Soldier Seeking Asylum: 'I Want to Be Able to Atone'

Elsa Rassbach interviews André Shepherd, a U.S. soldier applying for asylum in Germany

by Elsa Rassbach

Background: the view from Germany

Berlin, May 26, 2009. Early in June, President Barack Obama will sign into law the supplemental funding of 92 billion U.S. dollars for the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan that was approved by the U.S. Congress last week. Then he will depart for a speaking tour and meetings with heads of state in Egypt and in Europe.

On June 5th, he will be coming to visit us here in Germany, making stops at the concentration camp at Buchenwald, at Weimar, and at Dresden, a site also of massive bombings of civilians during World War II. This will be Obama's third visit to Germany in less than a year, and it seems likely that he will once again, as in the previous two visits, make a pitch for more German support for the ongoing "war against terror," particularly in Afghanistan. Though Obama is popular here, the German government has for the most part stonewalled his requests for further direct German involvement in these wars.

The well-known German ambivalence towards the U.S. "war against terror" is now being further tested by a U.S. soldier's application for asylum in Germany. André Shepherd, who was stationed in Germany, refuses to deploy to Iraq. Many U.S. soldiers stationed in Europe who refused service in or support of the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan have been tried in U.S. military courts in Europe and imprisoned in the U.S. military's correctional facility at Mannheim; the most well known are Blake Lemoine (2005) and Agustín Aguayo (2006-2007).

But Shepherd is so far the first to turn to the German government for help: last November he filed a formal application to the German government for asylum. For the moment his case is entirely outside of U.S. jurisdiction.

Shepherd argues that there are strong reasons arising from Germany's history for Germany to grant him asylum: the Nuremberg Principles and the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany that has provisions written in the spirit of Nuremberg. In 2005 the highest German administrative court upheld a German military officer's right to refuse orders in 2003 to provide software that might have been used by the U.S. for logistics during the invasion of Iraq.
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