On Friday, December 5, 2025, the German Bundestag gave its final approval to a law that, beginning in 2026, will require all German men to fill out a registration form for military service when they reach age 18. Responses to the questionnaire will be used to generate a list of potential draftees to be used if military conscription is activated.
On the day of the vote in the Bundestag there were anti-draft rallies and marches in Berlin (5,000 people), Hamburg, and other cities, and a School Strike Against the Draft that involved students in at least 90 cities and towns throughout Germany.
This revision to German military conscription law has been widely misunderstood, with many reports the scheme is voluntary (it isn’t, although the amount of the administrative fine for noncompliance has not yet been determined) or that it reflects a rejection of conscription. In fact, it’s intended by the German government to make a show of increased readiness to quickly implement an on-demand draft whenever that is deemed “necessary”.
Viewed from the USA, what’s most striking about the new German law is how much it resembles the Selective Service registration scheme in effect in the USA since 1980. The new German law also draws on some of the proposals considered by the U.S. National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service (NCMNPS) in 2017-2020 for (1) advance collection of additional information about potential draftees’ skills and fitness for military assignments and (2) increased use of the Selective Service registration process as a marketing opportunity to promote voluntary enlistment in the military.
The new German law appears likely to backfire on the government in the same ways that draft registration has in the USA: (1) making potential draftees and older allies more aware of the government’s commitment to the legitimacy of military conscription and desire to be prepared to activate a draft whenever it so chooses; (2) catalyzing anti-draft organizing and draft resistance, and (3) providing potential draftees with the opportunity, through the relatively low-risk tactic of foot-dragging or ignoring demands for self-enrollment in the conscription registry, to show their unwillingness to be drafted. That was the message sent by the failure of draft registration in the USA. We hope and expect that young Germans and their older allies will send the same message through their response to the new German military conscription law and personal information collection program.
In the USA, voluntary compliance with the legal mandate for self-registration was low from the revival of the program in 1980, and collapsed completely once it became clear that enforcement against passive mass noncooperation was impossible and wouldn’t be attempted.
The biggest mistake of the U.S. government when it reinstated the requirement for young men to register for the draft in 1980 was to take young people’s subservience for granted and not make any plans for enforcement. The brief round of show trials of non-registrants for the draft in the U.S. in the 1980s was a public relations disaster for the government. That was in significant part because it was a hasty and somewhat desperate response to an unanticipated crisis of public confidence in the registration system and contingency plans for a draft prompted by growing public awareness of widespread non-registration.
Germany appears to be making the same naïve mistake today. I can find no evidence of any plan by the German government for enforcement of the registration requirement against the inevitable resistance, both active and passive.
Enactment of the new German law, after a hiatus in conscription in Germany since 2011, seems to reflect the same wishful thinking that drove enactment in 1980 of the U.S. law to resume draft registration after a hiatus in draft registration and draft boards that had lasted since 1975. Threats and stepped-up preparations for military conscription don’t make potential draftees more likely to volunteer for military duty, especially for foreign wars. Recent experience in the U.S. shows that heightened fear of war and of activation of a draft drives compliance with draft registration down, not up.
The stated goal of reviving draft registration in the U.S. in 1980 was, in the words of President Jimmy Carter, to “send a message to the Russians” about U.S. willingness to fight the USSR in Afghanistan. Instead, the message it sent was that young Americans weren’t willing to fight and die for the side the U.S. was then backing in Afghanistan, which included those who would come to call themselves the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Not until after 9/11, by which time the U.S. was backing the opposite side in the continuing war, did the U.S. put boots on the ground in Afghanistan.
The German government is trying to send the same two contradictory messages through its new draft registration scheme that the U.S. has been trying unsuccessfully to send for decades.
On the one hand, Germany is trying to reassure potential cannon-fodder that this isn’t (yet) a draft, and that enlistment in the military is still (for now) voluntary, just as the U.S. harps on the message that Selective Service registration is “only” registration (for now) and not (yet) a draft.
On the other hand, Germany wants to tell the world, and especially President Vladimir Putin of Russia, that preparedness for a draft shows that Germans are prepared to fight and dies to counter Russian aggression.
