The scenario you posit is kind of a comic book, evil villain take on how people would react to their own wounded. The Nazis may have been hateful to outsiders, but Germans are quite sentimental about their own soldiers. The notion that wounded soldiers were being systematically killed for reasons of resource efficiency makes no sense on any level.
Because of the Holocaust, I believe it has become very simple to group all German soldiers into the “Nazi” camp ( so to speak). But we need to remember that not all soldiers took the Hitler oath.
Would a “good” German soldier kill a Jew on orders of a superior?
Oh yeah. He sure would.
Would a “good” German soldier kill a Jewish family he found hidden?
Yep. He sure would.
“Just following orders”, dontcha know.
But that still doesn’t make him a Nazi.
Thanks
Q (born in 1949, and woefully inadequate of the history of my Fatherland)
Yes it does, on exactly the level that I hypothesized; That doesn’t mean that it actually really happened like that in practice, but it certainly could make sense for an amoral, ruthless, evil regime or group (if not the Nazis, how about the Manson Family, the Malaysian Mafia or the Oompa Loompas) to not want to waste scarce, valuable resources on their now useless members who are no longer able to pull their own weight, and can only act as a drain and a burden to the group and it’s assets as a whole. Maybe the Nazis didn’t tend to have that outlook, but even a child could see the logic of what I am talking about.
Just because you don’t agree with something doesn’t mean it can’t follow a certain reasoning.
^I
t dose not make any sence. Militaries are organisations where such news would travelk quickly. Just what do you think it would do to morale and motivations if soldiers knew what awaited them? And morale and motivation are two things the Nazis had in abundence,
German soldiers may have hated the Allies and the Jews, but they were not Marvel Comics characters like the Red Skull. Killing your own men, wounded heroes no less, in cold blood does not realistically follow from being able to kill the enemy in cold blood, as you seem to keep inferring it does. Your “logic” is implausible at best as it rests on behavioral assumptions that the German solider would have the same callous disregard for the life of his fellows as he did for the enemy.
It doesn’t work that way in real life military organizations where you are relying on unit cohesion and loyalty. Killing off your wounded soldiers is pretty quick way to destroy loyalty.
He had a choice, which was given to him because of his service; but one way or another, he wasn’t getting out of it alive. Taking poison as the option to a bullet in the head is still an execution. It was a shameful act by der Fuhrer.
I just noticed the connection between the OP’s question and his user name. Coincidence?
I should just point out that the question and the quotes I provided in the initial responses are not exactly the same. The OP asked about executing wounded soldiers: my reference was to disabled soldiers.
Spavined Gelding, I don’t see how your seeing disabled veterans contradicts the post. The quote states a start had been made on WW 2 handicapped veterans. Given the number there were that you saw a large number and a start had been made on exterminating them can easily stand together. The book states that tens of thousands of WW 2 German veterans were saved from execution by the occupation of the Allies.
But the bolded part of your quote is questionable. How were they useless? There are many jobs that a wounded & crippled soldier would still be capable of doing. And that would free up someone else to do another job.
It takes about 18 years to grow a soldier, and train him to follow orders. To throw him away because of a wound,m even a crippling one, is NOT an efficient use of resources. Especially when you are starting to run short of new young men to train as soldiers.
This idea just doesn’t make sense.
Yeah, just a coincidence, I’ve had this user name for a while.
Regarding the ongoing debate I think part of the aspect is that for Nazi Germany, as well as the Soviet Union and other totalitarian regimes what was most important was the state and not the individuals of that state. If in their twisted logic it would improve the overall ‘health’ of the state then even an individual who has literally given quality of life and literal limb in service to that state is disposable if he is considered to now be a net drain on resources and not a net asset.
Do I think it actually happened? Unlikely, but given the nature of the Nazi regime perfectly plausible. Though as mentioned above the authorities would have to keep it very quiet to avoid destroying moral of fighting units, but the Nazis were masters of deception and outright lying.
It sounds possible. I recall reading that there was an incident, where the wife of a high ranking German Army officer (and her kids) got on the wrong train by mistake (it was a train hauling Jews to a death camp).
She was executed, along with her kids-the SS didn’t want word to get ot.
