Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

by Max Hastings

It is an enduring enigma how a German army overwhelmingly composed of conscripts, as much citizen soldiers as were their Allied counterparts, should have shown itself consistently their superior. Part of the answer must lie in the supreme professionalism of the officer corps and its combat doctrine; through the ages Germany had produced formidable soldiers, and under Hitler their performance attained its zenith, albeit in an unspeakable cause. Beyond this, the role of compulsion became almost as important as it was in Stalin’s armies. German soldiers who fled a battlefield or deserted knew they were subject to execution, a sanction imposed with increasing frequency as the Nazi empire crumbled. The Wehrmacht shot nothing like as many of its own men as did the Russians, but by 1945 penal executions ran into tens of thousands. Allied commanders, desperate to persuade their own men to try harder, often lamented their inability to impose deterrent capital sentences on deserters.