The Right Shot at the Right Time

Surviving Desertion. Chapter 4 of Who Was WM? Investigating a Televisionary: The Life and Work of Wolfgang Menge

7 min readMay 5, 2024

This fake photo—created with ChatGPT—shows a German Wehrmacht vehicle, driven by three young soldiers, being stopped by an SS patrol on a lonely north German country road on a March night in 1945. Shortly before the firefight erupts …

1945: Desertion as a National Pastime

In the final months of the war, desertion becomes a widespread phenomenon in the Nazi armies. Several hundred thousand soldiers leave their units and try to make it home. Thousands of them are apprehended. The regulations demand that deserters be sentenced to death and executed by firing squad or hanging. There are hardly ever any exceptions.

In 1944, almost 9,000 German soldiers die in this way, and between January and the capitulation in May 1945 of the same year, another 8,000, many of them teenagers. The bodies of those executed are left hanging from lamp posts and utility poles for days and weeks as a deterrent.

Nevertheless, more and more are taking the risk. The Allies’ advance seems unstoppable. In the last two months of the war alone, over 100,000 soldiers are deserting from the German Wehrmacht. WM is one of the young men who do not want to be sacrificed for a lost cause as defeat looms.

WM and the Wehrmacht

How this all comes about, how his war years unfold, can no longer be fully reconstructed. An autobiographical testimony may have existed, a radio text that WM would send to Northwest German Broadcasting on December 6, 1955, when the Federal Republic of Germany has just joined NATO and is thus regaining sovereignty. German rearmament begins with the estsablishment of the Bundeswehr just a decade after the end of the Second World War. It is highly controversial politically among the population. WM’s text arises from this occasion. He writes to his editor:

“I am also moving with the times and am presenting you with my war memoirs. I already started writing them in this summer. The German is sometimes not quite polished — that was the artist’s intention. As for the author’s name, I would suggest using the name in the text: Retired Corporal Rainer Maria Schulze. In case, of course, you like it at all, and it is compatible with the broadcaster’s policy.”

The enclosed memoirs are lost. The protagonist’s made-up name, reminiscent of Rilke, suggests that the text was not an autobiographical factual report anyway, but — given the German rearmament — one of the bitter satires that were already WM’s trademark at the time.

In later years, when he has become a public figure, much interviewed and portrayed, WM usually only makes allusive and mocking comments, such as in a TV interview with Guenter Gaus in 2004:

“I was active in the German army for a few years, unfortunately without much success. Because I didn’t even advance to corporal, which I don’t think anyone has ever managed to do — to be around for so long without at least becoming a senior private …”

WM Heads Home Early As Well

He commented no less laconically on the end of his military service:

“I went home a little earlier. It seemed things were getting uncomfortable because — the Russians were approaching from the east, the Americans from the west …”

Wolfgang answered my questions similarly in 1987.

“Well,” he says at the time, rocking in his Sylt hammock, “I was wounded and in hospital. And then I went home a little earlier.”

“How am I to understand this?” I ask.

“Well, what would you call that? Desertion or something. I always wanted to leave, of course, but I didn’t want to endanger my parents.” He pauses and looks up into the bright blue sky. “And when I saw this was no longer an issue because everything was falling apart anyway, I ran away and hid.”

But was his military service and its end really so uneventful?

An official document from 1946 — a petition for clemency to the Hamburg public prosecutor’s office, the reasons for which will be discussed later — shows that the nearly 21-year-old WM holds not only the Iron Cross First and Second Class, medals for exceptional bravery, but also a close combat clasp. It is awarded for notable achievements in man-to-man combat.

How Does WM Obtain His Close Combat Clasp?

On the other hand, these military honors may simply be down to the skill of his best friend Bernd Hering. His daughter Sabine Hering writes that WM was “discharged from the Wehrmacht in May 1945 by Bernd Hering, who as an art student had the necessary crafting skills”. This ‘official’ legitimization of the deserter’s presence in Hamburg is sealed by a “stamp carved from a cork, true to the original.” WM is thrilled, reports Sabine: “Full of bravado, he also wants his discharge papers to include an award and has the Iron Cross First Class forged into them.”

Sabine Hering, born in 1947 and WM’s godchild, is the person we owe most of our knowledge about what happened — or may have happened — back then. Shortly after WM’s death in 2012, the professor emeritus of social sciences documented the memories of her parents, the “last living witnesses of Wolfgang Menge’s ‘wild years.’” Sabine has known since childhood the anecdotes that Bernd and Ruth Hering recounted in 2012. They were “often a topic of conversation in the family due to their entertainment value.” Of course, Sabine Hering emphasizes that the stories’ documentary integrity is broken. This is because they mix decades-ago experiences with hearsay — WM’s self-portrayals to close friends during the war and post-war period.

It is undisputed that WM’s unit is stationed in Poland in 1943. The 19-year-old carries poison with him, which he has obtained from a doctor friend. If it comes to that, he wants to determine how he dies. The situation is dire. In August, the German troops have managed to crush the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto with tremendous brutality. But the partisan struggle of the Armia Krajowa, the Polish Home Army, puts the Nazi occupiers under increasing pressure. At the same time, the Red Army is advancing rapidly westwards. In July 1944, it reaches the eastern Polish border.

The Trickster Encircled

A decade and a half later, in a synopsis for the film adaptation of a war novel, WM will describe the “reality of war,” “its blind brutality, its merciless violence.”

Soviet troops surround WM’s unit, and he is slightly wounded. He decides to use a trick. When a plane lands to evacuate the seriously injured, he writes himself a large note: he needs urgent treatment. He hangs this note around his neck and walks around the plane, seemingly confused. Until an officer catches sight of him and shouts at him:

“Now, get on board at last!”

WM obeys and ends up in a military hospital in Silesia. Having been since his early teenage years as a persistent lover of the opposite sex, he quickly makes friends with a nurse. She gets him a certificate stating that he is seriously ill. He is safe for a while.

But the front is approaching. WM must recover and is assigned to a new unit. The Red Army reaches Silesia at the beginning of 1945 and approaches the Austrian capital in March. Around the same time, American and British troops cross the Rhine and advance into northern Germany. Hamburg is their strategic target in order to gain access to the North and Baltic Seas. The city is under constant bombardment. Operation Gomorrah. The house where WM’s parents and little sister live is hit and becomes uninhabitable. The family flees to the countryside, the Baltic Coast.

“I Also Killed a Man Once …”

When he receives this news, WM’s unit is near Vienna. Now, he carries out what he has been planning for a long time. Two comrades join in. Together, they steal a bucket car. Between the American-British and Russian fronts, they try to reach Hamburg. However, their most dangerous enemy is not the Allies. Despite all their vigilance, an SS patrol manages to track them down.

The three of them know the fate that awaits deserters. They are experienced front-line soldiers; they open fire. And hit deadly.

“Life takes strange paths,” WM would write ten years later, in October 1955, in the manuscript for a radio program sent from Tokyo, probably alluding to the deaths from the atomic bombings, albeit with false figures: “You can kill 480,000 people and be showered with medals and honors for it, and someone else who is content with one or two is asked to sit on a chair with electrically charged wires. I also killed a man once, from a meter away. Thank God that never was found out. Unfortunately, I have a lot more on my record than that. Nobody will hold it against me if I pass over the individual cases, but just state this fact in general, in the certain conviction that I will be believed.”

Either way, WM has earned his close combat clasp.