Conventional wisdom during World War II among German soldiers, members of the SS and SD as well as police personnel, held that any order given by a superior officer must be obeyed under any circumstances. Failure to carry out such an order would result in a threat to life and limb or possibly serious danger to loved ones. Many students of Nazi history have this same view, even to this day. Could a German refuse to participate in the round up and murder of Jews, gypsies, suspected partisans,”commissars”and Soviet POWs—unarmed groups of men, women, and children—and survive without getting himself shot or put into a concentration camp or placing his loved ones in jeopardy? We may never learn the full answer to this, the ultimate question for all those placed in such a quandry, because we lack adequate documentation in many cases to determine the full circumstances and consequences of such a hazardous risk. There are, however, over 100 cases of individuals whose moral scruples were weighed in the balance and not found wanting. These individuals made the choice to refuse participation in the shooting of unarmed civilians or POWs and none of them paid the ultimate penalty, death! Furthermore,very few suffered any other serious consequence!
Well, a 5 percent rate of being sent to a concentration camp or combat unit isn’t exactly negligible, and a further 17 percent were threatened. So maybe it’s correct that these effects are “surprisingly mild”, but these stats are more justification for the “just following orders” explanation than I’d have imagined from the main text.
I assumed that there were a large number of unknown cases and that the unknown cases, on average, had less severe consequences. But I haven’t read the paper deeply enough to really know this.
I’m not sure that focusing on the outcomes makes sense when thinking about the psychology of individual soldiers. Presumably refusal was rare enough that most soldiers were unaware of what the outcome of refusal was in practice. I think it would probably be rational for soldiers to expect severe consequences absent being aware of a specific case of refusal going unpunished.
I don’t know if this is true, but I’ve heard that when the Nazis were having soldiers round up and shoot people (before the Holocaust became more industrial and systematic), as part of the preparation for having them execute civilians, the Nazi officers explicitly offered their soldiers the chance to excuse themselves (on an individual basis) from having to actually perform the executions themselves with no further consequences.
I guess it was usually not worth bothering with prosecuting disobedience as long as it was rare. If ~50% of soldiers were refusing to follow these orders, surely the Nazi repression machine would have set up a process to effectively deal with them and solved the problem
Quite an interesting paper you linked:
Table of the consequences they faced:
Well, a 5 percent rate of being sent to a concentration camp or combat unit isn’t exactly negligible, and a further 17 percent were threatened. So maybe it’s correct that these effects are “surprisingly mild”, but these stats are more justification for the “just following orders” explanation than I’d have imagined from the main text.
I assumed that there were a large number of unknown cases and that the unknown cases, on average, had less severe consequences. But I haven’t read the paper deeply enough to really know this.
I’m not sure that focusing on the outcomes makes sense when thinking about the psychology of individual soldiers. Presumably refusal was rare enough that most soldiers were unaware of what the outcome of refusal was in practice. I think it would probably be rational for soldiers to expect severe consequences absent being aware of a specific case of refusal going unpunished.
I don’t know if this is true, but I’ve heard that when the Nazis were having soldiers round up and shoot people (before the Holocaust became more industrial and systematic), as part of the preparation for having them execute civilians, the Nazi officers explicitly offered their soldiers the chance to excuse themselves (on an individual basis) from having to actually perform the executions themselves with no further consequences.
I guess it was usually not worth bothering with prosecuting disobedience as long as it was rare. If ~50% of soldiers were refusing to follow these orders, surely the Nazi repression machine would have set up a process to effectively deal with them and solved the problem