German city erects memorial to soldiers who deserted Hitler

Apr 27, 2009, 15:29 GMT

Cologne, Germany - The German city of Cologne published Monday the design for a future memorial to honour the men who deserted Nazi Germany's armed forces, or paid with their lives for being conscientious objectors.

The memorial will be only the second civic monument in a public space to pacifists in a country where many people who lived through the war and are now dying out still regarded deserters as traitors.

Only Berlin has a public monument, in the form of 100 mirrors in a park where 230 German men were executed by firing squad 1944-45.

Cologne's memorial will take the form of a pergola with an inscription along its roof line, said Marcel Odenbach, head of the panel that chose the design. It was designed by Ruedi Baur of Switzerland.

'We should be proud of these men,' said Georg Quander, the city's culture supremo. The monument is to be completed by September 1, the 70th anniversary of Germany's commencement of the Second World War.

Deserters who refused to fight for Nazi Germany were socially shunned even after Germany's defeat and it took years for their personal rejection of the Nazi war effort to be seen in a new light.

In 2002, Germany's legislature declared the judicial convictions of the deserters and objectors void.

The Nazis routinely charged military personnel who ran away from their units with treachery and sentenced 30,000 of them to death.

In all, 20,000 were shot, said Karola Fings of Cologne's museum of Nazi crimes. Others had their sentences commuted, but may also have died in concentration camps or in 'punishment battalions' which were exposed to extreme danger.