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Interesting article indeed, but did he or did he not use the defense of "acting under orders"?

As presented by 2 excerpts below:

"This is not to say that Groening attempts to hide behind the “acting under orders” defense. He does not present himself as a mindless automaton who would have followed any command given to him."

"Additionally, he felt he was—using the words of the infamous Nazi post-war defense—acting under orders, and he attempts to defend himself with this analogy: “The first time a company of soldiers gets a volley of machine gun fire they don’t all get up and say, ‘We don’t agree with this—we’re going home.’”

A little clarification would be nice.

I also recommend a couple of books on this subject:

- Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning

- Into that Darkness by Gitta Sereny

Into that Darkness is the most depressing book I've ever read. It is essentially an interview with Franz Stangl, one of the commandants of the Treblinka camp which, if it's possible to believe, was far worse than Auschwitz. He was an ordinary guy who simply went where things took him, ultimately into a place I can't imagine existing.

I don't mean to be down-voted so I ask honestly, how can we accept Treblinka as an extermination camp in the face of all the Jewish testimonies attesting to it being a transit camp?

Arad denies emphatically that Treblinka could have possibly been a transit camp and says "all that arrived were killed within 15 minutes", but he has not commented on the testimonies from Shoah Foundation's own tapes who describe stopping at Treblinka for a few days on their way East.

This is a complicated field of study made all the more touchy by the fact it is easily politicized so I'd be interested only if you have comments on how to coalesce these two realities (extermination vs transit camp) in the face of the evidence. We can avoid inflammatory discussion.

Video zlFCvQttOv8 on Youtube has the video testimonies. I won't link to it here due to its inflammatory title.

Because there were multiple camps under the Treblinka banner.

Treblinka I was a forced work camp. They had transit stops, and people came in and out of here. That's what most stories about it being a transit camp are.

Treblinka II was probably the largest extermination camp in terms of "output". 700,000--900,000 Jews were killed in its gas chambers and around 2,000 Romani people.

There were so many corpses they had to exhume their mass graves and burn bodies on pyres. In 2010 there were 3 previously unknown mass graves discovered.

That there was a duality is not unknown, that it was an extermination camp is not controversial. The evidence is clear.

> I don't mean to be down-voted so I ask honestly, how can we accept Treblinka as an extermination camp in the face of all the Jewish testimonies attesting to it being a transit camp?

There were two "Treblinkas", and both of them changed over time.

How can we consider it an extermination camp? Due to the 800,000 bodies that were exhumed, and the testimony of the gas-chamber murderers.

That body of evidence should outweigh the survivorship bias of those few who were in-fact transited through it at specific times.

Does anyone know if any guard at one of these camps ever committed what would of course be termed terrorism, and shot their colleagues or even a couple of generals.

Can everyone have quietly watched children brained against the side of a truck and not thought "oh, I have a loaded gun!"

Or is complicity a terribly strong bond?

Having read a large amount on the subject, I can't think of anyone who ever rebelled in that way. It's hard for us to imagine in this day and age, but SS members were conditioned from the beginning to accept, at all cost, superior orders. It was a part of Nazi lore and (I might get some heat over this) German militarism. There was nothing more important than obedience.

Most of the men directly involved in these acts were alcoholics as a result of their experiences. Many were also sent, late in the war, to places that had very high casualty rates (eastern front, partisan suppression in Italy) so that a large number were killed before the end of the war.

Just today I read about the natives from North Sentinel Island, which are known for killing intruders. Can you understand how they don’t doubt about why they should kill visitors? If yes, then you found a natural part of human psychology that is largely suppressed in modern society. Fact is, humans had and have little problem with killing if they feel it‘s necessary. During the time of the second world war, the eradication of “bad people” happened in a lot of places because societies had different standards.

Edit: I don’t mean to compare to make equal. Of course, we should understand the different situations that led to putting innocent people into camps and learn individual lessons.

You'd march to your CO's office, and form a union, and then lobby the politicians for stricter sentencing and a more broad classification of gypsies, possibly. Anything to keep the paycheck.

We have plenty of for profit prisons in the US, and we have had judges go to jail for accepting bribes from these prisons to send more people to jail.

While a jail isn't as evil as a death camp, I think you could definitely argue the conditions in many American jails are horrible, and you are basically will never be able to fit into society afterwards.

I rather heavily edited my parent post there - sorry.
I think the desire to avoid having one's family brutally murdered was also a powerful motive not to rebel.
Interesting article, stay away from the comments. I think i lost a few iq.
I should've heeded your warning. Holy hell.
Indeed, its an eye opener, in not a good way.