LETTER FROM BERLIN: A soldier who deserted in Nazi Germany had to wait a very long time before being vindicated, writes DEREK SCALLY
SALVATION COMES in unlikely places. For the 87-year-old Ludwig Baumann, it came in a 20-year battle to clear the names of victims of Nazi-era military courts, no longer here to fight for themselves.
That fight ended this week, when the German parliament revoked convictions against last remaining victims of Nazi military “justice”: the men and women convicted and executed as “war traitors”.
Ludwig Baumann is himself a victim, sentenced to death in 1942 not as a “war traitor”, but as a deserter. He was serving in the marines on the French border when early doubts about Nazi ideology became impossible to ignore. He tried to escape but was caught, convicted and put on death row.
After 10 months there, bound hand and foot and convinced every day would be his last, his sentence was commuted to life in prison. Mr Baumann was one of more than 30,000 people sentenced to death by Nazi courts for desertion or treason during the second World War. Of those, about 20,000 were executed.
After the war, Mr Baumann began a second sentence. His Nazi-era sentence still stood in West Germany and, as someone with a previous conviction, it was impossible to find work – or sympathy.
“We were treated as cowards, criminals and traitors, and, of the few survivors, many died in terrible circumstances,” says Baumann in a low voice, studying his hands to control his emotions.
His compensation application for wartime imprisonment was refused. The authorities ruled that his “time on death row was a reprieve, not a punishment”.
“I became very sick after that ruling,” he says. “I was so destroyed by it all that I began to drink. My parents were well-off, and after they died I drank away the entire estate.”
His marriage was a disaster, his relationship with his five children non-existent. The final blow came when his wife died giving birth to their sixth child.
“I had to stop drinking, get back on my feet and take responsibility for raising the children,” he said. “That was when I finally needed to start fighting.” In tragedy, a moment of salvation.
Baumann founded a group with other victims of Nazi military justice in 1990, but they were dismayed, if not surprised, to find public opinion against them. Even five decades on, Nazi-era traitors and deserters were viewed as cowards who had put their comrades in danger.
Then Baumann began to receive hate mail.
“You are vermin, Mr Baumann,” wrote one Col Alois Grüblehner of the Wehrmacht, accusing him of “betraying the Fatherland”.
By the mid-1990s, public opinion began to shift thanks to media coverage. A big help too, Baumann says, were attacks from the extreme right wing of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), whose opposition to rehabilitation helped them to secure votes of older Germans like Col Grüblehner.
In the late 1990s, as public opinion fell in behind Baumann’s campaign, the Kohl government agreed one-off compensation for victims.
The compensation, Baumann says, a one-off payment of DM 7,500, could only be paid out to victims directly, or to families of victims who died during processing of an application.
It was another blow to women who had already been denied a widow’s pension because their “traitor” husbands had been dishonourably discharged.
Finally, in 2002, the Bundestag finally voted: it expunged verdicts against deserters like Baumann, but left untouched the convictions against “wartime traitors”. After 60 years, Baumann’s name was clear, but he kept fighting.
“I knew that only when these last convictions have been lifted, have we successfully broken with our Nazi past,” he says.
Things began to move again after an official review of the 1934 Nazi treason law found it so vague as to be open to broad interpretation and abuse.
The Left Party threw its weight behind Baumann’s campaign and brought the Social Democrats and the Green Party on board to draft a Bill to clear the “traitors”.
The CDU held out and only agreed to back the Bill if the Left Party took its name off the initiative.
“I think the CDU made the calculation that, while it was possible in previous years to take care of old troops, now there is more to lose than win with this position,” says Left Party MP Jan Korte, who backed the campaign.
On Tuesday, Baumann sat in the public gallery of the Bundestag and watched. First an emotional debate on a bombing in Afghanistan; then a vote on the Lisbon Treaty. Finally his vote: unanimous in favour of rehabilitation of “war traitors”.
“For me it’s been a belated fulfilment of my life,” says Baumann. “I was so humiliated by my experiences, I humiliated myself so much with alcohol.
“Sometimes I ask myself, where would I have landed if my wife hadn’t died?”