Nor was it only unruly soldiers engaged in illegal activities who found themselves caught in the wide net thrown out by the collecting officers. Following a disorganized retreat across the Dnieper in late 1943, Sajer and his fellow survivors were confronted by the dreaded German field police—who always inspired “desperate unease”—then in the process of restoring order and discipline. A corporal, Sajer recalled, “told us to get over to the tables to be screened. We should be ready to produce on demand the papers and equipment entrusted to us by the army. This reception only increased our sense of astonished unease,” for as Sajer knew, “the most serious of accusations were leveled against anyone who returned without his weapons…. Our soldiers were never supposed to abandon their arms. They were supposed to die with them.”47
Sajer’s misgivings increased as he witnessed the interrogation of a lieutenant directly ahead of him in the line.
“Where is your unit, lieutenant?”
“Annihilated, Herr Gendarme. Missing or dead….”
“Did you leave your men, or were they killed?”
The lieutenant hesitated for a moment…. [He] clearly felt caught in a trap, as did we all…. He tried to explain. But there is never any point in explaining to an M:P.: their powers of comprehension are always limited to the form they wish to fill.
Further, it appeared that the lieutenant was missing a great many things…. The army did not distribute its papers and equipment only to have them scattered and lost. A German soldier is expected to die rather than indulge in carelessness with army property.
The careless lieutenant was assigned to a penal battalion…. At that, he could think himself lucky.
Lucky, that is, as Sajer well knew, only because the alternative was to be shot on the spot.
Then it was my turn. I felt stiff with fright Fortunately I had been able to reintegrate with my unit….
“You were retreating?”
“Ja, Herr Unteroffizier (Corporal).”
“Why didn’t you… fight,” he shouted….
“We were ordered to retreat, Herr Unteroffizier.”
“God damn it to hell!” he roared. “What kind of an army runs without shooting?”
My pay book came down the line. My interrogator grabbed it, and riffled the pages for a moment…. I followed the movement of his lips, which might be about to assign me to a penal battalion, to the life of a prisoner, to forward positions, mine clearing, infrequent leaves always confined to camps, so that the word “liberty” lost all meaning….
I held back my tears with difficulty. Finally the M.P.’s rigid fingers handed back my liberty. I had not been assigned to a penal battalion, but my emotion overwhelmed me anyway. As I picked up my pack, I sobbed convulsively, unable to stop. A fellow beside me was doing the same.48
So intimidating was Wehrmacht discipline that in the aftermath of a savage battle, in which he had only just escaped with his life, Sajer found himself overwhelmed with emotion not because of his recent ordeal but because he had narrowly eluded the more terrifying fate of the penal battalion or instant execution.
The harshest discipline and greatest danger of execution came in the last months of the war, when “flying courts martial” and similar institutions likely executed 7,000–8,000 men, most immediately and on the spot, using the so-called political crimes of desertion and Wehrkraftzersetzung used to justify such draconian measures. The great majority of men thus summarily tried and executed had rarely exhibited any overt ideological or oppositional motivation for their behavior. Rather, they were simply men, usually young, poorly educated, and slightly bewildered, who just could not cope any longer with combat conditions. Guy Sajer related a dreary episode of a kind that would grow only too familiar in the months to come. During the disorderly withdrawal through the Carpathians in the summer of 1944, “someone up ahead shouted for us to come and see,” Sajer remembered. “We looked down into a leafy ravine. A camouflaged truck… had crashed to the bottom.” And to these ravenous men, some of whom had not eaten in days, the contents of the truck were “like a whole commissary…. Chocolate, cigarettes, wurst.” But standing in the way of the enjoyment of such a bounty loomed the constant threat of the Feldpolizei, made more dangerous since many of these Landsers had lost or thrown away their military equipment. Sajer and his immediate comrades proved fortunate, however: “Like hungry beasts, we wolfed down the contents of the tins and the other provisions,” he recalled. “‘We’d better eat it all,’ Lensen said. ‘If we’re caught with anything in our sacks that wasn’t handed out, we’ll be in trouble.’ ‘You’re right. Let’s eat it all. They won’t slit us open to see what’s inside, although it would be just like those bastards to check our shit.’ For an hour we gorged ourselves until we were almost sick. When it grew dark, we returned to the road by a devious route.”49
They had escaped detection, but others of their unit were not so lucky:
We resumed our trek…. And then there was a tree, a majestic tree, whose branches seemed to be supporting the sky. Two sacks were dangling from those branches, two empty scarecrows swinging in the wind, suspended by two short lengths of rope. We walked under them, and saw the gray, bloodless faces of hanged men, and recognized our wretched friend Frösch and his companion.
“Don’t worry, Frösch,” whispered Hals. “We ate it all.”
Lindberg hid his face in his hands and wept. I managed with difficulty to read the message scribbled on the sign tied to Frösch’s broken neck.
“I am a thief and a traitor to my country.”
Poor Frösch had been one of those archetypal bewildered men who had never quite adjusted to life at the front, a nondescript individual whom Sajer had earlier described as “a foolish-looking fellow of angelic good will…. He always wore an expression of touching stupidity and banal good will.”50 For those like Frösch unlucky enough to have lost their units or equipment in the disorderly retreat that was the Götterdämmerung of the Nazi regime, such cursory “justice” loomed as a sobering reminder that the tentacles of the Hitler state still clutched them in a deadly embrace.
Landsers found without the proper documents or suspected of desertion also became victims of these summary trials. For maximum deterrent effect, those executed were normally left dangling from trees or poles with placards attached to them, warning others of the consequences of any perceived dereliction of duty. Max Landowski recalled such sights during his westward flight from Danzig in January 1945, remembering particularly that many of the hanged had been accused of “cowardice in the face of the enemy.” As he put it, “There was no mercy.” Reporting to Wehrmacht authorities in Cottbus, Landowski saw in front of the headquarters building “an executed German soldier [lying] on the grass, and he had a large placard… on his chest and on it appeared: ‘That’s how it goes for one who is a coward.’” Erwin Lösch recalled a similarly “horrific picture” in Danzig: “on the trees along the street hung German soldiers, ropes around their necks. Some were barefoot and almost all had a sign on their chest on which ‘coward’ appeared. Not a few had decorations on their field uniforms. It took our breath away.” And sixteen-year-old Hans-Rudolf Vilter still never forgot the picture of chaos in Berlin, especially “the deserters and apprehended soldiers that one saw hanging on the lampposts and trees with the sign: ‘I hang here because I am too cowardly to defend my fatherland.’”51