[The following takes place during the final days of World War II in Germany.]
Military police combed the territory behind the front lines for deserters and were given powers of summary court martial; tens of thousands of soldiers were caught and immediately sent back into battle; hundreds were summarily executed, some without any trial whatsoever.
[…]
The executions were well publicized among the troops – as for example when the soldiers in the Military District X (Hamburg) were informed that ‘on 27 March 1945, 21 soldiers, who the court martial has sentenced to death for desertion, were shot in Hamburg’, and that ‘every shirker and coward will face the same fate without mercy’.
A few weeks later the last shred of legal trapping was stripped from the campaign against allegedly defeatist elements within the Wehrmacht when, in his ‘Call to the Soldiers of the Eastern Front’ on 15 April, Hitler ordered: ‘Whoever gives you orders to retreat, without you knowing him exactly, is to be arrested at once and if necessary bumped off immediately – whatever rank he holds.’
The Supreme Commander and Head of State made it clear that neither legality nor military hierarchy were to be respected. German soldiers were expected to fight and to die, and if they hesitated they were to be killed by their comrades.
Source:
Bessel, Richard. “A World in Flames.” Germany 1945: From War to Peace. New York, NY, HarperCollins, 2009. 43. Print.
Original Source(s) Listed:
Quoted in Messerschmidt and Wüllner, Die Wehrmachtsjustiz, p. 117.
Text in Schramm (ed.), Kriegstgebuch des Oberkommandos der Wehrmacht. Band IV, pp. 1589-1590. See also Förster, ‘Die Niederlage der Wehrmacht’, p. 11.
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