But young Germans are no dumber than young Americans, and neither is Putin.
When draft-age men are ordered, under penalty of law, to provide personal information to the government for no other purpose than to facilitate a return to conscription if the government later makes that choice, young people will correctly conclude that this means the government is planning and preparing for a draft.
When Putin sees more German marching in the streets against military conscription than marching into recruiting offices, or sees them ignoring calls to report for questioning and examination for fitness for the military, he will correctly conclude that most draft-age Germans aren’t willing to die for Ukraine, no matter what their elders want.
Young Germans will be especially reluctant to submit to a draft while they know that their Euros are funding the Russian war machine through German purchases of Russian gas. Are German politicians and German voters, or at least those of them who are too old to be drafted, more willing to sacrifice their sons’ lives in Ukraine than to turn down the thermostats in their homes in the winter?
The vote following the final debate in the Bundestag was 323 to 272 with 1 abstention and 34 absences – neither close nor overwhelming. The Left Party put forward a counter-proposal also supported by the Greens to completely repeal the provision of the “Basic Law” (Germany’s Constitution) that authorizes the government to impose military conscription.
As amended and enacted, the “Military Conscription Modernization” law (Wehrdienst-Modernisierungsgesetz – WDModG) authorizes the government to activate a draft through a “statutory instrument” (like a “regulation” in the U.S.), without the need to enact a new law. This could be done whenever the government decides that not enough people have volunteered for military duty. Critics of the new law have questioned whether this attempt to fast-track implementation of a future draft, without a full legislative process and debate, comports with the “Basic Law”. But whether or not this provision of the new law is upheld by the German Constitutional Court, it shows that the government’s goal is to put military conscription on a hair-trigger.
Beginning in 2026, each German will be sent a questionnaire on their 18th birthday asking them to provide contact information for sending future military induction orders, and to answer questions about their fitness for military service. Men will be required by law to complete the questionnaire, while women will have the option to respond but can legally ignore the questionnaire. It’s unclear if the requirement to fill out the form will be based on current gender identity or sex as assigned at birth, or how it will be applied to non-binary Germans with self-selected X gender markers on their official documents.
There’s no penalty for failing to respond to the initial letter. That’s probably because it will be sent by regular mail and the government won’t be able to prove that it was received. This echos the situation in the USA, where the greatest obstacle to enforcement of the draft law against quiet or closeted non-registrants for the draft is the lack of evidence that their failure to register was “knowing and willful”. Without prove of delivery, threatening letters from the U.S. Selective Service System are junk mail. Non-registrants could be prosecuted only on the basis of signatures on registered letters, testimony of FBI agents who personally served them with notice to register, or public statements that they knew they were required to register. While the German postal system is more reliable than that in the U.S., as a matter of law the same is likely to be true in Germany.
If a German man doesn’t respond to the first questionnaire, he will be served by provable delivery with a second questionnaire. Failure to complete and return the second questionnaire is a violation for which an administrative fine could be assessed, although the amount of that fine has not yet been determined. That’s one of the indications that the German government isn’t yet planning for noncompliance.
A call for civil disobedience against the new military conscription law from the Deutsche-Friedensgesellschaft Vereinigte Kriegsdienstgegner (DFG-VK), the German affiliate of the War Resisters International, notes that the first letter can legally be ignored, returned late, not returned at all – or shredded as an act of protest. “The more sand is thrown into the gears of the Bundeswehr [German armed forces], the greater the likelihood that the person will be dismissed. The troops have no use for troublemakers.”
As with the reintroduction of draft registration in the USA in the 1980s, what – if anything – is done to those who quietly ignore or publicly repudiate the second formally-served demand letter will depend on how many of these resisters there are, and how much organized and publicly visible support they have.
The U.S. example shows that resistance to draft registration can prevent a draft. The passage of this new law isn’t the end of the debate on military conscription in Germany. It’s the start of the test of whether Germans will submit to, or will resist, the government’s attempt to gear up for a draft.
Edward Hasbrouck maintains the Resisters.info website and publishes the “Resistance News” newsletter. He was imprisoned in 1983-1984 for organizing resistance to draft registration.
