Was Von Braun even fucking necessary for NASA?

[Broomstick]

It was a nice rationalization, particularly since there was some truth in it, but when 1945 rolled around and you get to the March firebombing of Tokyo that was specifically intended to destroy the city and large numbers of its citizens. In fact, the firebombing of March killed more people than either of the atomic bombs.

It's not a rationalization at all, its a straightforward statement of a military problem and its solution. Tokyo is like every other Japanese city - now as much as then - the small manfacturing plants and machine shops are mixed in with the residential areas. Previous B-29 raids had more or less failed to destroy the big plants let alone the little ones (bombing from 30,000 feet with conventional weapons is quite a problem) and the bombing offensive was grinding to a half due to the combination of unworkable tactics and an unsuitable target set. The fire-bombing campaign was explicitly designed to solve the problem presented by the structure of Japanese industry. After Tokyo was burned down, photographs show the remains of presses and drilling machines left standing in the ruins. Your statement that the population was the specific target was quite wrong, industry was the target, the people who died just were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

You are incorrect. Machinery even today is useless without people, pre-computer age it was even more true. It was not enough to simply destroy the machines - you have to destroy the people, too, or they will repair and rebuild - even if those people running the factories are schoolchildren.

Japan blurred the line between civilian and military, and the Japanese population paid a heavy, heavy price for it.

The people WERE targets, not just buildings and machines.

By the way, are you aware that the B-29s dropped leaflets all over Japan listing the targets for fire-bomb raids (including Hiroshlima and Nagasaki) and advising people to leave them?

Yes, and they were ignored. It wasn't that the populace didn't believe they would be bombed, it's that the Japanese did not flee battle.

They were a formidable enemy, and I keep saying that if ever Japan and the US go to war again I hope to god we're on the same side. We do NOT want to fight them again! The Japanese - both military and civilian - fought amazing battles with amazingly little gear and support. With modern technology... I'd really rather not see that, thank you very much.

We were planning to invade Japan. We weren't going to fight mano a mano - the US doesn't do that. No, we rain death from afar or above or whatever we can to maximize the number of them killed and minimize the number of us killed. We weren't going to confront peasants with pitchforks on the beaches, we were going to burn the houses down around their ears. Well, OK, yes, we DID have plans to send men onto the beaches, there would have been some D-Day style fighting, but as much as possible the plan was to destroy as much of Japan as possible from above before we set foot on the islands.

Of course, we're not stupid. The U.S. kills by stand-off firepower and wer're very good at it. That's a long way from saying we intended to exterminate the population. Basically if people fought they would die, if they didn't, they wouldn't. And if we had to kill them we would do so in the most cost-effective manner.

The problem was that in 1945 it looked like the whole damn population from toddlers on up was going to fight - invading Japan was going to come awful damn close to total extermination because the two things we had learned were 1) the Japanese do not fear death and 2) the Japanese do not surrender.

I have heard it said that the atomic bombings were so horrific that the living envied the dead - I don't know if that's really true or not, but a weapon of that magnitude was starting to look like the only way to avoid a bloodbath. The Japanese had more stomach for massacre than the US did, and that's a bad thing to confront when you're planning an invasion.

The people planning that knew damn well that they were going to be killing women, children, old men, and infants, and the plans were to firebomb every inhabitation above a certain size regardless of whether or not it held military assets.

Not quite so; yes, we were going to destroy every Japanese community that was of economic significance; destroy any means of communciation and destroy all transport facilities. That's standard prepping for an invasion. The problem was that the structure of Japanese industry was such that economic dispersal went vto a very low level so destroying the whole set-up was a pretty complex task.

Yes - in Europe such centers of military industry could be eliminated yet still leave villages and farms intact. This could not be done in Japan. The subjugation of Japan meant the destruction of just about every fucking village and city in the whole country, and the destruction of virtually every center of agriculture. It's all very fine to speak of military necessity but the reality - and the leadership were well of aware of it - was that 90-95% of the Japanese population might have to be destroyed. Some US troops balked at conducting air raids over Japanese towns. There were real concerns that a significant number of US soldiers were going to refuse to do the necessary killing.

That is the plan that was halted by the dropping of two atomic bombs, which is why students of history often argue that those two bombs resulted in less death than the planned invasion would have.

And its a perfectly accurate argument. The invasion would have been a nightmare.

Certainly. The US was desperate avoid it, even if the Japanese weren't. However, we continually have a new generation coming up through the schools and thus it is important to ask these questions again and again. Without an understanding of the context the moral dilemmas can't be comprehended, much less debated and discussed.

Are you saying that if something is a legitimate military target then ANY means is acceptable to destroy that target?

There's a doctrine called proportionality. What this means is that the scale of destruction whould be gauged by the military necessity for destroying the target. If, for example, there is a sniper in a single building, then the task of killing him should be proportional to the military objective of killing him. Destroying the whole town would be inadmissable but destroying the whole building would probably be acceptable. It doesn't matter whether the building is a house, a church or a hospital, whether it is empty of full of civilians. If there is a sniper in there, then taking out said building is legitimate but destroying the whole town is not.

Of course, the question of where lines are drawn are where the arguments erupt. What justifies taking a single human life? What justifies destroying a building? What justifies bombing and entire city? These questions should NOT be easy to answer, these moral questions should require thought. War quickly becomes a matter of choosing the lesser of two evils.

Now, we can apply this to Dresden (and to every other town we flattened in World War Two). It's military industries are undoubtedly a viable target. It's railway communications (which were peculiarly essential in Dresden's case) were undoubtedly a military target, its command structures were undoubtedly military targets. So destroying them was undoubtedly legitimate. What was proportional? Well, the only means we had to get at them were heavy bombers, the accuracy and payload of heavy bombers was such that they could not strike at said targets accurately enough to destroy them, the only way to erase them was to burn down the whole damned town. It was the militarily appropiate and legitimate response and that's that. We literally had no lesser option.

I am inclined to agree with you, but as I said, we should ask these questions over and over. That's part of the reason I stir the pot in these threads - I want people to THINK.

There's bombing a town and then there is incinerating it - Dresden stuck in the mind not because it was a legitimate target for bombing that was in fact bombed (lots of towns got bombed) but because of the density of the bombs dropped and just how total the destruction was.

Actually. Dresden was a long way from the top of the heap on those criteria. It stuck in the mind because it was the last large city that got turned into a bonfire and because it was a city that was familiar to people. Say "Essen" and people think of Krupps and steel and artillery. Say "Dresden" and people thought of china statuettes and a toursit destination. As teh advertising people say, all a matter of image.

And likewise people dwell on the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombings as if they were the ultimate evil, but ignore the Toykro raid of March 1945. This, to my mind, is an argument for more thorough teaching of history but I'm not holding my breath, waiting for it to happen. Meanwhile, the well-known battles and bombings still provide fodder for moral debate, after which you can say "by the way - this over here was even worse"

As to your first comment, these is a difference between bombing a town and burning it down. Burning it down works. We found out quite early that cities are destroyed by fire, not explosions, that pure bombing does risibly small amounts of damage. Fire on the other hand devastates the target areas. It's more cost-effective to burn targets down. Nuclear weapons are essentially giant incendiaries, we rely on fire for their primary effects.

And yet we have sunk hundreds of millions of dollars into weapons that target more and more precisely. The reality is (as always) that you need the right tool for the right job. There are situations that, arguably, do require an entire city to burn. There are other situations where, if one only could target one person or one building, that would be preferable. I prefer a world in which the destruction can be tailored to what is truly necessary, rather than based on what tools are available.

The US military has also tried to develop non-lethal means of defeating people - think what that could mean IF you had to invade and area with a hostile civilian populace, or merely pass through such an area.

The Japanese were seriously discussing arming the populace with bamboo spears. Peasants, old men, women, and children armed with pointy sticks against fully equipped Marines staging a D-Day style invasion is... pathetic. That's not what is normally considered a "military force". No doubt there would have been some resistance with actual weapons in some places but the end result would have been a slaughter, the Japanese caught between their burning homes and the armed men storming the beaches.

I know. Doesn't matter, if they fight they die. If they don't, they don't. If using civilians as soldiers (no matter how ineffective they are) results in teh deaths of other civilians, the responsibility lies with the Japanese, not us. They broke the rules, they pay the price. SEP.

The problem is the psychological damage that does to OUR troops - Americans don't react well to gunning down 8 year olds, even if said 8 year olds are carrying spears and intending to kill them.

That was the problem with Japan, from our viewpoint - they genuinely preferred death to surrender. They would rather die in battle than surrender, and if they were captured that had that irritating tendency to suicide - preferably while taking some of us with them. It scared the fucking shit out of the average GI.

Not to mention the reaction of the people back home who don't (and often can't) understand the situation on the ground at the front.

[Wanderer]

*sigh* Again, you deliberately ignore the processes involved. You didn't join the SS expecting a picnic. Von Braun, in contrast, literally woke up to find that Himmler had hijacked the project for the Army. Equally, there is a huge difference between "Hans, kill this man" and what von Braun did...or rather didn't do, because both you and Wanderer have shown no evidence he actually hurt prisoners, either himself or through orders. What he didn't do was put in a protest - so he's comparable to men like Barbie, who deliberately (often on their own initiative) ensured the deaths of thousands? Absurd.

Since you rejected two other sources:

Time

For reasons best known to von Braun, who held the rank of colonel in the dreaded Nazi SS, the prisoners were ordered to turn their backs whenever he came into view. Those caught stealing glances at him were hung. One survivor recalled that von Braun, after inspecting a rocket component, charged, "That is clear sabotage." His unquestioned judgment resulted in eleven men being hanged on the spot. Says Gehrels, "von Braun was directly involved in hangings."

Hangings were commonplace, and Dora inmates remember von Braun arriving in the morning with an unidentified woman, having to step between bodies of dead prisoners and under others still hanging from a crane. These were not ordinary hangings, Gehrels says, "not hanging that breaks the neck of the prisoner, but they were slowly choked to death with a kind of baling wire around their neck."

Again what more do you want signed depositions from prisoners.

Wait fuck that, one must not file proper paperwork for one to be part of a crime. Von Braun was a high ranking manager and the workers were under his supervision, any crimes done by his men against the workers are his crimes as well.

[Broomstick]

Again, he did not make the decision to use slave labour. He had no control over its use.

Really? The same applies to a KZ guard, as I said. And in the "good Nazi guard" thread it was shown that being an executioner is not the moral course of action. As for legalism, the NMT and subsequent trials did not exempt people from responsibility even if they "did not make decisions' but merely executed them.

There is also a matter of how one adapted to the system - if it could be shown Von Braun attempted to ease suffering, even if he couldn't end it, that might mitigate his guilt. For example, (as I mentioned before) if there was evidence he sought more reasonable work/rest hours, or asked for better food for workers that would be in his favor but as far as I know he never asked for this. And seriously, I don't see where saying "Hey, I think we might get more work out of these slaves if we fed them a little more" would get him shot. That was the least he could do - and he did not do it, did he?

Again - Oscar Schindler used children as slave labor, but that is mitigated by the fact that if he hadn't they would have been killed outright and he strove to provide his slaves with adequate food, clothing, and shelter. He enabled them to survive. Did Von Bruan enable anyone's survival, or did he just decide it wasn't his problem? Or did he in any way add to their suffering?

... if every Nazi was executed it would have left Germany pretty much without sufficient able-bodied, educated, and skilled adults to run the country.

What's with the silly B&W fallacies? I never said "kill all Nazis". I said "bring to justice those guilty of war crimes". Do you know that not all the judged war criminals got death? Many got prison sentences. For example Doenitz. A war criminal, 10 years of prison. Etc.

Yes. I know that. Remarkably enough, some people were even acquitted.

Even so - executing everyone involved in executions - not just Nazis but thousands of others as well - would have been another bloodbath. There are, no doubt, some people who would argue that would have been for the best. It would make for an interesting debate.

I wasn't referring merely to those arrested (although that was a staggering number in and of itself) but rather everyone who was actually guilty of participating in the various genocides of WWII, or the many war crimes of WWII.

You know, the prosecution does not always mean death. Also, speaking about prosecuting everyone NOT arrested is meaningless - people who can't be arrested due to their running away or somehting, hiding, etc. are out of the question. The question is the ability to prosecute arrested criminals. Those who are not arrested for whatever reason are unreachable by justice anyway.

Really? Didn't the Israelis have a cottage industry in hunting such people down and assassinating them for a few decades?

Debating the morality of that would be interesting, too.

What about Japan? They were doing a nice job of slaughtering, too.

Well, they are Germany's spiritual brothers and Aryans of the east and all that. But they never came to a determination to wipe out - physically annihilate "subhuman" nations completely, which for Germany was a matter of industrialized policy.

It is indisputable that the Germans were planning to exterminate certain groups, but others they intended to reserve for continued slave labor. Of course, that doesn't make it any better.

They were very efficient (they were Germans, after all) but that level of atrocity is something EVERYONE is capable of.

The Germans differ from others, because they openly set the physicall annihilation of large, continent-spawning nations as a goal.

But while the Germans were the only ones in the 20th Century who actually attempted that, every nation/people have the capacity for that level of evil. Are there not people today who wish the total annihilation of the nation of Israel? Doesn't 'ethnic cleansing" occur? Are there not examples in history of one people annihilating or attempting to annihilate another? The Germans were remarkable for their efficiency, not for their goal.

We have had plenty of instances since then prove this out: the Killing Fields of Cambodia. Sudan. Darfur. Saddam Hussein gassing Kurdish villages.

Cambodia is the only thing that comes even remotely close to the speed and efficiency of the Nazis. Needless to say, Cambodia is not as efficient and speedy - it took the Khmer Rouge more years than the Nazis to kill fewer people. But an intensity that is comparable, indeed, and in relative population scale as well.

And that is my point - Nazi Germany was NOT unique. Thanks goodness such things are rare. Thank goodness most throughout history who desired such a thing were incapable of carrying it out.

Realistically, it was the annihilation of European Jews

Wait, so Slavs, including Yugoslavs and Poles, are not people? Or they were not slaughtered on a scale quite the same as the Jews were, as part of the GeneralPlan Ost?

Oh, don't be an idiot - of course Slavs are people, too. You can't even argue the Jews were the first group to be exterminated - that was the disabled Germans.

Most estimates I've seen put the total deaths at 6 million Jews and 6 million for all others in the concentration camps. That does not diminish the very real suffering of the Slavs, but the Jews were hit worse than they were. It is also well documented that after the Jews were gone the next in line would be the Poles - which makes Polish participation in Jewish slaughter horrifically ironic, doesn't it? Yes, the Germans had a whole sequence of exterminations planned, and fully planned to exploit the hate of one group for another. First, get the Poles to acquiesce to the building of death camps to get rid of the "filthy Jew", then, after the Jews were gone, kill the Poles in those same camps. More German efficiency.

Even so - there were plenty of Slavs who had emigrated to North and South America. It's a lot harder to completely wipe out a large ethnic group than it used to be. The Germans sought to erase these groups from history. That was not possible, although they certainly could (and did) slaughter millions of people.

And even if you can make the argument the war was just, that the Nazis were that evil, can you still excuse the atrocities done in the name of winning that war? Does winning a just war justify the use of immoral means to achieve that end?

Actually, yes, since I'm an utilitarian. If far minor suffering was used to prevent greater suffering (i'm sure you understand that the total destruction of Eastern European population, which was not far down the road, was far greater suffering, in scale, than Germany's demise which had a PATHETIC civilian death toll, RIDICULOUS and absolutely fucking MERCIFUL compared to what Germany itself did to the nations it INTENDED to destroy, let me fucking explain once again, INTENDED TO KILL, whereas the Allies DID NOT intend to UTTERLY MURDER EVERY GERMAN).

I didn't ask if what happened was justified - I asked if ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING would be justified. If the Allies had exterminated every German to stop the war would that have been justifiable, since the number of dead Germans would be less than the number of dead had Germany succeeded?

That was the potential problem facing the US in Asia during WWII - would we have to essentially annihilate the entire Japanese population to end the war? The Germans stopped fighting and surrendered long before it got to that point - what if the Japanese did not? And if they did not stop fighting and we had to kill 999 out of 1000 - how could we say that we weren't as evil as the Nazis? Fortunately, we did not have to do that to Japan, we "only" had to drop a couple nukes on them.

Tell, were Stalin's purges less evil than what the Nazi's did?

They had a lesser scale and did not have the goal of totally annihilating the nations' entire population, but imprison some and scare the others. Therefore, utilitarianism says, they were less evil.

But how many millions died because of him? Do you count absolute numbers, relative numbers, or intentions and motivations?

There are many who regard Stalin every bit as evil as Hitler and his gang, and many who opposed our alliance with him during WWII, even if we all had a common enemy. There was even a contingent early in the war that thought we should throw in with Germany against Stalin, just to give you an idea of how very different he is viewed here.

I am sorry if it upsets you but the US actually has a history of pardoning the other side in a war.

Yes it upsets me. Those people should have nothing but death, and that's the end of story.

Well, OK, it upsets you. The US and Russia had very different views of the war, and still have very different outlooks upon it. The Americans can be totally ruthless and utter bastards while fighting a war, but we tend to be a lot more tolerant and forgiving afterwards than most nations.

I take it your answer is "no".

Correct. And since you apparently hold the same position, failing to find the reasons for such behaviour, it's something we agree on.

I wouldn't say never -- but it would be EXTREMELY unlikely that a situation would arise where something like a Nazi war criminal would be so valuable that we could justify keeping him alive. Even if we could, I'd argue for lifetime imprisonment of some sort. One good act does not make up for a hundred thousand instances of evil.

[Stuart]

You are incorrect. Machinery even today is useless without people, pre-computer age it was even more true. It was not enough to simply destroy the machines - you have to destroy the people, too, or they will repair and rebuild - even if those people running the factories are schoolchildren. Japan blurred the line between civilian and military, and the Japanese population paid a heavy, heavy price for it. The people WERE targets, not just buildings and machines.

This was a greta debate in WW2 with the British and Americans on different sides The British took your argument, that the factory workers were also part of the industrial machine and were also therefore justifiable targets. Hence, the bombing of German cities and the way it was organized. In that debate, the United States position was that the workers were only legitimate targets as longa s they were at their factory benches; once away from those benches they were not legitimate targets. Over Germany, the British viewpoint held sway but it didn't over Japan.

In a nutshell, the American argument was that military industral machine contained facilities plus people and take away one of the two and the system stops. We chose to target facilities not people, We still do by the way; when planning startegic strikes (certainly up to 1998, it was very explicit that we did not target people per se). The British viewpoint was that the industrial machine contained both people and machines so both should be taken away to be sure the machine stopped.

Yes, and they were ignored. It wasn't that the populace didn't believe they would be bombed, it's that the Japanese did not flee battle.

