Never Again! Wehrmacht Military Justice, Desertion, and the Shadow of 1918

The German military executed between 16,000 and 18,000 German deserters over the course of the Second War. During the short, 3-month Poland campaign, the Wehrmacht executed twice as many German soldiers for desertion as had the Imperial German Army over the course of the World War I. It would be misplaced to attribute this ready resort to the death penalty to the incursion of National Socialist worldviews into the military mindset. Quite independently of Hitler and the National Socialist movement, the German military community believed that the military justice system had failed in the crisis of 1917/18. When the German military reestablished its military justice apparatus in 1933 (it had been disestablished in the Weimar era), the veteran jurists who made up its core were determined to “correct” the mistakes of the First World War. Nationalist, hostile to the left, and traumatized by the collapse of military authority in 1918, they reimagined how harsher discipline might have changed the First World War.

Military jurists were determined to be more proactive in stifling dissent and deterring desertion in any future war. This paper will demonstrate how the “stab in the back” narrative, lessons learned by military jurists, and the military’s embrace a worldview that left no place for conscientious objection or personal considerations set the stage for the execution of thousands of German soldiers unwilling or unable to conform to the demands placed on them in the Second World War.