Evidently, not very well. There was a helicopter crew who saw what was happening and intervened. I’m just stating what we’re expected to do.
Unfortunately, those responsible were evidently not pushed much at all for their actions there.
I should have been more clear. Apolitical in the sense of not belonging to, or being very much involved in, the political parties of Germany. Clearly, many members of the Wehrmacht would have had a strong belief in the ideas and goals they were fighting for. (As in, many were fervent supporters of the ideas of Nazism, but that did not necessarily include being an actual member of the Nazi party, nor being involved in the formation of politics on the civilian scene)
A documentary I saw once about the development of death camps and gas chambers, mentioned that the main impetus was low morale in the Army. They had originally been assigned to round up civilians, dig mass graves and shoot the civilians into the graves en masse. Apparently dissatisfaction was high.
People join the army for a lot of reasons. The grand adventure, a change from the depression and poverty at home, to defend the fatherland - does not mean they are all heartless killing machines. They might shoot unarmed civilians, knowing they could be executed if they refused; but if the sargeant and the rest of the officers up the line are similarly disgusted, the dissatisfaction would be expressed all the way back; they signed up to fight the enemy who were trying to kill them, not to shoot children.
Obviously, even with ideology and heavy discipline, the concerns all the way up the command were such that they decided it was not a good idea to leave the army to do the job. So it wasn’t like Stalin’s KGB, where the least talk of dissent got you killed. (And I’m sure they were aware of the concept of “fragging” when armed soldiers were pushed to far.)
There are stories of concentration camp guards being outed when they tried to hide among the prisoners during liberation, and of others who were protected by the prisoners. So even in the death camps, there were a range of people from the sadistic to the ones who were as kind as they could be without crossing the line to get themselves killed.
IIRC the “following orders” defence was generally ignored because a lot of the prosecuted had shown initiative “above and beyond the call of duty”. They made executive decisions that were more sadistic than necessary, or failed to request for basic relief. No surprise, since generally administration positions were more likely to go to loyal party members and syncophants. Following orders as a defence goes only so far if you are part of the committee deciding who and how many to kill this week.
From what I understand, the dissident-killing and purges were chiefly done by the NKVD, the ancestor of the KGB. Even in Stalin’s USSR, the main army did not do the bulk of the killing of undesirables.
The NKVD and the SS were similar in that they both had conventional military functions, acted as a praetorian guard and doer-of-deeds-best-kept-secret (can anyone come up with a less awkward term?).
Wikipedia suggests that “Wetwork” would be appropriate. particularly as it is evidently derived for the Russian euphemism for KGB-sponsored killings.
Thank you for posting that. A true hero.
I had a friend who admitted a war crime to me once, to immediate reaction an awful thing to do, but with the story understandable. WW2 Italy they were advancing until they came upon a church that was heavily defended and met strong opposition. What the record books might say tenacious. But it was a single church in a sea of allied advances and bore no relationship to any battle, it has already been bypassed. They lost a lot of his friends that day and eventually they got mortars to destroy the church, pounded it to bits, limbs of the defenders all over the place etc. The German commander emerged with a handful of his men covered in white plaster, and they marched him up the hedge line and “shoot his arse off” (i think literally). What really disgusted his was the needless deaths of both his friends and the German soldiers they had to kill to sort it out.
In “Ordinary Men”, Christopher Browning talks about the reserve military/police units responsible for a lot of the early mass-shootings. One point he emphasizes is that the commanders of these units were entirely aware that they were asking their subordinates to do very “difficult” things; Browning states that people could opt out of participation in mass killings easily, with no questions asked. I’m not entirely convinced it was always that simple, but it’s pretty clear that no one (or very few people) were forced to commit genocide. You murdered civilians because (for whatever reason), this was what you wanted to do.