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Hitler’s Deserters
by Lars Petersson
(Fonthill Books, £18.99)
IN Hitler’s Deserters Lars Petersson returns to his study of ordinary German soldiers under the nazi regime which he began in Deserters, published a decade ago.
In it he recounts the fate of the estimated 50,000 German soldiers who deserted their units during the second world war, of whom 20,000 were executed by firing squad, hanging or beheading.
Ten thousand suffered slower deaths in concentration camps and penal battalions.
Even those who escaped execution have lived the rest of their lives treated as traitors, cowards and pariahs by a post-nazi Germany which professes to hate the regime which they had refused to fight and kill for.
Petersson is careful not to treat this brutality as an isolated case.
He tells the well-known story of Private Harry Farr, executed for “cowardice” by the British army in 1916 by a so-called trial in which the shell-shocked Farr had to represent himself.
This summary “justice,” Petersson contends, happened 10 times more frequently on the British side than on the German in WWI and was perhaps part of the inspiration for Hitler’s decree of the most merciless discipline for the armed forces in the second world war.
It was a discipline suffered by 24-year-old Anton from regiment 462, whose commander on the Eastern Front had praised him as “encouraging in battle.”
While on leave he got drunk and allowed himself to be injected with kerosene and fall ill rather than return to a Russian front on which he had fought for four years without a break.
The nazi authorities allowed him six weeks to recover, then executed him for self-mutilation.
The 16-year-old Ferdinand was sentenced to death for desertion in 1945, solely for planning an escape while in custody after a nervous breakdown.
The nazi court termed him a “spineless immature childish-looking boy” and executed him.
With these grim accounts of inhumanity, Petersson’s book is a timely reminder of how the brutality of the first world war paved the way for the even greater brutality of the second.