Irrelevent, the point is we dropped them. We wouldn't have done if they were primary targets.

The problem was that in 1945 it looked like the whole damn population from toddlers on up was going to fight - invading Japan was going to come awful damn close to total extermination because the two things we had learned were 1) the Japanese do not fear death and 2) the Japanese do not surrender.

Hence the growing preference for blockade and bombardment over direct invasion. Don't overstate the Japanese by the way, when tehy did fold, they folded very hard.

I have heard it said that the atomic bombings were so horrific that the living envied the dead - I don't know if that's really true or not,

Nah, it's a quote from a mid-1950s anti-nuclear protester (may be Bertrand Russell). Its sometimes attributed to Nikita Khruschev but that's been debunked.

The Japanese had more stomach for massacre than the US did, and that's a bad thing to confront when you're planning an invasion.

That essentially was Japanese strategy, hang on and hope the US goyt sick of the killing, Trouble for them is that we're so good at it.

Yes - in Europe such centers of military industry could be eliminated yet still leave villages and farms intact. This could not be done in Japan. The subjugation of Japan meant the destruction of just about every village and city in the whole country, and the destruction of virtually every center of agriculture. It's all very fine to speak of military necessity but the reality - and the leadership were well of aware of it - was that 90-95% of the Japanese population might have to be destroyed. Some US troops balked at conducting air raids over Japanese towns. There were real concerns that a significant number of US soldiers were going to refuse to do the necessary killing.

Not to my knowledge; the Japanese were not popular in 1945. I know of no cases of US pilots refusing to take part it bombing raids. I do knopw that there were numerous bomber pilots who expressed severe reservations about going in low with incendiaries but they were concerned that they'd be mown down by Japanese defenses.

And yet we have sunk hundreds of millions of dollars into weapons that target more and more precisely. The reality is (as always) that you need the right tool for the right job. There are situations that, arguably, do require an entire city to burn. There are other situations where, if one only could target one person or one building, that would be preferable. I prefer a world in which the destruction can be tailored to what is truly necessary, rather than based on what tools are available.

Never going to happen. In the final analysis it always come sdown to what the best tool in the available toolkit for the job is. If we have a big area target, PGMs are not suitable, area weapons are. The further it is away, the less accurate the weapons we use to hit it. That won't change.

[K. A. Pital]

Applying it to a KZ guard is different, because as you have persistently and dishonestly ignored, there is a huge difference between the ways in which a KZ guard becomes a KZ guard and the way in which von Braun suddenly found himself involved.

So? It is not the process through which one becomes a war crime accomplice that matters, but the crime.

von Braun didn't hurt people and didn't have the individual power to determine that.

Really?

A member of the Dutch resistance during World War II, Gehrels readily acknowledges von Braun's contributions to the world of science, but is all too aware of the little-known dark side of both him and his brother Magnus.
[...]
One survivor recalled that von Braun, after inspecting a rocket component, charged, "That is clear sabotage." His unquestioned judgment resulted in eleven men being hanged on the spot. Says Gehrels, "von Braun was directly involved in hangings."

Hangings were commonplace, and Dora inmates remember von Braun arriving in the morning with an unidentified woman, having to step between bodies of dead prisoners and under others still hanging from a crane.

What exactly is not clear to you here? How many times should we punch down the fact that by working in a huge death camp you CAN'T absolve yourself of responsbility?

Which completely ignores my point, that Braun's protest would have done fuck all

No, that "point" is a complete fucking non-issue - it doesn't matter whether Braun would've saved prisoners or not. It does matter if you are complicit or not.

DO not use the moron logic here, or pretend to claim some sort of argument against Braun's unquestionable criminality.

Here's a thought for you: a gang is about to kill a man. Who will be complicit? All who were present and took part in the murder. Who will not? The one who walks away. Yes, he won't save the man from death. But he will not be a criminal. Is that clear?

...you implicate a huge number of Germans in war crimes.

Yes, so I do.

They were endemic in the East - you couldn't have served there, in either the SS or the Wehrmacht, without seeing them, even if you didn't actually do them.

The SS was judged criminal in entirety. The Werhmacht has only it's top trialled, but nonetheless, many war criminals were trialled out of it's millions of servants.

Anyone in the kind of middle-management position occupied by von Braun would have seen it.

No. Not every coffee shop used slaves. Factories did though, and yes, factory managers and the like should have been trialled, and many were. Not always "executed", as I said, but prison terms did apply.

No German soldier, SS or otherwise, could, as I explain above. But the SS was a big organisation - though this ignores that KZ guards did not find themselves there by accident.

This did not serve as a defence in the NMTs and looks pathetic as a defense now. "Oh, he didn't really have a choice" - tough fucking luck. There's always the choice to run away under the risk of death. If you don't, fuck you.

*sigh* Again, you deliberately ignore the processes involved.

Because they are irrelevant to prosecution of a person who acted in war crimes.

Equally, there is a huge difference between "Hans, kill this man" and what von Braun did...or rather didn't do, because both you and Wanderer have shown no evidence he actually hurt prisoners, either himself or through orders.

No, the evidence was presented - it's just that you completely fail to admit it.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

You are incorrect. Machinery even today is useless without people, pre-computer age it was even more true. It was not enough to simply destroy the machines - you have to destroy the people, too, or they will repair and rebuild - even if those people running the factories are schoolchildren.

Broomstick, a lot of machine tools, today and in the past, take a lot of effort to replace given the complexity and precision. Destroying vital machine tools might be enough to set back by months if not years.

[K. A. Pital]

Or did he in any way add to their suffering?

He participated in executing prisoners. Personally. This is what both you and thejester fail to admit even after presented with evidence multiple times.

There are, no doubt, some people who would argue that would have been for the best. It would make for an interesting debate.

Well, why not?

Really? Didn't the Israelis have a cottage industry in hunting such people down and assassinating them for a few decades?

Yes. But catching people is a different process from trialling them. Yes, it's also important because many got away, but like I said, not just Israelis but many other nations still trial Nazi criminals in case such are found.

But while the Germans were the only ones in the 20th Century who actually attempted that, every nation/people have the capacity for that level of evil.

Having the capacity and actually getting a very good shot at the deed are two different things. And Israel is far smaller than the destruction of East European population in entierty, so the goal is also remarkable.