Everyone seems to have taken the “wounded and crippled but can still do useful work” tangent.
The wounded that the book referred to were quadriplegic, brain damaged, with hopeless internal injuries.
I’m skeptical of this. AFAIK, the Nazis gave up on their national efforts to kill handicapped Germans in 1941 after vast public opposition, including open protests. Apparently killing of the handicapped continued in some places on a local level, but even if some of those killed locally were disabled war veterans, it would be quite a stretch to say that “the Nazis extended their extermination campaign to their own badly wounded and crippled soldiers.”
A small proportion of the mentally handicapped or psychically ill people killed in the T4/‘euthanasia’ murders of 1940/1941 would have got that way as a result of brain damage or war experiences sustained in World War 1 (I recall one case of a local whose war experience got him into psychiatric care in the 1920s, and transferred from there to be murdered in 1940, from an article in our local paper), but that program was not specifically targeted at disabled WW1 vets - the typical T4 victims were children, or adults mentally disabled from birth. If a policy to kill disabled soldiers existed it would be schoolbook stuff here in Germany, so I am inclined to dismiss it (except for ad hoc battlefield mercy killings as noted by others).
Stalin never said that—or at least, there’s no evidence of him having said that or anything like it.
I doubt that the wife of a high-ranking German officer would mistake a regular train for the kind of train heading to a death camp.
This sounds staggeringly unlikely on every single level. The wife getting on the train - she didn’t notice she didn’t have a seat but instead was packed into a locked cattle car? The Germans allowing her on the train - do you think the trains to the camps were regularly scheduled and the Jews wandered up with tickets? The execution to keep things quiet - the Wehrmacht had actively participated in genocide in Poland and the USSR, and a “high ranking German Army officer” would likely have been aware of this.
Moreover, even if Germans didn’t know of the extermination aspect, that Jews were deported to resettlement camps was common knowledge. Even if by a miracle this scenario had started, as soon as the mistake was discovered the wife would’ve been returned home, with no knowledge gained of the gas chambers.
Or indeed the other way around. :smack:
The idea of euthanasia had been discussed in the medical profession for centuries; there was a widespread but not total consensus in the medical literature up to the late 19th century that “euthanasia medica” was limited to terminal care without taking any action that directly led to the person’s death.
In Germany, the definition of euthanasia changed during the last decade of the 19th century following the discussion of ideas by Alfred Ploetz et al. who extended the term to include mercy killings and assisted suicide. The idea of killing “the unworthy of life” entered the discussion during that period as well - but was mostly used as a cautionary illustration of possible consequences.
The moral philosopher Ernst Haeckel supported the idea of killing terminally ill painlessly out of pity; following discussions showed that the boundaries widened: he and other outspoken members of the sciences also considered euthanasia, mainly assisted suicide, to be an option for incurable patients whose illnesses were not necessarily terminal. The slope became even more slippery when some argued that a consent of people with severe mental handicaps was not absolutely necessary to justify a mercy killing.
Karl Binding, a jurist, and the psychiatrist Alfred E. Hoche published a book in 1920 that was called „Die Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens. Ihr Maß und ihre Form“. They seriously and openly discussed the necessity of killing everyone who was not (anymore) a productive member of society and had become a burden for society; and they called them “unworthy of life”.
It’s not surprising that the breach of a taboo happened after the World War and the following chaos and hardships in Germany; the popular social ideas of that time throughout the Western world played also a role to convince radical thinkers that such positions had become socially acceptable.
Adolf Hitler was certainly susceptible to those ideas; and his pathetic but oh so ominous “Mein Kampf” already showed that he not just truly believed in a division of humanity into the worthy and unworthy but wanted to make sure that only the former were selected to live and propagate.
Once in power, those ideas were implemented step by step, starting almost immediately. The Nürnberger Rassegesetze (Nuremberg Laws) were the most prominent early red flag of a grand plan behind the declamations; the realisation of systematic euthanasia, however, took a bit longer: Hitler was not sure, how the public might react and even when he finally decided to take action (after the war had started in 1939), he did so secretly – the notorious euthanasia decree was not made a law to avoid its publication:
Note that this mandate includes not just anyone categorized as unworthy by law but all who were considered terminally ill.
