Thoughts on war: The German writer Alfred Andersch on the “oath of allegiance” and compulsory military service (Published on 04/08/2025)
The German writer Alfred Andersch, born on 04/02/1914 in Munich, deceased on 21/02/1980 in Berzona/Switzerland, is best known as a critical author of post-war literature. He was drafted into the Wehrmacht for the first time in 1940 and took part in the Western campaign against France before being temporarily discharged in 1941 because of his marriage to a “half-Jewish woman”. After separating from his wife, he was drafted again in 1943, deserted on 07/06/1944 near Oriolo/Italy and defected to the US Army.
In his autobiographical report “Die Kirschen der Freiheit” [“The Cherries of Freedom”] from 1952, he describes his desertion and the motivation behind it. His descriptions contain very readable thoughts on the subject of individual freedom versus enforced obedience, in particular on the significance of the Wehrmacht “oath of allegiance” and the legality of compulsory military service.
He writes (source: Andersch, Die Kirschen der Freiheit (1968), p. 100 ff. [translated from German language]):
„Not then, on that road in southern Umbria, but later in captivity and in the years that followed the war, after reading letters like the one from Werner’s father in particular, I thought about what actually bound Werner and most of the others. So much so that it never occurred to them that they could do anything other than stay with the bunch. It was simply the »staying with the bunch« itself, the herd instinct, incessantly drummed into them with terror and propaganda, which also made Werner’s face pale and blurred. One was almost independent if one added a few vague ideas of comradeship and defense of the fatherland to the urge to simply merge into the fate of the masses or was simply naturally eager to fight. Most German soldiers in this war did not move like dreamers, nor like drunks, but like captives; those under the power of the evil eye no longer see the iris and pupil of the hypnotist. His consciousness is switched off, he only feels the spell.
They should admit it – it’s no shame – and dispense with the last-minute excuse they made up afterwards: it was the oath that obliged them.
I admit that the oath was a problem for many officers. But during the entire war, I didn’t meet a single soldier among the crews I was with who ever said a word about the oath. And not because it was seen as a sacred thing that was not talked about.
I myself took the oath on a bright, sunny March morning in 1940 in the courtyard of a barracks near Rastatt. Standing in the second rank of the training company, I recited the text together with the others, in paragraphs and with my oath hand raised at right angles:
»I swear by God this sacred oath that I will render unconditional obedience to the Führer of the German Reich and people, Adolf Hitler, the Supreme Commander of the Wehrmacht, and that as a brave soldier I will be prepared to lay down my life for this oath at any time.«
As I spoke these words without making a face, I had to smile inwardly at the sewer rat’s [the author’s term for Hitler] clumsy attempt to bind me to him. Even the simplest of considerations reveals the absurdity of this oath.
Whoever refused to obey a conscription order under the rule of the sewer rat was killed or at least sent to a concentration camp for many years. The same sentence would have befallen anyone who, following the powerful pull of mass destiny, had become a soldier and refused to take the oath at the last minute.
The oath was therefore taken under duress. Refusal to do so was punishable by death. It was therefore null and void.
The unbeliever can speak the words of an oath without this process touching more than lips and tongue.
The believer knows that the oath binds him to God in the most extreme sense. A vow, a testimony made under oath, is always made voluntarily. (One can only be released from it if the truth of God has proven the oath to be knowingly or unknowingly false).
Nowhere is the dialectical relationship between commitment and freedom more evident than in the oath. The oath presupposes the freedom of the person swearing it.
The oath is a religious act, or it is meaningless. Most German soldiers, however, did not believe in God, or they were religiously indifferent in such a way that they did not think about whether they should believe in God or not, except in the hours of the most distant loneliness or near death.
For this reason, the majority of German soldiers were not able to take an oath at all.
Furthermore, their Führer was likewise not capable of taking an oath, as he denied God and had all religious impulses persecuted because they encouraged people to reduce his person to the right measure in their thinking. In place of the divine, which overarched man, including himself, he substituted an empty concept, but one that still bore the signs of terror: providence.
Only the believer who decided to take that oath in full awareness was capable of taking an oath. Did such believers even exist? If there were, they were struck with blindness. They had committed a grave sin.
For they had to say to themselves, if they still had a spark of reason left in them, that God could not possibly be interested in obedience to the sewer rat, and unconditional obedience at that. And if they could not grasp it with their minds, they had to feel that the Luciferian rat, which raged against God, desecrated the sanctity of the oath by claiming it for itself.
But whether believers or unbelievers, they were all confused.
