Going back to 1942-3. Your a young Ukrainian, who has grown up under the yoke of Stalin and the USSR. They have starved you and your family. Suddenly German Panzers drive past your house smashing the Bolsheviks and killing those evil commissars and NKVD types that have made your lives miserable. These Germans who are fit, tough and full of fighting spirit are quite captivating. Sure some are assholes, but your used to to that. By and large they leave you alone. Soon you see posters up that ask for Volunteers to fight the Soviets and reclaim your homeland. You join up, to get revenge, be part of something, plus new clothes and 3 meals a day is great. You don't really understand Nazi's political stuff and you don't care. Hitler made Germany strong and took on Stalin.
After awhile though you start seeing the similarities between the methods of the Communists and Nazi's, you hear rumours, things about what to Jews that are taken away. Then orders coming to hunt down partisans. Pretty soon your doing what the NKVD did, but you can't escape. You also know things are not going well in the war. At some point an opportunity arises to escape to the West and you take it.
A case of Buyers Remorse?
Oh well, you bought it, you own it.
Also not sure what ‘Homeland’ there is to reclaim since Ukraine never existed as an independent, internationally recognized country up until that time. There was a collective sense of belonging to an ethnic identity though.
Do we then offer the same leniency to all those Croatian Ustasha that thought, hey, I’m just seeking a free Croatia from those Communist Partisans, who also happen to be mostly Serbian and Orthodox, so I’m going to support the Germans, and whoops, shame what’s happening to the Jews, Gypsies and the rest.
Same with the Estonians and Latvians?
Once those Ukrainians that did join up and began to see the crimes being committed against the Jews, that their unit themselves may have been committing, against the Poles and Gypsies, and our Allies, the Slovak Partisans, why didn’t they desert? Why didn’t they refuse to obey orders?
The Dostler case became a precedent for the principle that was used in the Nuremberg Trials of German generals, officials, and Nazi leaders beginning in November 1945: using superior orders as a defense does not relieve officers from responsibility of carrying out illegal orders and their liability to be punished in court. The principle was codified in
Principle IV of the
Nuremberg Principles, and similar principles are in the 1948
Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The German military law since 1872 said
[18] that while the superior is ("solely") responsible for his order, the subordinate
is to be punished for his participation in it if he either transgressed the order on his own account, or if he knew the order to be criminal.
[19] The Nazis did not bother (or were too reluctant) to formalize many of their offenses (e.g., killing a non-combatant without trial), so the prosecutors at Nuremberg could have argued that the defendants broke German law to begin with. However, this line of argument was infrequently used.
And of course, this being Canada……
1987 Canadian prosecution of Imre FintaEdit
The Canadian government prosecuted Hungarian Nazi collaborator
Imre Finta under its war crimes legislation in 1987. He was accused of organizing the deportation of over 8,000 Jews to Nazi death camps. He was acquitted on the defence that he was following the orders of a superior. The Canadian courts that accepted that verdict are the only ones in the world that recognize that legal defence….
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