WW2 560 executed

[727Sky]

Dad said in his unit when an SS officer was captured the SS soldierwould be executed shortly there afterwards.

How about 560 prison guards executed in one day ! Right or Wrong ??
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/QFmy7FaIR...ture=share War is hell and may your good fortune prevent you from ever having to try and survive in a war zone.

[xpert11]

From memory, the U.S. Army units involved with executing those Nazi concretion camps didn't cover up those incidents. What occurred was mentioned in their after-action reports. Also, after news of the Malmedy massacre during the earlier Battle of the Bulge, GIs weren't keen on taking SS members as Prisoners of War.

As for the morality of their actions, there is no reason to think those American soldiers would have known about the future Nuremberg and related trials.

[Maxmars]

I suppose by that stage in the war, most soldiers had begun to learn that the Geneva Convention was only really being upheld by the allies.  Seeing direct physical confirmation in thousands of examples of depraved indifference, abject base cruelty clustered into a single place must have been emotionally traumatic. 

How many of these soldiers knew someone who was lost and perhaps captured, how many suddenly realized that what happened here is just a glimpse into what might be happening to their friends?  "Who the hell were these people who would do this?"

Simply human empathy... it was not 'ideologically scrubbed' in American soldiers as it was in German soldiers, who were often taught "they are animals" "they are not human beings".  In Americans at least, empathy was oppositely nurtured as a 'reason for fighting.'

The result is outrage, a sense of the rape and murder of compassion and human dignity.  The fury which followed was more punishment than war...  Officers tried to control it... but they were just as affected as their units.

It was a shameful lapse of command, a tragic loss of control... there can never be excuse to justify plain mass execution... Americans want to stand by the value of 'due process'... but there was none there.

Just my 'projection'... others would know better... I welcome correction.

[xpert11]

It was a shameful lapse of command, a tragic loss of control... there can never be excuse to justify plain mass execution... Americans want to stand by the value of 'due process'... but there was none there.

You read my mind concerning that loss of control. I have given thought to that matter in the past. It would have been tough to find junior officers and experienced Non-Commissioned Officers with the backbone to stop those executions.

It would have taken a lot to rattle those hardened combat veterans. From a military ethics standpoint, your points are valid. But I understand how and why those GIs acted as judge, jury, and executioner.