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Comment by HillRat | Hacker News Reader

"[A former principal] said severe violence and military-style discipline were the only ways to run a place filled with thousands of unruly people who didn't want to be there."

And the lessons of Nuremberg go unheeded again. Dear God, I hope there's standing for an ACTA claim, since it's damned certain ROK isn't going to try and make this inhumanity right again.

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> the lessons of Nuremberg

Mind elaborating on that to people (like me) not deeply familiar with European history?

My takeaway from learning about Nürnberg was that everyone is responsible for their own actions and you are guilty even if you "just"followed orders.

What if you're under duress, which everyone in the military basically is at all times? (Nowadays, you typically have the right to refuse an order if you know it's illegal, but I doubt that was the case in the SS in 1944.)

When it comes to committing a crime against humanity such as the mass murder of civilians, you're expected to refuse the order even if it means being killed for doing so. Self-preservation is not a reasonable excuse for committing a war crime, and it never has been.

What about all the civilians who no doubt contributed economically and indirectly to the Nazi regime simply by not opposing or fighting them?

They were punished quite severely by Germany's reparations at the end of the war. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_reparations_for_World...

What about the American companies who built war machinery for the Nazis?

Does that mean the people who did oppose the Nazis had to pay reparations too?

Such is the cost of being a citizen of a country that goes to war unfortunately. It's also a lesson in why everyone should be vigilant about stopping their leaders doing evil things. Some modern leaders should take note.

OK, but try explaining that to an 18-year-old kid whose buddy / father figure / platoon sergeant has a gun to his head. Difficulty: You get to be an anonymous intellectual half a world away who might not ever find out if he makes the wrong choice. I think I can pull up 20 or 30 million data points from the last century that say it's an unrealistic expectation.

I think judges see that.

Not everyone was given death penalty in Nürnberg either.

I think the most important fact was they ruled that "just following orders" wasn't a blanket excuse.

>Nowadays, you typically have the right to refuse an order if you know it's illegal, but I doubt that was the case in the SS in 1944

That was the breakthrough of the Nuremburg trials. Judges cut through that and established the principle that everyone in the SS could have known they are committing genocide and could have known that a genocide is not covered by the rules of war. That's why you can refuse an illegal order in Western armies now.

The alternative would have been that everyone in the chain of command had claimed duress up to the NSDAP leadership - and those were mostly dead by then.

Post-Nuremburg, everyone knows that you will get punished and the higher your rank, the worse for you if you are part of genocide. Ideally. In reality, a lot of war crimes and genocide still goes without punishment.

The Nuremberg Trials[1] / "Nuremberg Defence"[2].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_trials [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders

While I share your hope that there will be some service of justice, nothing could make that right.

To be fair, GP said "try and make this inhumanity right again" which sounds very reasonable.

Yeah, I deliberated on that, knowing that the victims who survived can never be made whole, let alone those who died beneath a shroud of official silence. I suppose I should have said "the ROK will never bring the guilty to justice," though a tort claim isn't real justice either.

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