Germans Who Refused to Execute Civilians During World War II (1988) [pdf]
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Well researched (based on testimonials) and well written.
Some men get used to the job, some enjoyed it, some kept refusing.
> Twelve out of 500 soldiers opted out when allowed to leave freely.[34] Those of them who felt unable to continue shooting at point-blank range of prisoners begging for mercy, were asked to wait at the marketplace where the trucks were loaded.[35] The action was finished in seventeen hours. The bodies of the dead carpeting the forest floor at the Winiarczykowa Góra hill (about 2 km from the village, pictured)[36] were left unburied. Watches, jewelry and money were taken.[3]
Unfortunately some of those men who refused were hanged after the war for made up war crimes. History has bitter sense of humor.
> For a battalion of less than 500 men, the ultimate body count was at least 83,000 Jews.[50]
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Soluti...
[2] http://hampshirehigh.com/exchange2012/docs/BROWNING-Ordinary...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_Police_Battalion_101
It requires independence of thought and high principles.
Ethics are a group choice - a set of morals, in the plural, derived from "ethike" - the 'science of morals'.
They're interlocked, sure, but it is an individual who makes a moral decision for themselves, but an ethical decision for their group...
EDIT: I mean, all you have to do is look at the definition of both words in a few dictionaries. Its pretty clearly stated that ethics are a group of morals formulated around the purposes of a group, where morals are derived from and based on an individual decision. Can't have one without the other.
Of course, you are within your rights to disagree - such is the nature of the ethics of philosophical discussions.
But that too is a moral view, is it not? It may be "meta-relative" to other moral views but doesn't keep it from being statement of values.
I have no German ties whatsoever but I am in deep admiration of their capacity to accept, correct and be vigilant of repetition.
I know neo-nazism exists. I hope it continues to be an aberration.
Neo-nazism doesn't scare me as much as the average American patriot, whose political cover allows many, many crimes to be committed in their name with, seemingly, no repercussion.
However, as a believer in karma, participating in such a society is not on - thus, I moved.
My only concern now is that the Germany of the future will have what it needs to address America - because it doesn't look like Americans are going to be roping in their criminal death cult any time soon ... and all signs point to an America, in the future, which will have to deal with the crimes being committed in its name, today.
1700 demonstrators showed up this year. We must not forget.
Were they demonstrating against or in favor of the POW's and resistence fighters?
-- Mario Savio
I really think there is something to the idea of not going along because you just cannot. I think sometimes the "no" comes first, and then comes finding or making a way, maybe.
Though I think disgust with what one is complicit in, and the sheer inability to go on with it, are ultimately also based on positive values, and on not betraying oneself, so it's always a "no to X, to uphold a yes to Y" IMO.
from https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2014/marchapril/feature/the-t...
> Arendt had removed the guarantee of absolute innocence and automatic guilt from the question of moral responsibility. What did she put in its place? The capacity to exercise an “independent human faculty, unsupported by law and public opinion, that judges in full spontaneity every deed and intent anew whenever the occasion arises.” And who evidenced this capacity? They were not distinguished by any superior intelligence or sophistication in moral matters but “dared to judge by themselves.” Deciding that conformity would leave them unable to “live with themselves,” sometimes they even chose to die rather than become complicit. “The dividing line between those who want to think and therefore have to judge by themselves, and those who do not, strikes across all social and cultural or educational differences.”
Hannah Arendt's essay "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship":
https://grattoncourses.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/arendt-pe...
The national-social cocktail completely tore apart common decency.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monowitz_concentration_camp#Bu...
Really? Atrocities against civilians in war were common even then. No need to look further than e.g. the colonies.
I think the point was that scale of it was quite different in WW2. In WW2 the majority of casualties were civilians, which was new compared to previous conflicts.
I'd have to see data on that, not that I definitely disbelieve it. But it does seem to me that this was more often the case than not.
The Germans explicitely suspended its use in their armed forces for the Eastern Front – which is why millions of Soviet PoWs were left to die of starvation in what was basically large cattle pens while Jews or card-carrying Communists were to be shot on the spot after capture.
in a lot of cases there was a cloak such as, we are not told to do it immediately i have more efficient plans.
>Oskar Schindler (28 April 1908 - 9 October 1974) was a German industrialist and a member of the Nazi Party who is credited with saving the lives of 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust by employing them in his enamelware and ammunitions factories in occupied Poland and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.<
These people were declared essential servants and diverted from concentration.
Thank you for spreading his name, here and hopefully elsewhere. He and the people he helped deserve it.
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.
Less than one hundred out of millions.
Viewing them all as “fungible villains” is a very accurate approximation with a ridiculously low error.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
I also use that phrase. In my youth, I would even have meant it literally. Now, I will respond to it in the sense of cognitive traps which people too easily fall into and are lucky to escape. I have been "lucky" to have experienced racially motivated harassment in my youth, so I have had a direct view of what people taken by groupthink are like.
Far too many human beings in 2019 are falling into groupthink where they will gladly throw young people and children under the bus, just to serve their "side." Note that this applies equally to the political Left and the Right. Once one wants one's own side to win so badly, that basic principles go out the window, one's mind has been taken by groupthink.
The following is directed generally: If one is of the Left and cannot see or automatically excuse all of its transgressions, then one's mind has been taken by groupthink. If one is of the Right and cannot see or automatically excuse all of its transgressions, then one's mind has been taken by groupthink. If one is of the mindset that critics are automatically enemies, one's mind has been taken by groupthink.
