Читаем Soldaten полностью

In soldiers’ eyes, the only thing worse than someone who refused to fight was someone who deserted. Major Heimann recalled a case from the battles for Aachen:

In their conversations, POWs treated desertion as something unthinkable. “I could never have done it myself and I don’t think any men from GERMANY proper would ever desert, only Austrians and all those Volksdeutsche [ethnic Germans from outside Germany proper],” asserted one lieutenant in late December 1944.⁶⁸⁸ It was rare for soldiers to directly address the topic before the end of 1944. One exception: “I shall probably be sentenced to death, but it’s better to be alive under sentence of death for desertion, than to be lying dead on the battlefield.”⁶⁸⁹ Interestingly, the soldier who said this was a member of the SS division “Frundsberg.” By July 1944, the German situation was so miserable that even the Waffen SS was no longer a monolithic bloc of fanatic political warriors. In order to avoid accusations of shirking and cowardice, most German soldiers who had deserted concealed that fact and sought to portray their behavior as conforming to military norms. They had only given up because the war was now lost and it no longer made sense to keep fighting. Hopelessness was named far more often as a reason for desertion than any political motivations. This may have been due to the POWs’ communicative situation: especially while being held prisoner, individuals were not permitted to question military values.⁶⁹⁰

Very few soldiers articulated any doubts at all about the war itself or Germany’s attacks upon its neighbors. Even a deserter like Alfred Andersch, later a well-regarded German author, who abandoned his post near Rome on June 6, 1944, displayed a thoroughly positive attitude toward the Wehrmacht and military virtues.⁶⁹¹ That shows how deeply even those men who had the courage to break free from the framework of the Wehrmacht had internalized the military value system. It was only as of spring 1945 that increasing numbers of soldiers dared to speak frankly and unashamedly about desertion: