• scratchee@feddit.uk
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    3 days ago

    The Wehrmacht was not “clean”, certainly.

    But that article doesn’t seem to claim that individual soldiers have the same guaranteed culpability.

    That’s not to say that even low grade nazis were ever innocent and pure, but I think there’s a little grey.

    If we’re trying to find a single good nazi in all of history, then I think technically Schindler counts.

    • NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io
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      3 days ago

      But that article doesn’t seem to claim that individual soldiers have the same guaranteed culpability.

      I mean they must have that culpability since they were cooperating with Nazi genocidal policy by, among other things, invading countries to where the Holocaust would be exported in the first place. I mean it was by definition individual soldiers enforcing the state of affairs where Jews and other targets of Nazi ire were getting exterminated. It was those individual soldiers suppressing resistance, taking POWs to be executed, etc. I mean you’re pretty guilty the moment you’re fighting a war of extermination on the side of extermination.

      If we’re trying to find a single good nazi in all of history, then I think technically Schindler counts.

      That’s fair, but I think most modern people wouldn’t consider him a Nazi. He was registered as a Nazi by necessity, but ideologically I don’t think he believed in the extermination of Jews while bribing Nazi officials to keep his workers out of death camps. If you do consider him a Nazi then yeah there was dissent within the Nazi party; I don’t think that’s much of a surprise.