German Executions
Dr. Christoph Jahr
According to official statistics only 48 death sentences were carried out in the German Army between 1914 and 1918. This fact does not readily match the picture of rigid German militarism. The military code of the German Empire still in force in 1914 dated from 1872. It was, as a memorandum by the British War Office stated in 1879, “more lenient than the Military Law of any other country“. In war, capital punishment could be inflicted in the following cases:
-Treason or concealment of treason
-Unjustifiable surrender
-Desertion in the field, repeated
-Instigation to conspiracy to desert in the field
-Desertion from a post in the presence of the enemy
-Cowardice in action
-Express refusal of obedience in the presence of the enemy
-Assault of superior in the field
-Instigation to mutiny in the field and participation in mutiny in the field
-Plundering accompanied by killing
-Murder
The irretrievable loss of records during World War II has made it almost impossible to establish detailed statistics on the number of executions in the German Army. The official statistics published in 1929 show very low - probably too low - figures. Thus, it is questionable how many soldiers may have been shot without trial.
Number of Death Sentences:
Some striking differences emerge when we compare these figures with the respective ones for the British and French armies. In relation to its size, ten times as many death sentences were carried out in the British and French armies as in the German one. While only about 11% of the death sentences passed were actually carried out in the British army, 30% were in the German army. More than two thirds of the death sentences passed in the British army were for the military offence of desertion; in the German Army it was only one third. In the British and French armies alike the number of death sentences inflicted and carried out reached its peak in 1914/15 and diminished during the war. In the German army, the highest number of executions seems to have been reached in 1916, the year in which the German army came close to defeat (Verdun and Somme in the West, Brussillov: Offensive in the East).
In the German Army, military law was applied relatively leniently. Obviously, the long history of Germany as a constitutional state - or “Rechtsstaat“ to quote the almost untranslatable German word for it - secured a reasonable application of military law considering the character of the German Empire as a ruthless authoritarian state. But things appear differently when we take into account the treatment of the civilian populations in Belgium and France. To give one example, in the area of communication held by the 6th Army (headquarters in Tournai), 7217 people were convicted for various offences in just one year, 1917. Seventeen death sentences were passed, 13 alone for espionage.
That military law was not applied equally can also be shown in another example. All in all, between 130,000 and 150,000 men were convicted of desertion or absence without leave in the German army, 40-50,000 of them in the field army. Given a total of 13.5 million mobilised German soldiers, it is clear that this did not have any significant effect on the outcome of the war, especially since the enemy armies had similar problems to deal with. Once more, the application of military law in cases of desertion in general was quiet lenient.
Desertion, however, is not only a military problem, but also a political one. This is clear in the case of soldiers from national minorities. The soldiers from Alsace-Lorraine were generally accused of lack of loyalty to Germany. From the very outset of the war, therefore, they were subjected to a whole host of discriminatory special regulations - both formal and informal. The legal norms that applied to the other German soldiers did not apply to the national minorities. And this is where we see the first sign of the dualism between “the normative state” and “the prerogative state” that Ernst Fraenkel later described as characteristic of Nazi rule.
One Army Group described the psychological effect of this discriminatory treatment as a self-fulfilling prophecy: “If a man is expected to lay down his life for a country, he has to have the feeling that this great sacrifice ... is for a ‘fatherland’. But if, by means of all sorts of measures, he is given to understand that he is actually a stepchild of this fatherland, then he is bound to develop the feeling that it is not a question of a fatherland at all…. The next step to defection thus becomes a very small one.”
Military law and its application were also discussed in the German Parliament. Surprisingly enough, the Reichstag did manage to exert some influence on the army. In April 1916, the Reichstag passed a resolution supporting a law to reduce the minimum sentences in the military code. Despite reservations, the Prussian War Ministry launched enquiries to determine whether a reduction of minimum sentences would be possible without endangering “troop discipline”. In April 1917, a bill “regarding the reduction of minimum sentences“ was passed unanimously by the Reichstag and became Law. Late in the spring of 1918, the War Minister presented the Reichstag with a Bill to change the military code once again.
In so doing, he uttered words in June 1918 which, in the light of the “stab-in-the-back legend“, deserve particular attention: “We do not fear that this greater leniency will cause any erosion of discipline.” Once again, the law was passed unanimously.
The military authorities had not been able to counter the all-party political pressure for more lenient sentences. Admittedly, the initiatives for changing the law came from the Socialist left, the liberal parties, and the Catholic Centre Party, but even the parties of the right and the War Ministry put aside their original objections fairly quickly.
Thus, throughout the war, an astonishingly far-reaching consensus prevailed in the Reichstag to the effect not only that military penal laws should be more lenient, but also that they could be so without any serious threat to discipline.
As far as post-war developments are concerned, a few key points deserve mention here. In the face of fierce resistance from the right-wing parties, military law was abolished in 1920. This decision, which they never accepted, formed one of the many starting points for their fundamental criticism of the Weimar Republic. The “malingerers” were held partly responsible for the defeat. Thus, the debate about the application of military law in the Great War was one of the arguments with which the Germans were persuaded to go for a second Griff nach der Weltmacht” (drive for world power).
Consistent with this, military law was reintroduced in 1934 and now corresponded completely to the bloody image of military law that was not at all the case from 1914 to 1918.
In 1940, the military lawyer Erich Schwinge formulated the interpretation of the causes of Germany’s defeat that had become state doctrine in 1933. He maintained “that the outcome of the great battle of the nations very probably would have been different if the spread of certain symptoms of disintegration in the years 1917 and 1918 ... had been fought as energetically as in other countries.”
Ironically enough, Schwinge’s shining example in this was the harsh application of military law in the French and British Army 1914-1918. Thus, in the Second World War German military law became more radical and inhumane than ever before and in any other state (except probably the Soviet Union), a development that resulted in about 15,000 German soldiers being executed between 1939 and1945.
The present British and French debate on whether collective posthumous pardons should be granted for all executed soldiers is unparalleled in Germany as far as the First World War is concerned. But this is definitely not the case for the soldiers of the Second World War. It is a painful and unfinished process to learn, that the "military values" like obedience and performance of duty so popular in German society during the first half of the 20th century were so easily perverted in World War II ending in a policy of total terror and even genocide.
In Germany, the question whether collective posthumous pardons for all executed soldiers should be granted is, therefore, being discussed only for the Second World War. The victims of the German military justice of World War I have been entirely forgotten.
Dr Christoph Jahr
Christoph Jahr was born in 1963 in Freiburg i.Br. and studied History, Politics and German in Freiburg and Berlin. He is a scholar of the Historial de la Grande Guerre, Péronne (1995) and at the German Historical Institute, London (1996); he obtained his Ph.D. in 1997 on the subject of desertion from the German and the British Army 1914-1918. He is a scholar of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft for research on the internment of British civilians in Germany, 1914-1918 (1997); and is currently junior lecturer in modern history at the Humboldt University in Berlin.
Co-editor of: "Feindbilder in der deutschen Geschichte. Studien zur Vorurteilsgeschichte im 19. Und 20. Jahrhundert" (Berlin, 1994)
"Gewoehnliche Soldaten. Desertion unde Deserteure im deutschen und britischen Heer 1914-1918." (Göttingen, 1998)
This is a summary of an address given at the "Unquiet Graves" International Conference on Executions held in Flanders in May 2000.
