The Stabsgefreiter

"Sidetrack" ranks

Years ago, when I was fourteen or so, the reading of a reprint of the wartime Handbook of German Military Forces left me in awe of the variety of rank insignia worn, and titles of rank borne, by German enlisted men of World War II.¹ In particular, I marveled at the many types of Gefreiter on display in the plates and the curious ways that their designations had been translated into English. (What, I wondered, was an “administrative corporal?”)

From left to right, the insignia of a Stabsgefreiter, an Obergefreiter (with more than six years of service), an Obergefreiter (with less than six years service) and a Gefreiter

I later discovered that few, if any, German soldiers, made all available stops as they rose in rank. Rather, the diversity of ranks stemmed from the use of some grades as the administrative equivalent of railroad sidings. That is, the ranks of Stabsgefreiter and Obergefreiter provided a consolation prize for soldiers who, despite long years of service, were not yet ready (or, perhaps, might never be ready) for more demanding duties.²

In the army of Frederick the Great, a Gefreiter was a private soldier who had been freed (gefreit) from some (but far from all) of the many petty restrictions then imposed on men in the ranks. For example, a Gefreiter could be sent on errands, such as going to a well or stream to fill of water bottles, that other soldiers might exploit as an opportunity to avoid drill, get drunk, or desert. In other words, a Gefreiter was the military equivalent of a trustee in a penitentiary.

In the course of the nineteenth century, as the “cadaver discipline” of the Enlightenment gave way to more participatory forms of control, the Gefreiter evolved into an apprentice non-commissioned officer. He might, for example, serve as the senior man in a squad bay or the leader of a small patrol.

In the First World War, a Gefreiter often found himself in charge of the crew that served a single crew-served weapon. (In the case of the Musketen battalions, Gefreiter was also the default rank for the leader for what we would now call a “fire team,” a group of four men who fed, fired, and protected a single automatic rifle.)

Early in the interwar period, when all enlisted men of the army of the German Republic were obliged to enlist for twelve years, farsighted officers anticipated the problem of what to do with an “old soldier” who lacked the skills, knowledge, and attitudes required of an efficient non-commissioned officer, especially one who was serving in an “army of leaders.” In particular, they worried that long-serving soldiers with little to lose might provide young recruits with the wrong sort of guidance, influence, and example. To solve this problem, they generalized the rank of Obergefreiter, which had previously been limited to men of the Foot Artillery, and invented the rank of Stabsgefreiter.

The rank of Obergefreiter was normally awarded to a man who, having served for a combined total of four years in the ranks of Gefreiter and Oberschütze (private first class), had failed promotion to the lowest non-commissioned officer rank (that of Unteroffizier.) The rank of Stabsgefreiter was reserved for men who managed to serve for twelve years without convincing their superiors that they were capable of leading a squad.

As might be expected, the rapid expansion of the German Army that began in earnest in 1934 put Stabsgefreite and Obergefreite in the awkward position of watching much younger men attain the rank that had eluded them for so long. Human nature being what it is, this led to situations in which the “permanent lance-corporals” took pleasure in undermining the authority of young non-commissioned officers. In response, commanders of platoons and companies often took pains to minimize contact between the holders of “sidetrack” ranks and impressionable recruits.

Source: For a snapshot of the rules for the promotion of German enlisted men, see Ludwig Queckborner Die Schützenkompanie: Ein Handbuch für den Dienstunterricht (Berlin: E. S. Mittler und Sohn, 1939), pages 39-40. (In 1942, the US Army reprinted this work, under the title of The German Rifle Company, as a tool for the training of intelligence specialists.)

For Further Reading:

The Non-Commissioned Officers of the German Empire

Field and Foot

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1. Published by the US War Department, the Handbook on German Military Forces went through at least three editions during the Second World War. In the decades that followed, a number of presses produced facsimiles of the third edition (that of March 1945.)

2. Siegfried Knappe, who joined the German Army in 1937, described Stabsgefreite as “losers, career soldiers who could not handle responsibility and would never hold a rank higher than Stabsgefreiter.” Siegfried Knappe and Ted Brusaw, Soldat: Reflections of a German Soldier, 1936-1949 (New York: Orion Books, 1992)