What is conscription? A "fun" way to waste a year of your life doing unpaid labor in some camp. Oh, sorry, it's not "unpaid", the wage is 8 euros.
"What's the big deal?" you say. "8 euros sounds decent for a guaranteed job for 1 year in a place with very low living costs compared to the US. That's about the minimum wage here". And that would be true, if it was 8 euros per hour. Except it is 8 euros PER MONTH. It's almost a joke, like I have no clue what you're supposed to do with 8 euros. But I guess they give you shitty food and a shitty bunker bed to sleep? Awesome. Oh wait they're now saying they're gonna increase the wage to 30 euros. Impressive. Except they're probably doing it because they want to make conscription last longer than a year, whoo!!
Basically it's a great place where a bunch of weirdos with anger issues scream at you while you're mopping floors and you just have to ignore them every day for a year, if you don't have anything left to do in there you can leave for a while but you have to be back by midnight, and you can only take leaves for a total of 18 days throughout the whole year. Dumbasses tend to become fashy in there too. What an amazing institution, I'm so fucking happy the state doesn't want to pay people to work in camps so they just have us do it for free. It's really wild how much you can get away with if you promote it as patriotic.
When Germany used to have conscription, there was the option to refuse military service on moral grounds and to work in a medical, environmental or social services institution instead. The pay was higher as well. It was still pretty damn awful. Nursing and social services professions are fairly demanding and pushing untrained randos into them doesn't work very well. Most conscripts ended up just doing the most mind-numbing, least demanding jobs that nobody else wanted to do. It was ultimately just a band aid to provide a healthcare system overextending and underpaying its personell with more cheap labor by pressing young men into service.
BTW, the sole reason conscription in Germany is not a thing anymore (it's actually just "on hold" indefinitely) is that the army needed fewer conscripts, which led to people being drafted totally at random, which was then deemed unconstitutional after a couple of years.
I knew a guy who had long hair and just went to military prison for a few days, when he refused to obey any orders, said that they were al nazis there and to this day only speaks with disgust about germany.
The nazi problem of the German army is so bad that the army's own intelligence agency has an "early warning system" where doing public Hitler salutes counts as moderately strong likelyhood of being a nazi.
The only exmilitary guy i know has gone full on fash(but he killed some americans in Afghanistan who did some warcrimes at least, he used to be better). The long-hair guy also talks aboit how you can go " nazi-watching" at hitlers old mountain villa, they are not even hiding.
You can kind of, sort of do something like that here only it's a major pain to get it approved unless you're refusing on religious grounds, and it's not that much different anyways, plus it is longer.
Non-military conscription was longer in Germany as well. When i served, it was 13 months instead of 10 - in the 1960s, it used to be two years instead of one. Back then, people also had to go through an interrogation in front of a comission, where they'd bombard them with loaded questions along the lines of "would you be able to use violence to protect your girlfriend when somebody assaults her?", as if that had anything to do with somebody's willingness to kill his East German relatives in the prelude to a nuclear war. They were barred from pulling off stuff like that after a while, i just had to write an essay, but the easiest way to get that approved was actually to cite religious grounds as well.