Less than one hundred out of millions.
Viewing them all as “fungible villains” is a very accurate approximation with a ridiculously low error.
If one starts allowing group culpability without regard for the innocents, no matter how few, then this destroys the principle of individual culpability. Sorry, but that's something the good guys shouldn't be doing, and only something one should expect the bad guys to do.
Good guys don't treat entire groups of people as fungible and disposable. Period.
Nobody can possibly weigh every Wehrmacht member’s actions. Those that acted with distinction have been documented. They are the exceptions that prove the rule. If they were not, the outcome of the Wehrmacht’s actions would have been very different.
Your criteria is impossible to satisfy, by design. An attempt to rewrite history.
Strawman. Should you ever meet a former member of the Wehrmacht, you owe them the same general regard to be given any human being.
An attempt to rewrite history.
False. You are projecting. My words state the opposite of what you suggest. I take it you are invested in the idea that it’s okay to throw away individual rights in some situations and simply punish groups. If that is the case, then you are advocating for committing exactly the moral failing we should hold against the Wehrmacht.
In this case, this is the least popular implication of the principles which were fought for in WWII at the price of millions of lives.
In short, in 2019 terms, “Punch a Nazi” is committing the exact moral failing at the root of the discredited philosophy being fought. Peacetime politics through violence is wrong. Period.
(No, punching for political gain doesn’t make you a war criminal, obviously. No equivalence, obviously. What you are doing is introducing that moral framework. Best to avoid the moral framework of the worst villains.)
Most human beings have not taken up arms to make war on behalf of a genocidal regime led by a fanatical anti-Semitic tyrant. It’s okay to look askance at those who did.
I also use that phrase. In my youth, I would even have meant it literally. Now, I will respond to it in the sense of cognitive traps which people too easily fall into and are lucky to escape. I have been "lucky" to have experienced racially motivated harassment in my youth, so I have had a direct view of what people taken by groupthink are like.
Far too many human beings in 2019 are falling into groupthink where they will gladly throw young people and children under the bus, just to serve their "side." Note that this applies equally to the political Left and the Right. Once one wants one's own side to win so badly, that basic principles go out the window, one's mind has been taken by groupthink.
The following is directed generally: If one is of the Left and cannot see or automatically excuse all of its transgressions, then one's mind has been taken by groupthink. If one is of the Right and cannot see or automatically excuse all of its transgressions, then one's mind has been taken by groupthink. If one is of the mindset that critics are automatically enemies, one's mind has been taken by groupthink.
Too many people in 2019 are caught up in groupthink and outright hate, but camouflage it and justify it to themselves as a worthy cause. This is what happened in Germany prior to WWII, and it is something we need to look out for.
It’s okay to look askance at those who did.
Yes. So long as you view them as individual human beings and the particular facts. So long as you're not responding to a shallow label and taking action with little thought. That is the underlying philosophical mistake which is the foundation of the very wrong you would hold against them.
I too would look askance at them. But if you treat them as fungible and disposable, then what exactly did our side fight for?
One way or the other, there will be few situations where such refusal is possible, much less written down.
“There was not a uniform system of "terror-justice" operating automatically against those whose civil and moral courage forced them to declare "ohnemich!"(without me!). In fact, the opposite is true. In every case of documented refusal to obey orders to exterminate people, the coercive powers of the Nazi system proved to be impotent or ineffective.”
The vast majority of these were killed by Germany, Japan, Italy, and Soviet Union.
While there were individuals who resisted this, the systems of government and the belief systems that drove the totalitarian states where unprecedentedly horrific.
If you're interested in learning more about this history, "The Second World Wars" by Victor Davis Hanson is a good place to start.
World War 1 happened 2 decades earlier and wasn't totalitarian and was nearly as horrific (the combat itself was usually far more horrific than WW2). The legacy of humans has been constant war for centuries before that. Even reducing it to some 20th century political ideology is insufficient. Human history has long been a series of duelling nation states, religions, city states, war lords, tribes, etc.
The only thing that stopped wars was economic production trumped state expansion while becoming global creating strong interconnections between nation states... and technology (ie, nuclear weapons, total war economies) made the stakes of war too high. But again that's just what stopped or slowed down the bloodshed, not a sufficient explanation of why it kept happening.
I'm not aware of any major attacks on civilians in that war.
World War 2 was directed primarily at killing unarmed.
The Nazis wanted to colonize eastern Europe, so killed many to make room for that, as well as anyone that did not fit in with their notion of racial purity. The Japanese killed their millions in China, but also elsewhere. The Italian killing fields were in Ethiopia. The Soviets killed millions of prisoners of war.
Looking at the ideologies of these countries, their goal was to kill anyone who got in the way of those ideologies.
There is nothing controversial about saying that. If you are implying that I'm ignorant of such a basic fact, then this is insulting and commenting in bad faith.
What is controversial nowadays, ironically for a society which claims to be founded on inviolate individual human rights, is that the exact same regard for individual culpability should be accorded members of the Wehrmacht. My previous comment supports the notion of group culpability for members of an army. However, the idea that all members of the Wehrmacht are equally culpable is simply ridiculous and untenable, given the facts and given the principles of individual human rights.
If you're interested in learning more about this history, "The Second World Wars" by Victor Davis Hanson is a good place to start.
If you mean to insinuate that I know nothing of the very basic history of WWII, please know that I am already a fan of David Hanson.
As noted elsewhere, it is an act of individual courage to go against the flow of the groupthink. I hardly think "Nazi German Bad" is at all controversial. However, in 2019, "individual rights for all, no exceptions" is controversial, in direct contradiction to our stated values in the US.
First of all, modern armies are mass action: uniforms make the "other side" literally uniform and undifferentiated. The purpose is twofold: first so that your own troopers won't think rationally about what they are doing and will simply follow along with the crowd, whether the rule is "shoot", "dig a foxhole", "don't run away" or whatever. The second value is to dehumanise the enemy and increase the chance that violence will actually be done to him (this is why the officers were so unhappy with the Christmas Day football game between British and German troops in WWI).
This whole process appeared in the Nopoleonic->Prussian invention of mass warfare; until then it was a largely retail affair when you really figured if you needed to kill that other guy in front of you or not.
Second of all, and again this is a function of 20th century warfare, this process was amplified through mass propaganda to whole populations, again dehumanizing the enemy. It's own long topic so I"ll stop here.
I will say that these refusals are even harder, not easier, when you're in a group who can see you take action or not (as opposed to firing at a far-away enemy where your colleagues can't really see how well you're aiming).
So in other words: everybody on HN has been trained to think this way, and all active participants in WWII had been likewise trained to think this way of the "other side"
You have kids at home. They'll have no more food on the table if you are dead.
You show up. You do what they tell you.
Sadly that's how it has always been. Some enjoy it-most though just want it to end.
This is not to say, that there isn't a group accountability for an organization like an army, where people are all wearing the same regalia and literally marching under the same banner. This implies a group responsibility for calling out the wrongs of one's own side. The morality of the faction can be measured as a whole by how well it calls out its own failures of principle, and by what principles it says it upholds and by what principles it eschews.