‘Hitler’s Deserters’ by Douglas Carl Peifer review
In the liminal twilight of 1989, as the Berlin Wall’s imminent dissolution augured epochal geopolitical reconfigurations, Turkish sculptor Mehmet Aksoy was meticulously consummating his ‘Memorial for the Unknown Deserter’. Conceived for Bonn’s Freedom Square—then the epicenter of West German polity—yet ultimately transposed to Potsdam’s Unity Square, erstwhile locus of the GDR, in 2001, Aksoy’s Carrara marble opus is a meditation on ontological negation: a monolithic excrescence, its nucleus excised in the anthropomorphic void of an absent soldier, emblematic of the spectral agency of those who repudiated conscription into mechanized barbarity.
Douglas Carl Peifer’s magisterial treatise, Hitler’s Deserters, constitutes a historiographical intervention of formidable erudition, excavating the destinies of individuals who, in a gesture of existential defiance, extricated themselves from the Wehrmacht’s totalizing apparatus during the cataclysm of the Second World War. Given the epistemological impossibility of quantifying the aggregate of such transgressors, Peifer circumscribes his inquiry to those arraigned and judicially immolated by the Third Reich’s martial tribunals—institutions animated by a juridico-ideological synergy that sentenced approximately 18,000 to 20,000 military personnel to capital punishment for desertion, treason, or the nebulous charge of ‘subversion of the military spirit’. The monograph anatomizes the manifold vectors of desertion—ranging from existential dread, filial piety, and psychological attrition to the pragmatic calculus of survival—while delineating the perilous trajectories undertaken by these fugitives.
Peifer’s cardinal contribution resides in his transposition of otherwise hermetic German-language scholarship into the Anglophone academic canon, constituting the inaugural, methodologically rigorous, English-language exegesis by a credentialed historian. His archival peregrinations—particularly within the Swiss Federal Archives, Switzerland being a liminal sanctuary for Wehrmacht absconders—yield a palimpsest of narratives hitherto occluded from anglophone discourse.
Structurally, the treatise is architectonic, demystifying the labyrinthine strictures of Nazi military jurisprudence for the uninitiated. Peifer elucidates the ideological monomania—shared by Hitler and his officer corps—fixated on preempting a reprise of the mythicized ‘Dolchstoßlegende’ of 1918, while simultaneously exposing the Wehrmacht’s instrumentalization as a linchpin of the Nazi state. The narrative achieves its zenith in the poignant individuation of the so-called Verräter: through granular biographical exegeses, Peifer incarnates the anonymized statistics—Wilhelm Hanow, clandestinely harbored by his intrepid spouse only to be decapitated by guillotine; Ludwig Metz, whose odyssey into Swiss asylum is meticulously reconstructed; Stefan Hampel, whose Sisyphean escape from penal servitude culminates in Soviet captivity. These vignettes evince the inextricable interpenetration of juridical logic and Nazi ideological animus, with the imputation of ‘asociality’ frequently precipitating capital verdicts.
Peifer’s excursus into the psychosocial mechanisms that impelled the majority to acquiesce—ideological indoctrination, martial camaraderie, and the performativity of masculinity—while perhaps reiterative, is counterbalanced by his perspicacious taxonomy of desertion’s motivic spectrum: war-induced lassitude, atavistic fear, domestic yearning, and familial obligations predominate, with ethical or political dissent constituting a marginal impetus. The Anglophone dissemination of these findings represents a substantive scholarly augmentation, further enriched by Peifer’s interrogation of postwar hermeneutics surrounding the deserter’s mnemonic valence in both German polities. Once anathematized as traitors, these men have been, in select discursive registers, transfigured into paragons of resistance—a metamorphosis instantiated in Cologne’s 2009 memorial to the victims of Nazi military jurisprudence, which reifies the deserter as a figure of recusant moral rectitude. Nevertheless, Peifer astutely contends that, for the preponderant majority, desertion was less a manifestation of principled opposition than an expedient retreat from the abyssal brutality of a war rendered manifestly unwinnable.
WORDS TO BE NOTED-
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Ontological negation
Meaning: A philosophical concept denoting the absence or denial of existence. -
Excrescence
Meaning: An abnormal or disfiguring outgrowth; here used metaphorically for a protrusion. -
Juridico-ideological synergy
Meaning: The merging of legal systems and ideological principles to enforce authority. -
Hermetic
Meaning: Sealed off from external access; esoteric or obscure. -
Sisyphean
Meaning: Relentlessly laborious and futile, from the myth of Sisyphus. -
Recusant
Meaning: Resisting authority or refusing to comply, often for moral reasons. -
Anathema
Meaning: Something or someone intensely loathed or condemned.
PARA SUMARRY- The article examines Mehmet Aksoy’s evocative marble sculpture memorializing unknown deserters and Douglas Carl Peifer’s scholarly book, Hitler’s Deserters. It explores how the monument’s void symbolizes those who rejected Nazi conscription, while Peifer’s work rigorously analyzes the fate and motivations of Wehrmacht deserters, contextualizing their actions within the oppressive legal and ideological machinery of the Third Reich. The narrative highlights the complex interplay of fear, survival, and rare moral dissent, and traces the evolution of deserters’ public memory—from vilification to reluctant valorization—underscoring the tension between collective condemnation and the recognition of individual courage.
SOURCE- HISTORY TODAY
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FLESCH-KINCAID- 22.4
WORDS COUNT- 550
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