That's not a fair statement, Keith... the Nazis were commiting acts of atrocities and they knew it was wrong, patently down the line. Had the pilots been laughing and killing innocent people, then yes, that's very wrong. These were enemy combatants, millions of Jews were not. There is a huge difference, legally AND morally. Soldiers are trained to know the difference and suffer severe penalties if they violate them. The American war edict is not to "destroy every Iraqi"
The most appalling thing about the Holocaust is (ok, there are lots of appaling things) but one of the weirdest that I'm finding out, is that the Nazis, on the battlefield, were very humane. I cut a documentary about WWII medics and I'm just starting one on nurses in WWII, where we have interviews with people that were part of D-Day and part of the liberation force that saw first hand the death camps. They would talk about how baffled they were at the sight of these mass graves and the condition of the people, because during the land battles in France and Italy, the Nazis would follow the Geneva Convention to the "T".
In fact, we have one medic who talked about during a lull in fighting, the Nazis would blow a whistle or raise a white flag, meet the Americans out in the middle of a hedgerow, and swap prisoners that both sides felt were to badly injured to continue fighting (as in "he won't get up tomorrow grab a gun and start fighting again") so that they could get sent back behind the lines to a field hospital and then sent home. When he got to Dacau he could not believe what they were seeing. His unit's first inclination was that German infastructure was falling apart because these "prisoners" were in such bad shape. It took them awhile to grasp that systematic genocide was occuring.
Also, as far as the Neuremberg Trials, officers who took the defense of "I was just following orders" were held accountable for there actions. The soldiers that were directly under them were pardoned. Its the chain of command. The people that had authority to disobey orders didn't . It was determined that a foot soldier or a guard would have been shot on site if they refused orders. You cannot be tried for the preservation of your own life. The Nazi officers tried to argue that their lives were endangered if they refused their orders (which is probably true), but that's where the war crimes council had to draw a line and say who could have disobeyed orders and who couldn't, because they could argue all the way up the chain of command to Himmler and (if he was alive) he could say say Hitler would have killed me. Of course, there were people who bought the party line (no pun intended) and treated their captives like animals, many of them were punished as well, if there were enough eye witnesses to testify against them (another difficult thing to do considering most of the eyewitnesses were dead). There are cases from Vietnam along these same lines.
If you want more info on this I could go dig out my college ethics books, or better yet read "A Man's Search For Meaning" by Dr. Viktor Frankl, a death camp survivor and creator of a style of psychotherapy called "logotherapy". In that book he talks about some of the guards that had shown compassion toward him, including a cook that would dip a little further down in the soup to get him a little extra potato or a pea. The core principle in logotherapy is that man's primary motivational force is the search for meaning in his life from his surroundings. He excuses the guards and everyday people (including some operators of the showers) that showed compassion and tried to do what they could to ease the suffering of their captives.
So, again in a rambling explanation, this appalling looking footage is a justified act of war in my mind. Maybe I should rephrase for you, Keith: These soldiers were obeying the orders of their war edict.
Quote from carligula on Mar. 5, 2004 at 10:25 AM
