Well, executing 50.000 to 100.000 German officers would have meant executing at least all officers the rank of major and above (roughly speaking). All war crimes on the German side taken into account, this would be one humongous crime larger than Katyn.
Bigger than Katyn? Yup! Bigger than the crimes of the Stalinist state? Um. Bigger than the Holocaust? Um...
I am not vindicating the shooting of random people, I am criticising discourses about it here on AH.com. Of course shooting people at random is wrong. I would have hoped that was so obvious as to be outside debate.
My point is that this was a war in which a whole lot of people were killed in horrible ways and yet people are jumping on a hypothetical crime which is, comparatively speaking, drops in the ocean and declaring that it would have meant the End of Honour and the exact equivalence of the Allied forces with Nazism.
I mean, it even seems to me to be a weird assessment of Stalinism. Starve millions of peasants in Ukraine and other places, deport ethnic groups to Kazakhstan, liquidate people for giving you a funny look, and you're a pretty bad person. Shoot the German officers, and you're
outrageously bad.
And odds are that there would be a LOT of men in that crowd who don't hold a iota of guilt.
My people traditionally believe that everybody is basically guilty of everything and you have to respect my traditional folkways.
Seriously, though, the German army had issued standing orders governing mass-murder of enemy civilians and prisoners of war and any member of the officer classes employed on the eastern front who had not gone out of their way to prevent them being enforced was involved in war crimes.
Enormous numbers of people on all sides were involved in war-crimes or in behaviour which I think we can all agree is not super-nice whatever the legalities, such as blowing up non-combatants - most of whom were basically decent ordinary people who would return to normal lives. I think that the decision to apply some sort of organised justice to the real killers and to forgive and forget when it came to the rest on all sides was absolutely the right one.
But the idea of the Puir Innocent Wee German Officers is frankly a nonsense. It was a dirty war.
It's a crime, it's an atrocity and what was done by the Germans beforehand doesn't affect this conclusion in the least. An eye for an eye just isn't right.
I'm not arguing that it's right, I'm arguing that arguing that it's the same as the Holocaust and the Holodomor isn't right.
When did this discussion shift from actually existing posts on AH.com to purely hypothetical war-crimes?
Oh, and despite my being German, the nationality of the men in question did not factor into this in the least. It could have been fricking Uruguayans or whatever and it would have been the same.
This is an admirable sentiment and I hope we understand why very few people held to it at the time.