Google Sippenhaft.
That’s exactly what I did to come to my conclusion.
The problem with Nazi crimes is that some of them pale in comparison to the others. So when I say something was “not widespread”, that is a relative term. If found several accounts of family members being harassed by police or arrested. I have found no accounts of family members being formally sentenced to death or killed outright (but we know that “being arrested” by the Nazis could lead to death, especially late in the war).
They arrested relatives of partisan, resistance fighters and political dissidents (Count Stauffenberg’s family being among the most well-known victims). In some areas, the threat of arrest was used against the families of deserters (for exampe Franz Thaler in South Tyrol).
As for deserters, about 30,000 deserters were sentenced to death, 23,000 were actually executed. Their families were not killed. The total number of deserters is estimated at 350,000-400,000.
By now, there’s a monument in Vienna to honor deserters from the Wehrmacht. And there are still no reports of killed relatives. And the people who fight the political fights necessary to get a monument erected right in front of important government buildings are not the kind of people who would try to hide anything like that.
I don’t know, warn at least the government about the deliberate extermination of civilians by the hundreds of thousands using a never-seen-before weapon? Wait more than three fucking days before killing another 100,000 civilians? Drop the first bomb on a military target and give them time to figure out what would happen if dropped on a city center?
And then of course there are the philosophical questions. If you’ve been attacked and you’re fighting a “just war”, how many more innocent lives is it right to sacrifice in order to get an unconditional surrender rather than just a conditional one?
