LEUTGEB: We had one thousand rounds per MG. You can imagine how long that lasts; we had no ammunition left. We had some damned Sudeten German there, the “Unteroffizier,” and I said to him: “What are we supposed to do here, we haven’t got any ammunition left, so let’s make off, we can’t do any more good.” “What the hell do you mean?” he said. I would have made off, but I didn’t want to do it because of my pals. Then we got mortar fire, which was simply indescribable. In the third Gruppe, only the machine-gunner was left alive.686
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:
HEIMANN: I had three “Bataillons” up there which only needed to retreat by night. Actually only the staff of my local defence “Bataillons” returned consisting of fifteen men; the rest had gone over to the enemy. They were men of forty to fifty years old, who felt quite safe in the “Bunker,” but then said: “We’re not going into the open field positions.” We were supposed to defend AACHEN with people like that!687
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
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:
