In the summer of 1941, on the outskirts of Belgrade, a Wehrmacht firing squad executed sixteen Yugoslav partisans. Photographs from the execution that surfaced decades later in the press sparked a heated debate – one of the men in the images was without a helmet and seemed not to belong among the executioners. For decades, speculation persisted whether a German soldier had refused orders and died alongside the victims.
Corporal from Wuppertal
Josef Schulz was born in 1909 in Barmen, a district of industrial Wuppertal in western Germany. He came from a region with strong working-class traditions, where leftist underground movements were active even before the Nazi seizure of power. When war broke out, he served as a corporal in the 714th Infantry Division – a unit deployed to the Balkans in 1941 as part of operations against the resistance movement.
Yugoslavia after the April 1941 campaign became a territory under chaotic occupation. Germans controlled key cities, but partisan resistance developed in the provinces. The Wehrmacht responded with brutal reprisals – for every German soldier killed, dozens of civilians and captured partisans were executed. This was standard practice that German command treated as a method of pacification.
According to official records, Schulz died on July 19, 1941, during a clash with partisans near Smederevska Palanka, southeast of Belgrade. A report from his unit, filed on July 20 at 2:00 a.m., classified the death as killed in action. In those months such reports were frequent – losses among the occupiers were rising, despite the Wehrmacht’s decisive military advantage.
No one then suspected that the name of the corporal from Wuppertal would spark controversies lasting half a century. Schulz was supposed to be one of thousands of anonymous soldiers killed in the Balkans, but the circumstances of his death proved far more complicated.
Photographs That Raised Questions
On the night of July 19-20, 1941, sixteen men accused of partisan activity were executed in Smederevska Palanka. Someone took photographs – probably for propaganda purposes or as documentation of reprisal actions. After the war, local residents exhumed the bodies and discovered something strange: German military equipment was found with one body, but there was no identification tag. In 1947, a monument honoring the victims included the name „Marcel Masel” – a distorted version of one partisan’s name.
Photographs from the execution appeared in West German weekly magazines only in the 1960s. One photograph showed a man in Wehrmacht uniform but without a helmet or belt – standing in line with the partisans just before execution. This image immediately raised questions. Was this a German captured by partisans? Or perhaps a soldier who refused to participate in the execution and was executed by his own comrades?
In 1972, Wilderich Freiherr Ostman von der Leye, a member of the Bundestag, found an entry in the diary of the 714th Division commander suggesting that Schulz died on that very day. The corporal’s brother, Walter Schulz, visited Yugoslavia a year later and reportedly confirmed that he recognized his brother in the photograph. This was enough for the story to gain publicity.
Yugoslav sources added further details. Witness Zvonimir Janković testified that he saw a German soldier without insignia who was heatedly arguing with an officer just before the execution began. According to the account, Schulz had refused to shoot defenseless people and was added to the group of condemned. This was a story that fit perfectly into the postwar narrative of „good Germans” fighting against the Nazi machine.
Evidence Versus Legend
Not everyone bought this version of events. The Central Office of State Justice Administrations in Ludwigsburg conducted an investigation in 1972 and concluded that Schulz died in a clash with partisans, not by execution. Military archives in Freiburg confirmed that the report of his death was filed only a few hours after the incident, suggesting death in combat action, not execution.
Schulz’s former comrades-in-arms rejected the claim that he was in the photographs. They pointed to inconsistencies in descriptions – Schulz had a different build, different facial features. Many of them emphasized that under conditions of strict military discipline, refusing an order would result in immediate arrest and trial, not spontaneous execution in the field.
However, in Yugoslavia the story took on a life of its own. In 1980, Josef Schulz’s name was added to a new monument in Smederevska Palanka as the seventeenth victim. West German ambassadors participated in commemorative ceremonies in 1981 and 1997, which sanctioned the narrative of a German soldier who chose the right side. Schulz became a symbol – proof that even in Wehrmacht ranks there were people capable of moral resistance.
The problem is that symbolism doesn’t replace facts. No documents definitively confirm that the man in the photographs is Schulz. The identification was based on the brother’s testimony, who viewed blurry photographs thirty years after the corporal’s death. Yugoslav witnesses provided contradictory accounts, and German commanders never officially acknowledged that any of their soldiers had been executed for refusing to carry out orders.
Film That Solidified the Myth
In 1973, Yugoslav directors Danko Popović and Predrag Golubović made a thirteen-minute film Joseph Schultz. The short combined original sepia-toned photographs with staged scenes, presenting a version of events in which a German soldier refuses to participate in the execution and is added to the group of partisans before being shot. The film was made on 16mm film and entered the educational market – distributed by the New York firm Wombat Productions.
The Educational Film Library Association recommended the film as teaching material about the Holocaust and moral choices during war. It also appeared in the guide Teaching the Holocaust published by Torah Aura Productions. For millions of viewers in the West, the film became the sole source of knowledge about Josef Schulz – and solidified the legend as historical fact.
The problem with this approach is that it flattens complicated reality. The story of Schulz, regardless of whether it’s true, became a convenient narrative – it allowed postwar Germans to believe that resistance within the Wehrmacht was possible, and Yugoslavia to show that even enemies could recognize the justice of the partisan struggle.
Many historians today treat the story of Schulz as legend – probably based on a grain of truth but embellished by the political and social needs of the 1970s. This doesn’t mean that refusing to carry out immoral orders wasn’t possible, but the specific case of Schulz remains too poorly documented to accept as certainty.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Rory Thornfield
Rory's grandfather left behind a wartime diary filled with accounts of a minor Burma skirmish that history books never mentioned. Reading it, Rory realized: behind every famous battle are dozens of forgotten struggles, each with its own human drama.
His preferred topics: The overlooked corners of military history – secondary campaigns, shadow battalions, local conflicts that never made headlines. From medieval sieges to twentieth-century expeditions, he focuses on the soldiers, not the generals. The people who faced impossible choices and carried those experiences forever.
Rory strips away the romanticism without losing respect for those who served. He combines tactical analysis with personal stories, examining human endurance and moral complexity rather than celebrating warfare. His writing is balanced, thoughtful, and deeply researched.
Outside work, Rory visits forgotten battlefields (now quiet farmland), photographs war memorials nobody tends anymore, and interviews veterans' families.