Most estimates I've seen put the total deaths at 6 million Jews and 6 million for all others in the concentration camps. That does not diminish the very real suffering of the Slavs, but the Jews were hit worse than they were.

Look:
General Plan Ost course of action, in case some don't know.
Since most of the Slavic people were not considered fit for "Germanization", their territories had to be resettled with millions of Germans and North Europeans.

The GPO had the goals of:
- destruction or expulsion of 80-85% Polish
- destruction of expulsion of 50-75% Czech
- destruction of 50-60% Russians in the European part of the USSR, expulsion of 15-25% to the East
- destruction of 30-50% of Ukrainians and Belorussians

Ultimately, in just three (3!) years before war's end, the GPO (accepted in 1942 and put to action) resulted in impressive achievments - over 30 million Slavic civilians were destroyed in Eastern Europe. Nations: Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Poles, Czech, Slovak, Serb, Croat, Bosniak.

Over 20 million people murdered from USSR, including over a million POWs, over 17 million civilians and over 8 million military men, which is over 10% of the population.

Over 6 million people murdered in Poland, which is over 17% of the population.

Over 2 million people murdered in Yugoslavia, which is over 10% of the population.

And 6 million Jews were murdered as we all know. The GPO and "Endlosung" were tightly connected, and the GPO as a general plan of killing the Untermenshen included full support of the "Endlosung", or the slaughter of all Jews in Eastern Europe.

Explain to me how this is "not unique"? In scale, it is unique. In scope, it is unique. In the openness of it's goals, it is unique. In speed and tempo, it is unique. In results, it is also unique.

Your failure is that you only see the death toll of the concentration camps - that is wrong. In the East, you often did not need to have a KZ. You just killed a city with all it's population inside and feel cool about that, or starve a multimilllion megapolis.

If the Allies had exterminated every German to stop the war would that have been justifiable, since the number of dead Germans would be less than the number of dead had Germany succeeded?

That is wrong. Destroying 80 million Germans in the Reich would've been a greater crime than Germany's deeds.

But how many millions died because of him? Do you count absolute numbers, relative numbers, or intentions and motivations?

A few millions, and in the course of over 20 years. Of course I count absolute numbers, and relative ones, as well as intent - brutally subjugating a population under dictatorship, but one which is still oriented at the progress and industrialization of the nation (which, incidentally, greatly increase the general Russian's life expectancy and good supplies), is a little different from setting to wipe said population out completely.

There was even a contingent early in the war that thought we should throw in with Germany against Stalin, just to give you an idea of how very different he is viewed here.

Yeah, but that's because some of the people in your nation failed to see the difference, and what Germany planned to do and did, since you were not on the ground. Do you think most of USSR just banded together to defend Stalin, or to actually protect all thos nations from what could be only described as total annihilation?

[Broomstick]

The problem was that in 1945 it looked like the whole damn population from toddlers on up was going to fight - invading Japan was going to come awful damn close to total extermination because the two things we had learned were 1) the Japanese do not fear death and 2) the Japanese do not surrender.

Hence the growing preference for blockade and bombardment over direct invasion. Don't overstate the Japanese by the way, when tehy did fold, they folded very hard.

No, they didn't. There were many Japanese still willing to fight after the atomic bombings, including some who were present at the cities when they were bombed. During the occupation there were incidents involving Japanese who wanted to continue to fight back, who sabotaged things, or who passively resisted. What prevented a low-intensity decades long on-going friction was the Emporer's command to cooperate and the obedience that the Japanese were conditioned to from infancy.

Yes - in Europe such centers of military industry could be eliminated yet still leave villages and farms intact. This could not be done in Japan. The subjugation of Japan meant the destruction of just about every village and city in the whole country, and the destruction of virtually every center of agriculture. It's all very fine to speak of military necessity but the reality - and the leadership were well of aware of it - was that 90-95% of the Japanese population might have to be destroyed. Some US troops balked at conducting air raids over Japanese towns. There were real concerns that a significant number of US soldiers were going to refuse to do the necessary killing.

Not to my knowledge; the Japanese were not popular in 1945. I know of no cases of US pilots refusing to take part it bombing raids. I do knopw that there were numerous bomber pilots who expressed severe reservations about going in low with incendiaries but they were concerned that they'd be mown down by Japanese defenses.

I've spoken to men who were actually there in the war, both relatives of mine and others. They most certainly did question what they hell they were doing - if they later went on to obey orders that does not negate the questions. The men weren't stupid and they were well aware that in addition to military assets and soldiers they were also killing others. Sure, some didn't give a fuck about that. Some did.

And yet we have sunk hundreds of millions of dollars into weapons that target more and more precisely. The reality is (as always) that you need the right tool for the right job. There are situations that, arguably, do require an entire city to burn. There are other situations where, if one only could target one person or one building, that would be preferable. I prefer a world in which the destruction can be tailored to what is truly necessary, rather than based on what tools are available.

Never going to happen. In the final analysis it always come sdown to what the best tool in the available toolkit for the job is. If we have a big area target, PGMs are not suitable, area weapons are. The further it is away, the less accurate the weapons we use to hit it. That won't change.

The fact the world will never be ideal is not a valid excuse for not trying to improve the situation. The more tools and the better tools we have, the better job we do. You're argument that a need to target a large area negates my ideal is nonsense - of course you use an area weapon for a large area. And you use a more targeted weapon for a smaller target.

[Stuart]

No, they didn't. There were many Japanese still willing to fight after the atomic bombings, including some who were present at the cities when they were bombed. During the occupation there were incidents involving Japanese who wanted to continue to fight back, who sabotaged things, or who passively resisted. What prevented a low-intensity decades long on-going friction was the Emporer's command to cooperate and the obedience that the Japanese were conditioned to from infancy.

I suggest you check the records of Japanese PoWs. When Japanese prisoners were taken, they proved extremely cooperative - to the point where they volunteered to go out and persuade other Japanese to surrender. That's what's meant by collapsing hard.

I've spoken to men who were actually there in the war, both relatives of mine and others. They most certainly did question what they hell they were doing - if they later went on to obey orders that does not negate the questions. The men weren't stupid and they were well aware that in addition to military assets and soldiers they were also killing others. Sure, some didn't give a fuck about that. Some did.

I'm sorry but these long-after-the-time recolections aren't really worth very much. They're distorted by long periods of after-experience influences. The fact is that as far as I can determine, there were no cases of bomber crews refusing to fly missions on moral grounds and no cases of infantry units refusing to fight. If you have any actual documented cases, then I'll be interested to hear them.

