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.
Hellbound and Down 