TEMPLIN: All people can talk about these days is taking off, whether you can just run away and how best to do it. The afternoon we were taken captive, we were sitting in a basement waiting. There was a lot of shooting nearby, and at any moment, we thought a shell will hit the basement. We were 15 men, and we were just sitting there, and no one dared to say: We’ll just sit here and wait to be taken prisoner. But the Americans simply wouldn’t come. And that evening some infantrymen showed up and said, “Come on, you can leave here now.” And we had to follow them. Otherwise we would have taken off. The infantry, the lieutenant were already gone by the afternoon. They blew up the bridge, but we just sat there. I wasn’t afraid at all.
FRIEDL: Yes of the Germans, but not of the Americans. The Germans, that was a lot worse, the uncertainty. Everyone thinks differently about how he acts. Everyone thinks: “If only the time would come,” and then comes the officer, and you carry out orders just so. That’s what’s tragic about the situation.692
The official punishment for showing cowardice in the face of the enemy or for desertion was, with very few exceptions, death, and German military tribunals were not shy about enforcing this rule. Some 20,000 German soldiers were given the death penalty—about the same number as in Imperial Japan. By comparison, only 146 American soldiers were put to death, while it is estimated that 150,000 Soviet ones were executed.693
The number of men executed as deserters increased as final defeat began to loom, rising dramatically in fall 1944. Up until that point, soldiers seemed to have accepted the death penalty as a perfectly normal punishment for desertion or even cowardice in the face of the enemy. In December 1943, Lieutenant Hohlstein of 15th Tank Division talked about his experiences two years previously in Russia. His bunkmate First Sergeant von Bassus inquired about the conditions surrounding the winter of crisis before the gates to Moscow in 1941–42. Hohlstein pointed out that there had been deserters:
HOHLSTEIN: Yes. There are always some individual cases. People who had been in the fighting in RUSSIA right from the beginning and had marched most of the time in the swamps and forests and mud and everything, who had been through that dreadful autumn and then experienced the cold and then the Russian break-through, of course became pessimistic and said: “It’s all up now, now, our number’s up.” In order to get to the rear more quickly, several men threw away their arms, their rifles and so on, which is in itself not very serious, but they were condemned to death. They had to be, because it just had to be made clear to them that a thing like that simply couldn’t be done.694
Bassus was astonished that Wehrmacht soldiers had deserted as early as 1941. Both men consoled themselves with the idea that these had been only isolated cases, and they agreed that deserters definitely deserved the death penalty.