Their fathers and grandfathers and the men of all previous generations had sworn oaths as soldiers. In swearing, a powerful, primeval taboo had descended upon them, and they were unable to recognize the absolute emptiness behind the glass bell of a sanctity invoked with words. For from a certain point in history, the space behind the glass bell of the oath had emptied.
This point is the French Revolution. The conservative faction in every country in the world scornfully claims to have taken the principle of universal conscription from one of the most revolutionary events in world history. That is true, but it is also true that they stole only this principle from the Great Revolution, but not the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity and the protection of human rights.
But be that as it may, from the beginning of the 19th century, modern states began to force all men in their territories to serve as soldiers. Even before that, there had been coercion within certain limits. But the principle had always been voluntary, even if the appearance of the soldier was slowly changing: from lansquenet to Frederick the Great’s guardsman. The lansquenet swore his oath of his own free will, and the pressed one could not be relied upon.
However, the general conscription left the man no choice. He was forced to do military service. But those who were forced to do so were made to swear the old, free oath of allegiance of the lansquenets and guards.
This still had a semblance of sense as long as the majority believed in God and the head of the state, the Prince, saw himself as a prince by the grace of God. As long as the idea of the fatherland was still a general one and the law, at least in its essence, was still autonomous.
But the general ideas faded, the majority no longer believed in God, and a huge minority even began to reject the idea of the fatherland. What remained was power itself, which, however, took on a mythical splendor for some people, while for others the imperialist character of the era was revealed.
In the course of this process, general conscription became a measure of power. It lost the meaning it had only possessed for a single historical moment anyway. Born out of an idealistic upsurge, a century later it exposed idealism as an illusion. The 18th Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte was repeated in every roar of a sergeant major.
And the religious act of the oath taken in freedom, the Rütli oath of free fighters, became a shaman’s spell, celebrated by the pressed, spoken into the emptiness of the barracks yards and not even echoing off the walls of a dead faith.
That was the reason why, during the whole war, I never met a single soldier among the men I was with who ever said a word about the oath. In the absurdity of the war of the sewer rat, everyone dully felt the absurdity of universal conscription and the soldier’s oath. In the pure form that the imperialist and ideological war of the latest historical moment experienced through Hitler, conscription and the oath were no longer experienced as a commitment, but as unconditional coercion. An era came to an end.
It turned out that compulsory military service and oaths violate fundamental human rights. Even if a modern system of power is humane enough to allow a few to have a conscience that refuses »military« service.
The decision to fight to the death requires a free man.
The oath can only be taken by a believer to a believer.
The army of the future can only be a volunteer army. Judging by the situation in which the faith finds itself today, the oath is inconceivable in such an army.
Such a volunteer army will be huge when it prepares the just defense against an unjust aggressor. At the outbreak of war, many more volunteers will flock to it and give aid to those incalculable multitudes of partisans who are a direct consequence of the misdeeds of an adversary who has fallen into the glamor of power.
The society that puts together such an army will, even if it loses many battles and does not even win the victory, nevertheless build the foundations of the future. Even in defeat, its spirit, as the superior one, will make the victor the loser in the historical sense.
However, people can invoke their basic rights against the old-style forced army whenever they want.
Against the extreme coercion of unconditional conscription and an ordered oath, he can choose the most extreme form of self-defense: desertion.“
Today, German soldiers are still required by law to formally pledge their loyalty and bravery. Professional soldiers and temporary soldiers have to take an “oath of service” (“Diensteid”), while those doing voluntary military service or conscripts owe a “solemn pledge” (“feierliches Gelöbnis”). The content of the “oath of service” and the “solemn pledge” is defined in sec. 9 of the German Soldiers Act as follows (translated from German language):
“(1) Professional soldiers and temporary soldiers shall take the following oath of service:
»I swear to serve the Federal Republic of Germany faithfully and to defend the law and the freedom of the German people bravely, so help me God.«
The oath can also be taken without the words »so help me God«. If a federal law permits the members of a religious society to use other oath formulas instead of the words »I swear«, the member of such a religious society may pronounce this oath formula.
(2) Soldiers who perform voluntary military service in accordance with sec. 58b or military service in accordance with the provisions of the Conscription Act shall acknowledge their duties by the following solemn pledge:
»I pledge to serve the Federal Republic of Germany faithfully and to defend the law and the freedom of the German people bravely.«”
(Head picture: Grave crosses of war victims at the Forest Cemetery Aachen,
inscribed “Unbekannt” [“Unknown”], May 2022)
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