Beech Tree News Network

A few months ago, I heard a story on NPR about the modern-day German military.  It referenced an article by Erin Blakemore, written in 2017 (updated in 2019), posted on the website history.com.  In the article, Blakemore states, “Military disobedience is actually baked into the German Bundeswehr, or armed forces.  And the reasons why can be found in the country’s sinister past.”  The German military manual states if a direct military order “…denies human dignity to the armed forces member or the order’s target, it must not be obeyed.”

               In order to understand why this directive is stated in Germany’s military manual, you must travel back to the year 1946, to Nuremburg, Germany, site of the Nuremburg Trials.  The trials sought to hold the Nazi leaders, whose atrocities shocked the rest of civilization, to accountability for their crimes.

               According to the site facinghistory.org, the tribunal consisted of representatives from the US, England, France and the Soviet Union.  The defendants on trial included top military leaders, high ranking SS officers, and leaders of Einsate Gruppen (mobile killing units).  Also included were key officials in Heinrich Himmler’s central office, which supervised the concentration camps and extermination program in which millions of Jews were systematically murdered.

               The charges leveled against the defendants, who were represented by legal counsel, fell under four categories:

               1. Waging aggressive war

               2. War crimes

               3. Crimes against humanity

               4. Conspiring to commit murder

With their leader, Adolf Hitler, dead by apparent suicide, the defendants confessed to their war crimes, but offered up the defense that they were “just following orders.”  The Tribunal rejected that defense, and each offender was tried and sentenced according to his crime.  Some were sentenced to death, others to time in prison, and others were acquitted.

               Albert Speer, one of Hitler’s top men, was given leniency and sentenced to 20 years in prison, because he refused to carry out Hitlers last command, commonly known as the Nero Decree.  The command was to burn Germany to the ground.  Hitler knew the Allied forces were closing in.  He gave Speer the order, commenting that all the brave Germans had already been killed and only the weak remained.  Hitler committed suicide in a bunker, and Speer never gave the command (facinghistory.org).

               An interesting side note to all the murder and mayhem carried out by the German military, is that not all the soldiers kneeled to the directives sent out by the Gestapo.  15,000 German soldiers were executed for desertion, 50,000 were killed for insubordination, and countless others were executed by officers or comrades when they did not follow commands (history.com).  These soldiers refused to “just follow orders” like their counterparts who blindly obeyed.

               At the end of WWII, Germany’s military was dismantled, and the current armed forces are forbidden to use their army “to do anything other than defend Germany itself.”  The military code emphasizes “the inner conscience of each individual” (history.com).

               “Inner conscience of each individual” is a good place to start, and an even better place to end.