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It makes me angry, when I see people online talking about the whole of the WWII Wehrmacht as if they are all uniform, fungible movie villains. This was a huge o

It makes me angry, when I see people online talking about the whole of the WWII Wehrmacht as if they are all uniform, fungible movie villains. This was a huge organization of human beings. The degree to which any individual is culpable needs to be considered on an individual basis. Human rights are absolute, even for the soldiers of the enemy. Principles like that are what separate free countries from tyranny. This is not to say, that there isn't a group accountability for an organization like an army, where people are all wearing the same regalia and literally marching under the same banner. This implies a group responsibility for calling out the wrongs of one's own side. The morality of the faction can be measured as a whole by how well it calls out its own failures of principle, and by what principles it says it upholds and by what principles it eschews.

claydavisss 8y ago
What most Americans know about WW2 they learned by watching Raiders Of The Lost Ark. The image of WW2-era German males is nothing more than cartoonish at this point.
iknowordidthat 8y ago
As the paper clearly illustrates, there were so few documented cases of refusal that they are negligible when weighing the war crimes of the Wehrmact and its members. Less than one hundred out of millions. Viewing them all as “fungible villains” is a very accurate approximation with a ridiculously low error.
- stcredzero 8y ago
  Hey, we'd only disregard the truth for a couple of complete innocents, so let's just treat this entire group of individuals as fungible and disposable? Sorry, but that's not properly valuing individual human rights. As I point out above, almost every one in the faction is culpable. However, they should still be held individually culpable, in accordance with their particular facts and individual human rights and the stated principles of the founding of the United States. If one starts allowing group culpability without regard for the innocents, no matter how few, then this destroys the principle of individual culpability. Sorry, but that's something the good guys shouldn't be doing, and only something one should expect the bad guys to do. Good guys don't treat entire groups of people as fungible and disposable. Period.
  - iknowordidthat 8y ago
    I have no idea why you are injecting the founding of the United States into this. Nobody can possibly weigh every Wehrmacht member’s actions. Those that acted with distinction have been documented. They are the exceptions that prove the rule. If they were not, the outcome of the Wehrmacht’s actions would have been very different. Your criteria is impossible to satisfy, by design. An attempt to rewrite history.
    - stcredzero 8y ago
      Nobody can possibly weigh every Wehrmacht member’s actions Strawman. Should you ever meet a former member of the Wehrmacht, you owe them the same general regard to be given any human being. An attempt to rewrite history. False. You are projecting. My words state the opposite of what you suggest. I take it you are invested in the idea that it’s okay to throw away individual rights in some situations and simply punish groups. If that is the case, then you are advocating for committing exactly the moral failing we should hold against the Wehrmacht. In this case, this is the least popular implication of the principles which were fought for in WWII at the price of millions of lives. In short, in 2019 terms, “Punch a Nazi” is committing the exact moral failing at the root of the discredited philosophy being fought. Peacetime politics through violence is wrong. Period. (No, punching for political gain doesn’t make you a war criminal, obviously. No equivalence, obviously. What you are doing is introducing that moral framework. Best to avoid the moral framework of the worst villains.)
      - HillRat 8y ago
        Should you ever meet a former member of the Wehrmacht, you owe them the same general regard to be given any human being. Most human beings have not taken up arms to make war on behalf of a genocidal regime led by a fanatical anti-Semitic tyrant. It’s okay to look askance at those who did.
        solveit 8y ago
        However, most human beings in their situation did. There but for the grace of god go I.
- pergadad 8y ago
  You're shot for refusing orders. In a war situation no one is going to bother recording this. You'll either get a letter home that you were a deserter and died dishonourably, so your widow and kids won't even get a pension, or you'll be lucky and the commander sends back a letter that you were killed in the line of duty or from injury/disease. One way or the other, there will be few situations where such refusal is possible, much less written down.
  - anigbrowl 8y ago
    Better to die with a clear conscience than to murder the innocent. If you were cunning you could take the commanding officer out instead.
  - jtbayly 8y ago
    The paper documents that those who resisted in the army and police suffered very little in the way of negative consequences. From the conclusion of the paper: “There was not a uniform system of "terror-justice" operating automatically against those whose civil and moral courage forced them to declare "ohnemich!"(without me!). In fact, the opposite is true. In every case of documented refusal to obey orders to exterminate people, the coercive powers of the Nazi system proved to be impotent or ineffective.”
tomohawk 8y ago
Something like 80% of the 60 - 65 million people killed during world war 2 were unarmed. They were civilians or prisoners of war. The vast majority of these were killed by Germany, Japan, Italy, and Soviet Union. While there were individuals who resisted this, the systems of government and the belief systems that drove the totalitarian states where unprecedentedly horrific. If you're interested in learning more about this history, "The Second World Wars" by Victor Davis Hanson is a good place to start.
- dmix 8y ago
  > While there were individuals who resisted this, the systems of government and the belief systems that drove the totalitarian states where unprecedentedly horrific. World War 1 happened 2 decades earlier and wasn't totalitarian and was nearly as horrific (the combat itself was usually far more horrific than WW2). The legacy of humans has been constant war for centuries before that. Even reducing it to some 20th century political ideology is insufficient. Human history has long been a series of duelling nation states, religions, city states, war lords, tribes, etc. The only thing that stopped wars was economic production trumped state expansion while becoming global creating strong interconnections between nation states... and technology (ie, nuclear weapons, total war economies) made the stakes of war too high. But again that's just what stopped or slowed down the bloodshed, not a sufficient explanation of why it kept happening.
  - BurningFrog 8y ago
    WW1 was of course an enormous tragedy, but it was fought between armies. I'm not aware of any major attacks on civilians in that war.
  - tomohawk 8y ago
    About 20 million died in world war 1, and deaths were primarily combatants. World War 2 was directed primarily at killing unarmed. The Nazis wanted to colonize eastern Europe, so killed many to make room for that, as well as anyone that did not fit in with their notion of racial purity. The Japanese killed their millions in China, but also elsewhere. The Italian killing fields were in Ethiopia. The Soviets killed millions of prisoners of war. Looking at the ideologies of these countries, their goal was to kill anyone who got in the way of those ideologies.
gumby 8y ago
I think there's a rational explanation for making what I agree with you is a quite a wrong assessment. First of all, modern armies are mass action: uniforms make the "other side" literally uniform and undifferentiated. The purpose is twofold: first so that your own troopers won't think rationally about what they are doing and will simply follow along with the crowd, whether the rule is "shoot", "dig a foxhole", "don't run away" or whatever. The second value is to dehumanise the enemy and increase the chance that violence will actually be done to him (this is why the officers were so unhappy with the Christmas Day football game between British and German troops in WWI). This whole process appeared in the Nopoleonic->Prussian invention of mass warfare; until then it was a largely retail affair when you really figured if you needed to kill that other guy in front of you or not. Second of all, and again this is a function of 20th century warfare, this process was amplified through mass propaganda to whole populations, again dehumanizing the enemy. It's own long topic so I"ll stop here. I will say that these refusals are even harder, not easier, when you're in a group who can see you take action or not (as opposed to firing at a far-away enemy where your colleagues can't really see how well you're aiming). So in other words: everybody on HN has been trained to think this way, and all active participants in WWII had been likewise trained to think this way of the "other side"
pergadad 8y ago
Normal men - farmers, workers, clerks - receive a letter in the mail: " on the first of next month, report to base X. Failure to report will be considered treason". You have kids at home. They'll have no more food on the table if you are dead. You show up. You do what they tell you. Sadly that's how it has always been. Some enjoy it-most though just want it to end.