The fact the world will never be ideal is not a valid excuse for not trying to improve the situation. The more tools and the better tools we have, the better job we do. You're argument that a need to target a large area negates my ideal is nonsense - of course you use an area weapon for a large area. And you use a more targeted weapon for a smaller target.

I think we're saying the same thing; there are specific tools for specific jobs and are used accordingly. Back in 1940s, the available toolkit was very much smaller and the number of options that much more limited,

[Broomstick]

No, they didn't. There were many Japanese still willing to fight after the atomic bombings, including some who were present at the cities when they were bombed. During the occupation there were incidents involving Japanese who wanted to continue to fight back, who sabotaged things, or who passively resisted. What prevented a low-intensity decades long on-going friction was the Emporer's command to cooperate and the obedience that the Japanese were conditioned to from infancy.

I suggest you check the records of Japanese PoWs. When Japanese prisoners were taken, they proved extremely cooperative - to the point where they volunteered to go out and persuade other Japanese to surrender. That's what's meant by collapsing hard.

But extremely few Japanese were taken as POW's - most preferred to either die in battle or kill themselves rather than surrender. Surrendering Japanese were not typical Japanese.

I've spoken to men who were actually there in the war, both relatives of mine and others. They most certainly did question what they hell they were doing - if they later went on to obey orders that does not negate the questions. The men weren't stupid and they were well aware that in addition to military assets and soldiers they were also killing others. Sure, some didn't give a fuck about that. Some did.

I'm sorry but these long-after-the-time recolections aren't really worth very much. They're distorted by long periods of after-experience influences.

And yet, memories of war are typically quite indelible - indelible to the point of causing mental illness or disability in some instances.

The fact is that as far as I can determine, there were no cases of bomber crews refusing to fly missions on moral grounds and no cases of infantry units refusing to fight. If you have any actual documented cases, then I'll be interested to hear them.

According to Lt. Fred Olivi, co-pilot of the plane for the Nagasaki bomb drop, the crews for the two atomic missions were given the option of refusing the mission without penalty. I don't know if any did or not (if this was a few years ago I'd ask him myself - he was a Chicago area pilot post-war - but he deceased now). The mere fact this was an option indicates that someone was considering the question.

It does not require an entire crew or an entire unit to refuse something to provide proof that questions were asked or considered in regards to who was targeted and/or attacked.

[Stuart]

But extremely few Japanese were taken as POW's - most preferred to either die in battle or kill themselves rather than surrender. Surrendering Japanese were not typical Japanese.

The number includes soldiers who were rendered unconscious and recovered consciousness in captivity. The pint is that when Japanese became prisoners they were very cooperative. Hence the fails hard comment.

And yet, memories of war are typically quite indelible - indelible to the point of causing mental illness or disability in some instances.

True; yet the point I made remains.

According to Lt. Fred Olivi, co-pilot of the plane for the Nagasaki bomb drop, the crews for the two atomic missions were given the option of refusing the mission without penalty. I don't know if any did or not (if this was a few years ago I'd ask him myself - he was a Chicago area pilot post-war - but he deceased now). The mere fact this was an option indicates that someone was considering the question.

Not necessarily.

It does not require an entire crew or an entire unit to refuse something to provide proof that questions were asked or considered in regards to who was targeted and/or attacked.

On the contrary, given your initial statement, that's precisely what it does require. I repeat, I can find no case of a bomber crew refusing a mission on moral grounds, nor can I find any reference to any concern about US troops refusing to take part in combat following an invasion of Japan.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

But extremely few Japanese were taken as POW's - most preferred to either die in battle or kill themselves rather than surrender. Surrendering Japanese were not typical Japanese.

I'm interested in what you meant "few". Most of the Japanese garrisons surrendered and had to be transported back to Japan when the surrender was announced.

[thejester]

Since you rejected two other sources:

Time

You have excelled yourself this time mate. First an article by a UFOlogist. Then the sales page of a book. Now a column that cites - wait for it - a book review, which in turn has no citations save for what the author says (it's in Nature, incidentally, 8/12/1994). Even better, the one specific accusation that emerges in both - that von Braun declared something had been sabotaged and 11 men were hanged - came to Gehlen through a conversation with someone who had had a conversation with someone else who had seen it. Amidst Gehrel's rant that von Braun should have been charged with prolonging the war, that the biography he was reviewing was 'Nazi propaganda', that von Braun had sworn a blood oath to Hitler (but dismissing his arrest as unimportant) and gruesome descriptions of what Dora was like...his claim is hard to take at face value.

Incidentally, the review makes no mention of people being executed for looking at von Braun.

Again what more do you want signed depositions from prisoners.

Yes, actually. I would like to see the primary sources rather than constant spin from vague secondary sources that get so many other facts wrong.

Wait fuck that, one must not file proper paperwork for one to be part of a crime. Von Braun was a high ranking manager and the workers were under his supervision, any crimes done by his men against the workers are his crimes as well.

If you want to establish that Von Braun was indeed the commander of the camp guards...go ahead, show the evidence. The singular theme of your and Stas' argument has been that Von Braun was a Nazi mastermind, without any evidence to back it up save your own dim perceptions.

[K. A. Pital]

Amidst Gehrel's rant that von Braun should have been charged with prolonging the war, that the biography he was reviewing was 'Nazi propaganda', that von Braun had sworn a blood oath to Hitler (but dismissing his arrest as unimportant) and gruesome descriptions of what Dora was like...his claim is hard to take at face value.

Gruesome descriptions of the reality of Mittelbau-Dora make it "hard to take" the claims that Braun oversaw or ordered execution of prisoners whom he routinely used for slave labour? Please tell me how that is not bizzare.

If you want to establish that Von Braun was indeed the commander of the camp guards...go ahead, show the evidence.

Not just guards. Camp personnel with managerial duties were guilty. And please. Mittelbau-Dora was a horrid extermination facility, and the Mittelwerk factory was little better. Even if Braun did not administer Mittelbau-Dora itself, he did administer the Mittelwerk factory, which itself was simply horrid by all accounts of it, and described as a "hellish place" by those who reviewed it post-capture.

To claim that peopl who hold managerial positions at Mittelwerk can be exempt from criminal liability is just ridiculous.

Are Krupp's managers who worked people to death in Krupp facilities "exempt" too? They were not KZ guards after all!

