Entziehungen: Österreichische Deserteure und Selbstverstümmler in der Deutschen Wehrmacht

"Coward", "traitor", "comrade-swine" - these are epithets with which deserters are still partly addressed today. In the time of National Socialism, any attempt at withdrawal from German military power was threatened with death. Deserters and self-agitators were mercilessly persecuted as "traitors" by the Wehrmacht judicial system. Their refusal to go to war for Hitler remained unimportant in post-war Austria. Who were the people who were exposed to this danger? The book explores the different motivations that underlie the confiscations and documents the partial adventurous flight sequences by means of sources. The persecution of the deserters and self-agitators by the Nazi military judiciary and the brutally brutal imprisonment of the German Armed Forces, which until now had hardly been investigated scientifically, are also analyzed in detail. A second focus is the situation of deserters and self-agglomeration in post-war Austria. Anyone who survived the war as a deserter had to fight after 1945 with massive hostility and discrimination. The persecution of Nazi-ideological hostile images and the inadequate handling of the past made these "disobedient" soldiers in Austria into social outsiders whose history and suffering have largely disappeared. The highly differentiated and stylistically distinguished book tells the story of the "other" soldiers in an illustrative manner and thus pioneers work in Austrian history research.