You think that makes it okay? There’s all sorts of awesome advancements that came out of WWII, not least the computer development that led directly to this great big ol’ internet of ours. Should we praise Hitler as the great scientific philanthropist of the age? Is any atrocity excusable as long as we accidentally got some sweet gadgets out of it?
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He was just following orders, eh?
That defense didn’t work out too well for all the guys who weren’t politically useful.
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And yet, in America, there were men “just following orders” who never spoke out against Japanese internment; or against the development of nuclear weapons; or against the firebombing campaigns in the late stages of the war when Germany and Japan had so little means to defend themselves that bombers flew in broad daylight, unescorted, with all of their armor removed so they could carry more bombs.
Plenty of Americans had very strong moral and ethical misgivings about what they were asked to do, but they followed orders.
One might argue some orders are easier to follow than others, but I thought the complaint here was that people were knowingly doing things they felt were wrong, period.
One might argue that mass internment of innocent civilians, the deployment of nuclear bombs on civilian targets, and the firebombing of countless cities to ashes were seen as “necessary evils”, but the same argument was surely true from the German perspective about their own crimes.
One might argue that more Americans disobeyed orders they disagreed with than Germans did, but we’ve established that not only were the orders themselves easier to obey, they were also much less dangerous to disobey. An American who chose to speak out risked being branded a traitor and locked up in jail, while a German who chose to speak out risked their own life, and the lives of their family. How, then, are the Americans who failed to speak out somehow better than the Germans who did the same?
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Easy for someone who I am assuming lived their entire lives in a country where they could say just about anything they want and fear no retribution. It’s easy to do the right thing, except when it’s hard.
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The German pronunciation of Braun does rhyme with frown.
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The brown Braun prawn has a frown?
Especially in my accent 
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