Over 20,000 deserters and war resisters paid the ultimate price at the hands of Hitler's brutal war judges and executioners. Several thousands of others died in prison camps and penal battalions, sacrificed as cannon fodder in pointless military operations. Even for those few who miraculously escaped death and survived the war, life was never to be the same again. For the rest of their lives they had to live as pariahs, scorned and looked down upon as traitors to their own Fatherland by a postwar society that professed to hate the regime they had actively opposed. At the time of Chancellor Adenauer's Wirtschaftswunder (economic rebuilding miracle) and well beyond, there was no sympathy for those German men who had refused to be part of the destruction and mass murder of the Second World War. In sharp contrast to these men's fate, their judges, masters of unbelievably draconian sentences, as well as other high-ranking Nazis, were allowed to thrive in postwar Germany as honored men in prestigious and powerful positions. Hitler's Deserters: When Law Merged with Terror is the story of this incredible injustice. It is the disturbing story of what happened to those who refused to fight for the Third Reich, and - even more horrifying - it is the story of a postwar society that turned its back on them.