[thejester]

So? It is not the process through which one becomes a war crime accomplice that matters, but the crime.

And yet you give an example where someone walking away is not implicated (incidentally in the Australian legal system I'm pretty sure they would be, but anyway). To use your example, Braun stood there and watched and did nothing. As I said at the start, that makes him a moral coward - but then, I fail to see the difference in cowardice between someone who stands there and watches and someone who walks away and fails to do anything.

What exactly is not clear to you here? How many times should we punch down the fact that by working in a huge death camp you CAN'T absolve yourself of responsbility?

Maybe if you did your own leg work and actually checked the credibility of the sources instead of mindlessly parroting them, I'd find your argument compelling. von Braun was an onlooker. Part of the armaments process, not the one that enslaved thousands and sent them to their doom.

No, that "point" is a complete fucking non-issue - it doesn't matter whether Braun would've saved prisoners or not. It does matter if you are complicit or not.

And he is no more complicit than someone who walks away - and yes, it is an issue.

DO not use the moron logic here, or pretend to claim some sort of argument against Braun's unquestionable criminality.

Here's a thought for you: a gang is about to kill a man. Who will be complicit? All who were present and took part in the murder. Who will not? The one who walks away. Yes, he won't save the man from death. But he will not be a criminal. Is that clear?

No, it's exceedingly retarded, because you've created a scenario in which there are two types of people - those that beat the man to death or those that walk away. Neither fits Braun accurately - he certainly did not directly kill people, nor did he walk away. He simply stood there and did nothing about the suffering he witnessed. Does it make him a moral coward? Sure, especially his postwar efforts to cover it up.

Yes, so I do.

So how can you complain about a black and white fallacy?

The SS was judged criminal in entirety. The Werhmacht has only it's top trialled, but nonetheless, many war criminals were trialled out of it's millions of servants.

And absolute handful in comparison to those who served.

No. Not every coffee shop used slaves. Factories did though, and yes, factory managers and the like should have been trialled, and many were. Not always "executed", as I said, but prison terms did apply.

Then we could well be in agreement. But that is a far cry from the OP's description of von Braun as a mass murderer who deserved to swing, or your description of him as a Nazi slavemaster.

This did not serve as a defence in the NMTs and looks pathetic as a defense now. "Oh, he didn't really have a choice" - tough fucking luck. There's always the choice to run away under the risk of death. If you don't, fuck you.

Apart from the hilarity of a keyboard warrior spouting about how he would have been so big and brave in the same situation...you've managed to completely twist my point. My whole original argument was that guys in the SS did have a fucking choice. They were not conscripted into the Einsatzgruppen. They did not have to deport Jews, or order the destruction of entire villages. They had far more agency than von Braun - a technocrat who found himself commanded by nutjobs who approved the use of slave labour and did not kill him purely because of his technical skill.

No, the evidence was presented - it's just that you completely fail to admit it.

No, false evidence has been presented and you've just accepted it rather than checking it like you should.

[thejester]

Gruesome descriptions of the reality of Mittelbau-Dora make it "hard to take" the claims that Braun oversaw or ordered execution of prisoners whom he routinely used for slave labour? Please tell me how that is not bizzare.

Because he implies that it was all von Braun's fault and yet provides no evidence to back this up.

Not just guards. Camp personnel with managerial duties were guilty. And please. Mittelbau-Dora was a horrid extermination facility, and the Mittelwerk factory was little better. Even if Braun did not administer Mittelbau-Dora itself, he did administer the Mittelwerk factory, which itself was simply horrid by all accounts of it, and described as a "hellish place" by those who reviewed it post-capture.

Evidence? He visited it, hardly the action of a man who runs the place. Everything I've seen points to Kammel being the overall head of the facility and Rudolph being the head of V2 production.

To claim that peopl who hold managerial positions at Mittelwerk can be exempt from criminal liability is just ridiculous.

Are Krupp's managers who worked people to death in Krupp facilities "exempt" too? They were not KZ guards after all!

Von Braun was, as far as I am aware, technical director of the A4/V2 program throughout. He did not hold a managerial position at Mittelwerk, so he's not comparable.

[K. A. Pital]

I fail to see the difference in cowardice between someone who stands there and watches and someone who walks away and fails to do anything

Yeah. You fail to see a difference. Remaining an acting SS-officer is not just "standing there", it's being part of a criminal group which actively perpetrates a crime right there and then.

von Braun was an onlooker. Part of the armaments process, not the one that enslaved thousands and sent them to their doom.

Yeah. Just an onlooker. The president of the Reichsbank never personally sent anyone to their deaths, but he was an accomplice in the Holocaust, as part of a crime group, that was enough.

Neither fits Braun accurately

So fucking WHAT? The people who are "standing there" are still fulfilling their duties as part of a CRIMINIAL FUCKING GROUP.

You know, I have a better comparison. A gang does robbery and murder. One gang member remains standing at the doors and watching out. He is not directly taking part in the murder of the housekeeper.

Guess what, he's complicit in a GROUP MURDER. He remains an active gang member during a crime.

And absolute handful in comparison to those who served.

If it were admiteed a criminal ogranizatin like the SS, they would have to be trialled in far larger numbers for merely being a criminal accomplice.

But von Braun was an accomplice of an ADMITTED criminal organization, the SS, at a massive crime site where th SS perpetrated said crime, and he led a project FOR THE FUCKING SS.

Stop pretending Braun is just an 'onlooker'.

But that is a far cry from the OP's description of von Braun as a mass murderer who deserved to swing, or your description of him as a Nazi slavemaster.

I said he's a criminal and a slavemaster. A "slavemaster" is a person who commands slaves, and Braun was one of those. He also was a Nazi. So "Nazi slavemaster" applied to him is very correct.

They had far more agency than von Braun - a technocrat who found himself commanded by nutjobs who approved the use of slave labour and did not kill him purely because of his technical skill.

Why did some rank military commanders get bad deals? After all, they just executed Hitler's orders and had no authority NOT TO.

Apart from the hilarity of a keyboard warrior spouting about how he would have been so big and brave in the same situation...

No, idiot, I'm not saying I would've been "big and brave" in the same situation, and I know fuck more than you about it, "keyboard warrior', since I'm the one who IS living in an autocratic nation. But I wont' be surprised if I get shot for being a Nazi accomplice, were I in VB's position (and I know I'd likely become coerced into being a criminal accomplice like he was). Somehow that is hard to grasp for you.

