"Just Following Orders"!

Is'nt this the same excuse used during the WWII war crimes trials and the present day "prison torture" thing in Iraq? Or scap goats because of an election year? Opinions ?

 

As I understand it, a soldier is legally obliged to refuse to follow an illegal order. Therefore, if the orders those prison guards obeyed are shown to be illegal, then both they (for following them) and their superiors (for issuing them) may be liable to punishment.

 

And what is more important, that these soldiers can't use excuses such as: "if I didn't obey they'd have shot me".

That doesn't apply not even to Nazi Germany, because Germans didn't commit horrible atrocities with a gun pointing to their head, but voluntarily and with a smile on their faces…

 

BTW,

Friedrich, already read the Christopher Browning's "Ordinary men"? If not get it. Shooting people is not easy...

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060995068/104-1728050-3975911?v=glance

 

No, Kai. Haven't read it. Have you? Do you recommend it?

But I have been reading through two books by Dr. Robert Gellately: "Not only Hitler" and "The Gestapo and the German Society".

Also, there's Kershaw's master works on Hitler: "Hubris" and "Nemesis".

All four books are definitive must-reads for those interested in Nazi Germany. These most professional sources prove how Germany wasn't raped by the nazis, but that Germany in fact had a very passionate masochist romance with the NSDAP and Hitler. Nazi crimes are German crimes.

 

Definitely Friedrich!

You send the home front men do the shooting of some 1/2 million or more jews and you´ll see why they ended up with gassing them instead. Must say still shocked by the fact of Polish forests full of dead people but then again not all Germans were bad. Quite many refused and got away with it. Just read the book. Anyway, after reading about Stalin on my recent mission there was always 15 million people (8.4% of the nation) in the camps so what´s the difference? ( Except that it´s not selling so well if you wrote a book on Russian camps...)

 

In terms of number, there's is one thing worse than nazism, and that is stalinism.

But it's unfair to compare both totalitarian régimes for two reasons:

1) Whether we like it or not, the Soviet Union under the stalinist régime destroyed nazism.

2) Stalinism starved, deported and killed millions of people, but did not make plans for systematic industrialised genocide based simply on racial policies.

There were good Germans, indeed. But good Germans also voluntarily nazified and worked in the co-ordination and worked on the Führer's direction.

The best example is the T-4 programme.

Philip Bouhler read a letter of a German peasant who requested the Führer's permission to kill his retarded 5-year-old son. Bouhler showed this to the Führer and he immediately said 'yes' and signed an order —which you posted. This order —one of very few direct orders given by Hitler— made the voluntarily nazified medic organisations wanting to follow what they believed was the Führer's will and then they started administrating euthanasia to mortally-ill people in terminal phases. Then to people in vegetative state, then to people suffering of brain-paralysis, then to schizofrenics, then to paranoids, then to retarded, then to people with Down-syndrom, then to people with physical deffects, etc. The result? 400.000 people assassinated, not by direct order of Hitler and not assassinated by illiterate pigs from the SA or SS, but by average middle and high-class proefessional physicians and professional nurses.

 

Yes, you are totally correct there Friedrich! There was some kinda national psychosis but as I understood the order that Hitler signed was the last one as well because the people in Germany had reacted and if I remember correctly-women made a protest march against these murders on disabled. After this Hitler did not make any public signs of favouring this politics. He left it to Himmler, who felt ill after watching people being killed...that´s how tough your racial propagandists are...Easy to give orders, harder to fulfill them.

I just read , BTW, that as the jews etc were killed and ripped off their valuable items, that the watches etc were sent to the men in the front.One example told how a U-boat crew got "new" watches, and they probably knew how these were gotten to them....

Anyway, I have encyclopedia of the Reich, and even if many people were involved in the euthanasia program, I was quite surprised how many people were sent to prison and killed because they thought that the nazi regime was wrong at the same time. I will come up with their names and short stories what they did.

For Russia it is true that it was not the same kind of racial system, but yet Stalin had a powerful system that killed millions of people, just remember the Ukraine famine in ca. 1938 which was deliberate. And the jews killing which Stalin started in the late 1940´s again by putting Moscowian jew doctors to court and starting thus sending them to camps.And this was after WW2!!! These guys meant it for sure!

 

Maybe Crazy Man Patton was right after all... Kai, anything to read on this?

Cheers!
Z.

 

Stalin and Hitler...

There is a book called 'Parralel Lives' I think.

Stalin was just as bad, if not worse than Hitler.

I have a book by a Russian Colonal who defected that states that in the USSR the conservative estimate for Stalins 'kills' is somewhere between 80 - 120 million... I have no idea if this is correct but I can dig the book out tomorrow if anyone is interested.

 

I´ll check the site for the Ukraine famine later on, Za, but as I have done some research for my "war gaming" as Stalin I must say I was surprised to find out that some 15 million were in the camps all the time, the police replacing the dead immediately. That was some 8.4 % of the total population.So quite a huge number of free workers for the country available, for instance the Stalin Canal which these days is quite useless (I think) and thousands of people (or even more? ) died bulding it.

 

Red, it is indeed called 'Stalin and Hitler - Parallel lives' and is by Anthony Bullok.

A bit of trivia on the Soviet Union for you Kai, it was forbidden to take blankets out of the country. This was true up until the 80's, a friend of mine escaped with his family and they sewed curtain rings on all their blankets so they could get them out of the country.

 

Bugger. just rememebered i gave the book i was talking about to a friend before i left the uk!!! Its always the way... Dont need something till you are rid of it!!!

Just gone through all my shelves lookin for it before i remembered!!!

 

Wonder if be-heading is easier to do than shooting? By the way,why were blankets illegal to carry out of Russia?

 

Guess not, one more boy part to worry about, more logistics. Besides, should be even messier...

 

Not if you have plenty of gullotines. Besides, a painless way of execution.

 

Those people (hostages) were held down while their heads were sawn/cut (not chopped) off. How is that painless???

 

Scratch that. I thought we were talking about Iraq.

 

A guillotine —that is an XVIII Century machine— beheads people cleanly, painlessly and efficiently in exactly 0,05 seconds. Nervous stimoulous —pain— don't travell so fast. So, your head is cut off much before you can feel pain.

And that is a very different discussion from whether it's 'morally' correct to behead, shot or torture people; independently whether they are nazi bastards, crazy revolutionaries or terrorist hijoeputas.

 

This is true, but research done on the last man to be guillotined showed that the 'head' lived for some 3-6 seconds after beheading.

The researcher asked the prisoner that after he had his head cut off to blink when he looked at his severed head... The prisoner after beheading blinked several times in answer to the researchers voice.

Cant remember who did these test but must be on the net somewhere...

May be painless but a moments realisation that you have had your head lopped off must be weird...