Too many people in 2019 are caught up in groupthink and outright hate, but camouflage it and justify it to themselves as a worthy cause. This is what happened in Germany prior to WWII, and it is something we need to look out for.
It’s okay to look askance at those who did.
Yes. So long as you view them as individual human beings and the particular facts. So long as you're not responding to a shallow label and taking action with little thought. That is the underlying philosophical mistake which is the foundation of the very wrong you would hold against them.
I too would look askance at them. But if you treat them as fungible and disposable, then what exactly did our side fight for?
One way or the other, there will be few situations where such refusal is possible, much less written down.
“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.”
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.
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.
I'm not aware of any major attacks on civilians in that war.
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.
There is nothing controversial about saying that. If you are implying that I'm ignorant of such a basic fact, then this is insulting and commenting in bad faith.
What is controversial nowadays, ironically for a society which claims to be founded on inviolate individual human rights, is that the exact same regard for individual culpability should be accorded members of the Wehrmacht. My previous comment supports the notion of group culpability for members of an army. However, the idea that all members of the Wehrmacht are equally culpable is simply ridiculous and untenable, given the facts and given the principles of individual human rights.
If you're interested in learning more about this history, "The Second World Wars" by Victor Davis Hanson is a good place to start.
If you mean to insinuate that I know nothing of the very basic history of WWII, please know that I am already a fan of David Hanson.
As noted elsewhere, it is an act of individual courage to go against the flow of the groupthink. I hardly think "Nazi German Bad" is at all controversial. However, in 2019, "individual rights for all, no exceptions" is controversial, in direct contradiction to our stated values in the US.
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"
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.
Eg the noble officiers didn't like the Nazis' populism. They were however mostly happy to fight a war, especially when it was going well.
As an example Babi Yar one of largest mass execution of Jews during II WW.
> Contrary to the myth of the "clean Wehrmacht", the Sixth Army under the command of Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau worked together with the SS and SD to plan and execute the mass-murder of the Jews of Kiev.[1]
I would have expected the opposite. I guess this means, the structures of society and rule of of law were actually sort of still working, but that most people feared going against the zeitgeist.
Only that they were quite educated. Not the lower troops of SA. But the party members were very much into classical education, classical music etc.
And they totally went by law and order. "Just" a different order. With racism as its core fundamentals and the neglect of humanism in general.
Not at all e.g. most of the Wannsee Conference attendants had "Dr." title. Numerous responsible for massacres of civilians or inhumane medical experiments had the "Dr." title. The so called elite can turn into monstrosity as well. It's not "the primitives" which are the real threat most of the time. "The primitives" gain power only after the the elite is purged and/or expelled - see the first decades in Soviet Union after the Bolshevik revolution, or Stalinism in Poland.
Actually lots of highly educated people were Nazis, including Nazi leaders and apologists.
Including people considered by their (even Jewish, even post WWII) academic peers, as the "biggest thinkers" of the 20th century.
Heck, Mengele had 2 Ph.Ds (anthopology and medicine).
Imagine how horrific someone's actions must be when even the SS think they might be going too far.
This is such a ridiculous claim to make. There is absolutely no correlation between Evil and Stupidity. And pretty much every fact of that time disagrees with the theory that Germany was led by idiots and uneducated people. On the contrary, you should be all the more afraid when smart people turn evil.
Some places where people did not go along are (famously) Denmark and (less famously) Bulgaria. These countries managed to save the vast majority of their Jewish populations (though in the case of Bulgaria, Macedonian and Thracian Jews were murdered). 75% of French Jews survived the war because the French largely protected French Jews (though stateless Jewish refugees living in France fared much worse).
The OP discusses instances where individual Germans refused to follow orders. One example:
> By his action to obtain this order, Griese refused the request of the SD to have his men participate in the execution of Jews in his area.
>In fact, the SD had shot the 365 Jews themselves while he was on his journey to and from Konigsberg
Nazi leadership recognized that mass execution of Jews (and others) by firearm was taking a psychological toll on the Germans being ordered to do so, which is one of the reasons that more abstract, industrial methods (e.g. gas chambers) were developed.
I draw attention to the parent's false equivalency of Nazi Germany and 21st Century USA. I describe the Nazi regime's recognition of the morale toll on its soldiers of gunning down innocent souls. Himmler himself saw this as an "issue."
Conjecture basis the article that the Nazi German legal system is similar to the modern American system is logically fallacious and dangerous insofar as it suggests that Nazism is compatible with contemporary American political and ethical values.
It doesn't tell you anything about what people do in the real world in real situations.
In the original form of the experiment (and several subsequent replications), the “teacher” was under the impression everything was real and wasn’t aware the “learner” (the person pretending to get shocked) was an actor.
Today, you’d never get an ethics board to approve the experiment in this form, as several former “teachers” were distraught, after being told the true nature of the experiment, because they naturally assumed they’d never be capable of such terrible acts.
There is no evidence to support the view that the “teachers” who administered dangerous shocks were somehow clued into the fact that it was an actor. That would have made the entire experiment worthless, as “Will people pretend to do evil things while role playing?” isn’t an interesting question because thats well understood to be true. Milgram set out specifically to see if every-day people would commit acts that go against their personal conscience if directed to do so by authority.
I find it interesting that the article makes an issue over the point that "the majority do not appear to have continued out of commitment to science," as this particular motivation seems to me to be one of the lesser issues raised by the exercise.
Welcome to psychology in the 1960s.
Some of us are not automatons :) https://www.xkcd.com/610/