I read through the Nuremburg document you cited, and frankly, if I’m a German soldier before the London Agreement is written up (1945), then I have no way to predict, other than my conscience, that I should disobey certain of my superior officer’s orders. The Nuremburg Opinion and Judgment you cite says as much, repeatedly. It is also evident from this there were no German statutes in force and applicable to those soldiers which might have prohibited any imaginable act of obedience to a superior officer, else appeal would have been made to them and the whole matter dispatched with ease.
Therefore the Nuremburg court had no choice but to build an inference of individual criminality for specific acts from a weakly cobbled together set of international traditions. The truth is, without that appeal to conscience upon which the international law was based, there would have been no sustainable assignment of criminality, and the parties who conducted the Nuremburg trial would not have been able to push past what was evidently a strong Ex Post Facto inhibition.
And if conscience can rise to the force of law, as the document you cite appears to argue, then one can never say that pure obedience to a superior officer’s orders is always the right course of action. One is obligated, under the international law to which you appealed, and under the dictates of conscience, to consider more than whether any given military order is facially legal, especially when one is an officer, and has thereby taken on an even greater responsibility for the exercise of individual judgment.
And all the after-birthers in a past thread acknowledged the same.
I gave the scenario where Soldier 1 was ordered to transport the prisoners to the oven, Soldier 2 was ordered to turn on the oven, and Soldier 3 was ordered to clean out the ashes.
None of those orders was, by itself, facially unlawful.
About then they all started calling me a Nazi and getting indignant - arguing that those soldiers should have reasonably known that their actions would end in an unlawful result even if their exact order was not criminal.
Their own words. They admitted it - that there is more to be considered than the mere criminality of a single, isolated order.
They were repulsed when they saw their own argument used to justify Buchenwald and Auschwitz. But then they returned to their own vomit by using the EXACT SAME ARGUMENT to say the single, isolated orders are all that matter in Lakin’s case.
>and the parties who conducted the Nuremburg trial would not have been able to push past what was evidently a strong Ex Post Facto inhibition.
I hate Ex Post Facto laws with a passion and strongly believe that the Nuremberg trials AS THEY WERE CONDUCTED were in error precisely because they applied laws in the Ex Posf Facto manner.