claydavisss 8y ago

What most Americans know about WW2 they learned by watching Raiders Of The Lost Ark. The image of WW2-era German males is nothing more than cartoonish at this point.

iknowordidthat 8y ago

As the paper clearly illustrates, there were so few documented cases of refusal that they are negligible when weighing the war crimes of the Wehrmact and its members. Less than one hundred out of millions. Viewing them all as “fungible villains” is a very accurate approximation with a ridiculously low error.

stcredzero 8y ago
Hey, we'd only disregard the truth for a couple of complete innocents, so let's just treat this entire group of individuals as fungible and disposable? Sorry, but that's not properly valuing individual human rights. As I point out above, almost every one in the faction is culpable. However, they should still be held individually culpable, in accordance with their particular facts and individual human rights and the stated principles of the founding of the United States. If one starts allowing group culpability without regard for the innocents, no matter how few, then this destroys the principle of individual culpability. Sorry, but that's something the good guys shouldn't be doing, and only something one should expect the bad guys to do. Good guys don't treat entire groups of people as fungible and disposable. Period.
- iknowordidthat 8y ago
  I have no idea why you are injecting the founding of the United States into this. Nobody can possibly weigh every Wehrmacht member’s actions. Those that acted with distinction have been documented. They are the exceptions that prove the rule. If they were not, the outcome of the Wehrmacht’s actions would have been very different. Your criteria is impossible to satisfy, by design. An attempt to rewrite history.
  - stcredzero 8y ago
    Nobody can possibly weigh every Wehrmacht member’s actions Strawman. Should you ever meet a former member of the Wehrmacht, you owe them the same general regard to be given any human being. An attempt to rewrite history. False. You are projecting. My words state the opposite of what you suggest. I take it you are invested in the idea that it’s okay to throw away individual rights in some situations and simply punish groups. If that is the case, then you are advocating for committing exactly the moral failing we should hold against the Wehrmacht. In this case, this is the least popular implication of the principles which were fought for in WWII at the price of millions of lives. In short, in 2019 terms, “Punch a Nazi” is committing the exact moral failing at the root of the discredited philosophy being fought. Peacetime politics through violence is wrong. Period. (No, punching for political gain doesn’t make you a war criminal, obviously. No equivalence, obviously. What you are doing is introducing that moral framework. Best to avoid the moral framework of the worst villains.)
    - HillRat 8y ago
      Should you ever meet a former member of the Wehrmacht, you owe them the same general regard to be given any human being. Most human beings have not taken up arms to make war on behalf of a genocidal regime led by a fanatical anti-Semitic tyrant. It’s okay to look askance at those who did.
      - solveit 8y ago
        However, most human beings in their situation did. There but for the grace of god go I.
pergadad 8y ago
You're shot for refusing orders. In a war situation no one is going to bother recording this. You'll either get a letter home that you were a deserter and died dishonourably, so your widow and kids won't even get a pension, or you'll be lucky and the commander sends back a letter that you were killed in the line of duty or from injury/disease. One way or the other, there will be few situations where such refusal is possible, much less written down.
- anigbrowl 8y ago
  Better to die with a clear conscience than to murder the innocent. If you were cunning you could take the commanding officer out instead.
- jtbayly 8y ago
  The paper documents that those who resisted in the army and police suffered very little in the way of negative consequences. From the conclusion of the paper: “There was not a uniform system of "terror-justice" operating automatically against those whose civil and moral courage forced them to declare "ohnemich!"(without me!). In fact, the opposite is true. In every case of documented refusal to obey orders to exterminate people, the coercive powers of the Nazi system proved to be impotent or ineffective.”

