It certainly was a popular method of survival when things became desperate for the German army.
The most common way came right at the battlefield. If a position was being overrun by the red army or the allies, a soldier would simply drop down and play dead amongst the piles of dead bodies. This was a terrifying gamble. Soldiers back in the day did dead checks where they’d poke the bodies with bayonets or fire off in them just to be sure. I recall reading a story of a young German who had remained motionless even as an enemy soldier had pulled the boots right off his feet. He knew if he blinked he’d be shot on the spot.
Then you have the SS officers towards the end of the war. These men knew they got into trouble on what they did. To escape, they would usually trade uniforms with a dead regular soldier. They’d take the dead man’s dog tags and leave their own ID behind. That way, the officer died on paper, and could vanish under a new name. The Gestapo head Heinrich Müller, who had ‘disappeared’ in 1945, probably did exactly this.
Some faked their deaths to be deserted from the army. If you just ran away, your family back home would be sought out by the Nazis. So, a soldier might leave a bloody helmet so he was reported as killed rather than a deserter. It was a sad and desperate way to spare his family from the hands of the Gestapo.
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