges, hence the discrepancy in numbers.

^[2] Figures for Britain, France, and Germany from Messerschmidt, figures for Italy from Welch. For an insightful comparison of the British and German military justice systems in WWI, see Jahr. Messerschmidt and Forschungsamt, Die Wehrmachtjustiz, 1933-1945, 172; Welch, “‘Harsh but Just’? German Military Justice in the Second World War: A Comparative Study of the Court-Martialling of German and US Deserters,” 377; Christoph Jahr, Gewöhnliche Soldaten: Desertion und Deserteure im deutschen und britischen Heer 1914-1918 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998).

^[3] Erich Ludendorff, My war memories, 1914-1918, 2 vols. (London: Hutchinson, 1919), 585.

^[4] Richard J. Evans, The coming of the Third Reich (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004), 61.

^[5] Evans, The coming of the Third Reich, 61.

^[6] See Messerschmidt and Forschungsamt, Die Wehrmachtjustiz, 1933-1945, 19-21; Jörg Echternkamp, German wartime society 1939-1945: politicization, disintegration and the struggle for survival, ed. Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, vol. 9/1., Germany and the Second World War, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008), 55-56.

^[7] Ludendorff, My war memories, 1914-1918, 611-12.

^[8] Messerschmidt and Forschungsamt, Die Wehrmachtjustiz, 1933-1945, 11, 21; Baumann and Koch, ‘Was damals Recht war …’ Soldaten und Zivilisten vor Gerichten der Wehrmacht, 67; David H. Kitterman, “The Justice of the Wehrmacht Legal System:  Servant or Opponent of National Socialism,” Central European History 24, no. 4 (1991). Schwinge’s commentary would go through 6 editions, and his post-World War II effort to whitewash the Third Reich’s military justice system became notorious.

^[9] Messerschmidt and Forschungsamt, Die Wehrmachtjustiz, 1933-1945, 73.  Schwinge continued to argue that German military justice had been too soft in World War I in his highly controversial 1977 study. For Schwinge’s assessment and a discussion of the Schwinge and Schweling apologia, see Otto Peter Schweling and Erich Schwinge, Die deutsche Militärjustiz in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus (Marburg: Elwert, 1977), 30-40; Steven R. Welch, “‘Harsh but Just’? German Military Justice in the Second World War: A Comparative Study of the Court-Martialling of German and US Deserters,” German History 17, no. 3 (1999).

^[10] Messerschmidt and Forschungsamt, Die Wehrmachtjustiz, 1933-1945, 70.

^[11] Robert Gellately makes a related point in True Believers. Many of the Nazi movements early leaders and militants had embraced its core tenets well before they joined the movement. And as others have pointed out, the German military’s tendency towards extremist solutions likewise predates the Nazi seizure of power. Robert Gellately, Hitler’s true believers: how ordinary people became Nazis (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2020).

^[12] In his large sample set, Welch did discover another case of an American shot for desertion, a Private Robert Donnelly. But as Welch explained, Donnelly had shot and killed a military policeman, and he was executed for murder rather than desertion. For a comparative discussion, see Welch, “‘Harsh but Just’? German Military Justice in the Second World War: A Comparative Study of the Court-Martialling of German and US Deserters”; Wüllner, Die NS-Militärjustiz und das Elend der Geschichtsschreibung: ein grundlegender Forschungsbericht, 77-79.

^[13] David French, ” Discipline and the Death Penalty in the British Army in the War against Germany during the Second World War,” Journal of Contemporary History 33 (1998): 535, 541; Gerard Oram, “Armee, Staat, Bürger und Wehrpflicht.  Die britische Militärjustiz bis nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg,” in Wehrmachtsjustiz: Kontext, Praxis, Nachwirkungen, ed. Peter Pirker and Florian Wenninger (Wien: Braumüller, 2011), 197.  See also Gerard Oram, Death Sentences in the British Army (London: Francis Boutle, 1998); Douglas C. Peifer, “The Past in the Present: Passion, Politics, and the Historical Profession in the German and British Pardon Campaigns,” Article, Journal of Military History 71, no. 4 (2007).

^[14] Messerschmidt’s estimate that between 18,000 and 22,000 German military personnel were executed by the German military includes death sentences levied and carried out for desertion as well as other charges, hence the discrepancy in numbers.