tomohawk 8y ago

Something like 80% of the 60 - 65 million people killed during world war 2 were unarmed. They were civilians or prisoners of war. The vast majority of these were killed by Germany, Japan, Italy, and Soviet Union. While there were individuals who resisted this, the systems of government and the belief systems that drove the totalitarian states where unprecedentedly horrific. If you're interested in learning more about this history, "The Second World Wars" by Victor Davis Hanson is a good place to start.

dmix 8y ago
> While there were individuals who resisted this, the systems of government and the belief systems that drove the totalitarian states where unprecedentedly horrific. World War 1 happened 2 decades earlier and wasn't totalitarian and was nearly as horrific (the combat itself was usually far more horrific than WW2). The legacy of humans has been constant war for centuries before that. Even reducing it to some 20th century political ideology is insufficient. Human history has long been a series of duelling nation states, religions, city states, war lords, tribes, etc. The only thing that stopped wars was economic production trumped state expansion while becoming global creating strong interconnections between nation states... and technology (ie, nuclear weapons, total war economies) made the stakes of war too high. But again that's just what stopped or slowed down the bloodshed, not a sufficient explanation of why it kept happening.
- BurningFrog 8y ago
  WW1 was of course an enormous tragedy, but it was fought between armies. I'm not aware of any major attacks on civilians in that war.
- tomohawk 8y ago
  About 20 million died in world war 1, and deaths were primarily combatants. World War 2 was directed primarily at killing unarmed. The Nazis wanted to colonize eastern Europe, so killed many to make room for that, as well as anyone that did not fit in with their notion of racial purity. The Japanese killed their millions in China, but also elsewhere. The Italian killing fields were in Ethiopia. The Soviets killed millions of prisoners of war. Looking at the ideologies of these countries, their goal was to kill anyone who got in the way of those ideologies.

gumby 8y ago

I think there's a rational explanation for making what I agree with you is a quite a wrong assessment. First of all, modern armies are mass action: uniforms make the "other side" literally uniform and undifferentiated. The purpose is twofold: first so that your own troopers won't think rationally about what they are doing and will simply follow along with the crowd, whether the rule is "shoot", "dig a foxhole", "don't run away" or whatever. The second value is to dehumanise the enemy and increase the chance that violence will actually be done to him (this is why the officers were so unhappy with the Christmas Day football game between British and German troops in WWI). This whole process appeared in the Nopoleonic->Prussian invention of mass warfare; until then it was a largely retail affair when you really figured if you needed to kill that other guy in front of you or not. Second of all, and again this is a function of 20th century warfare, this process was amplified through mass propaganda to whole populations, again dehumanizing the enemy. It's own long topic so I"ll stop here. I will say that these refusals are even harder, not easier, when you're in a group who can see you take action or not (as opposed to firing at a far-away enemy where your colleagues can't really see how well you're aiming). So in other words: everybody on HN has been trained to think this way, and all active participants in WWII had been likewise trained to think this way of the "other side"

pergadad 8y ago

Normal men - farmers, workers, clerks - receive a letter in the mail: " on the first of next month, report to base X. Failure to report will be considered treason". You have kids at home. They'll have no more food on the table if you are dead. You show up. You do what they tell you. Sadly that's how it has always been. Some enjoy it-most though just want it to end.