Comment by Thorrez
8 months ago
> And it turns out that the German soldiers faced surprisingly mild consequences for disobeying unlawful orders.
Huh. Franz Jägerstätter was executed for refusing to fight in the war.
8 months ago
> And it turns out that the German soldiers faced surprisingly mild consequences for disobeying unlawful orders.
Huh. Franz Jägerstätter was executed for refusing to fight in the war.
There are many documented and studied cases where orders to carry out massacres which were disobeyed carried no harm to the German who refused.
Mostly demotion or transfer to a different area, but no execution or jail time. Sometimes not even that.
I'm talking about not taking part in massacres (e.g. shooting unarmed women and children, locking people in a barn and setting it on fire, etc), not about refusing to fight, cowardice, aiding the enemy or actual treason.
Franz Jägerstätter was not a soldier.
>Drafted for the first time on 17 June 1940, Jägerstätter, aged 33, was again conscripted into the German Wehrmacht in October and completed his training at the Enns garrison.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_J%C3%A4gerst%C3%A4tter
That kind of sounds like he was a soldier to me. Or trained to be one.