No, false evidence has been presented

Is this also false?

SS Major von Braun made at least one "official visit of inspection" to Dora in 1944 and participated in a Nazi administrative meeting at Mittelwerk to discuss bringing in a thousand French civilians as slave laborers; over 700 of them later died there. Moreover, in a letter to Mittelwerk's production manager, von Braun tells how he himself went to the notorious Buchenwald camp to arrange for the transport of more prisoners to Mittelwerk.

I'd look to here as well:
Mittelwerk meetings

Where Braun ordered more slaves.

Now, really, how is Braun uncomplicit, as he held a managerial position at a slave facility? And saying that he managed the V-2 program, means he also managed the slave labour traffic requirements to Mittelwerk facilities.

He did administer the program, and with it, all the slave labour use as well.

[thejester]

Look, Stas, I'm not saying von Braun was some kind of saint. He should have served jail time, in line with the kind of sentence Speer got. But there remains a vast gap between what was described in the OP - as the overseer of the whole program and thus responsible for tens of thousands of deaths - and his actual position and what he actually did. The last link you gave is the only time he's described as directly having anything to do with the movement of slave labour, and even then he seemed to be along purely to pick people with the necessary technical expertise. This is the image that emerges again and again - the technocrat who has made a faustian bargain to achieve his dream. The man you're painting a picture of much more closely fits Arthur Rudolph, who was quite clearly:

- Responsible for approving (even championing), on the engineering side of the project, the use of slave labour;
- The management/usage of slave labour in Mittlewerk itself;
- Day to day interaction in Mittlewerk.

He probably should have been hanged given that unlike von Braun he actually seemed to be a Nazi, rather than a bandwagoner, having joined the party in '31.

The reality is von Braun was a technocrat. He accepted the use of slave labour and contrary to his (early) post war position he was definitely under no illusions as to what happened in Mittlewerk. But the actual decision was not his, he was in charge of neither the overall complex or the factory itself, and he could not change things. Did he go unpunished? Yes. Does the above description make him a 'Nazi slavemaster', or directly responsible for tens of thousands of deaths? I don't think so.

[K. A. Pital]

Okay, thejester, I'm also not saying Braun is personally, directly and uniquely responsible for the slave deaths and executions - he only gets the guilt by collective action (if it's a given he never participated and ordered an execution).

I also agree that Braun's punishment should've been along Speer's or Walther Funk's lines, not execution, while of course the likes of Arthur Rudoplh should've been executed probably.

I also agree that he's not a mastermind of slavery in Mittelwerk, but he did administrate the construction affairs, so he did command slaves.

[Broomstick]

And yet, memories of war are typically quite indelible - indelible to the point of causing mental illness or disability in some instances.

True; yet the point I made remains.

And yet, not all memory is faulty.

According to Lt. Fred Olivi, co-pilot of the plane for the Nagasaki bomb drop, the crews for the two atomic missions were given the option of refusing the mission without penalty. I don't know if any did or not (if this was a few years ago I'd ask him myself - he was a Chicago area pilot post-war - but he deceased now). The mere fact this was an option indicates that someone was considering the question.

Not necessarily.

It does not require an entire crew or an entire unit to refuse something to provide proof that questions were asked or considered in regards to who was targeted and/or attacked.

On the contrary, given your initial statement, that's precisely what it does require. I repeat, I can find no case of a bomber crew refusing a mission on moral grounds, nor can I find any reference to any concern about US troops refusing to take part in combat following an invasion of Japan.

I see - you want evidence of a mutiny. But if a mission asks for volunteers those who would balk at the mission are screened out beforehand - and some missions are such that this screening must be done. I fail to see why you don't understand that.

It seems to me that you have a very sanitized view of war. Although the pilots of bombers didn't see the results of their work up close the men on the ground certainly did. It really does a disservice to people in uniform to think that they don't consider and don't worry about bystanders. It would take one cold motherfucker to NOT be bothered by a dead baby lying a gutter no matter how unavoidable the circumstance, and in WWII there were plenty of those.

Prattle on all you want about "necessity" and "military targets" - no one involved in the destruction of cities in WWII had any illusions about the fact they were wiping out civilians as well as the military, the innocent along with the guilty, and sometimes even their own POW's (one of the accounts of the firebombing of Dresden from the ground was from a surviving American who was being held in the city when it burned). If cold, hard logic leads men to fight on anyway that in no way disproves my point.

Atomic bombs in WWII are questionable in part because they are NOT designed to take out military targets but to destroy entire cities. They are indiscriminate weapons. As it happens, the US was in a situation where killing a few hundred thousand could prevent the death of millions and on utilitarian grounds that was justifiable. That situation is pretty damn rare.

But, as interesting as this line of discussion is, it's straying far off the topic of the OP, which is Von Braun.

[Darth Wong]

There's an element of self-deception in arguments for bombing populated areas. People dance around the fact that the civilian population is basically considered a military target. They tell themselves that they're not, and they're just in the way of "legitimate" military targets, but from a purely military standpoint, any part of the enemy's war machine is a legitimate target, and that includes industry, which is entirely staffed by civilians.

The problem is that we have spent a great deal of time telling ourselves that we're the "good guys", and we don't do things like that. So instead of admitting that we simply decided the enemy civilians were part of his military-industrial complex and therefore should be destroyed in order to degrade his abilities, we tell ourselves empty platitudes like "we never intended to hit civilians, we just wanted to hit military targets", as if the industrial workforce of an enemy is not a military target.

At one time, civilians were considered off-limits even if they were part of the enemy's industrial complex. However, once we decided that the industrial complex was a legitimate military target, civilians became targets too. We just don't want to admit it to ourselves because we spend so much time self-consciously wrapping ourselves in the robes of righteousness.

As for Von Braun, I think that people without experience in actual engineering tend to overstate the importance of "star" individuals. Any engineering project of significant scope is a team operation, and the team simply won't work if the guy at the top is the only one who knows what the hell is going on. Usually, a team leader isn't even the technically smartest guy in the team; he's just the best organizer. Given the size of these huge rocketry research programs, I have a hard time believing that any such individual was critical to the success of the program, regardless of whether he supervised slave labour.

[Thanas]

Regarding the topic of refusing to take part in atrocities and the consequences thereof, it should be noted that the German Wehrmacht routinely did not punish soldiers or officers for refusing to take part in atrocities.