Aktion T4* was the first step to implement the selection rules; following orders, like Aktion 14f13, didn’t even bother to use some kind of pretext; they all followed the logic of the Endlösung that envisioned a human kind consisting only of the people that fulfilled the qualifications to be deemed worthy to live and propagate.
Hundreds of thousands “unworthy” were sterilized, murdered and tortured in medical experiments, among those people were also veterans of World War I.
But there was a certain reluctance to kill them; the panels of physicians that selected prisoners in the early stage of Aktion 14f13 in the concentration camps, for instance, were less likely inclined to include veterans, especially decorated ones, into their “Sonderbehandlung” (aka murder).
During the first years of the war, many prisoners were saved simply because they were still considered useful as part of the workforce but in the later stages, when the Nazis realized that the tide was turning against them, the killing reached frantic dimensions.
Well, you know that already. But were severely wounded German soldiers added to the programs that systematically killed everyone not considered useful?
I’ve read this claim being repeated in a couple of books, among them “Euthanasie” im NS-Staat by Ernst Klee, a truly sickening but highly valuable work. He and other authors show a lot of evidence for industrialized euthanasia but little when it comes to Germany soldiers.
Still, new evidence is found regularly, so if you could list the sources that were used in the book you mentioned, that would be most helpful.
Mercy killings of mortally wounded soldiers in agony were done, of course, and I wouldn’t be surprised at all if testimonies described the murder of soldiers by nurses, doctors or medics for no medical or pseudo-humanitarian reason – the medical professions murdered enough other people mercilessly, after all. But that’s not quite the mentioned claim.
However, the ideology knew no place for the useless and the phrasing of the orders we know, show that everyone unfit could easily be added to the death lists by zealous believers – and there were plenty of those.
Otoh, the believers were a part of the power structure, not its entirety – even Hitler backed down in the summer of 1941 when the Bishop of Münster, Clemens August Graf von Galen, delivered a series of nation-wide noticed sermons about the vanishing of patients and children and the subsequently delivered certificates of death.
At that time, the number of the victims had already reached 70,000 – which wasn’t public knowledge, of course – but too many people had vanished to not agitate the public; and Hitler decided to terminate, for now, Aktion T4 to avoid any trouble that might interfere with the war.
Even at the peak of his power, he was aware that his grip wasn’t total and he had to adapt to adverse public opinion and be wary of other centres of power – the most important one was the Wehrmacht. The code of honour of the leading figures wasn’t by far as straight as they wanted everyone to believe but an approval or just grumbling acceptance of the euthanasia of their own was highly unlikely; even the most morally corrupt generals had to know fully well, how dangerous it would have been for morale if the rumour mill had started to talk about such a program.
Hitler couldn’t afford to make on enemy of the general staff, and they couldn’t afford to abandon their soldiers, so any such program would have been incredibly self-destructive for the ones in power. Besides, Hitler was veteran of World War I and he had been wounded twice (he was blinded for a short time by mustard gas on one occasion), so his biography rather gives us reason to assume that he wouldn’t support the killing of the wounded.
But what about the final stage of the war?
If you put zealots in charge and the chain of command is breaking apart and an “end of days”-spirit is starting to take over (Hitler is the most prominent example of that kind of break-down), well, yes, it’s not nearly as implausible than during any other stage of Hitler’s regime.
“Plausible” or not – we need evidence for it to be called true.
If you are interested in doing some research on your own, there is an ideal starting point for your curiosity:
The Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt (MGFA), German Armed Forces Military History Research Office, answers every year more than 2,000 information requests sent to them by private citizens. Yours might be among them .. and in case that you doubt that they are willing to give information that make Germans look bad, no evil - they are used to questions that might prompt such a conclusion, because the majority of questions deals with the role of the Wehrmacht during the Drittes Reich.
Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt
AIF III
Zeppelinstr. 127/128
14471 Potsdam
Fax: (0331) 9714-507
E-Mail: mgfaanfragen@bundeswehr.org
Cicero, I’ve read A World in Arms, - who didn’t? - but not the book you mentioned. Could you name the sources Weinberg mentions?
Seriously. The BSometer is in the red with this claim.