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We are bound to obey the legitimate orders of our legitimate superiors in any society we claim to be part of.
The defendants at Nuremberg admitted themselves to be members of the Nazi State; both the defendants and the prosecutors admitted that Nazi Germany was a state in the international sense of that term, and in that state orders could be legitimately conveyed down the appropriate chain of military or civil command.
Because authority was legitimately vested in the state, it could be presumed to be properly exercised by those tn whom commands were addressed. This presumption was not irrebuttable to the ordinary European mind; but the Nazis strove to make it irrebuttable. The Nazis sought to make the state the sole society to which a Nazi could belong, and to make the head of that state the sole source of legal and moral obligation; this monolithic conception, intended to be the strength of the Nazi state, in fact became its greatest weakness. When the Fuhrer destroyed himself, he also carried the Nazi state to destruction: as he intended.
A strong society is one which allows the free growth of legitimate aspirations expressed in different forms of societies and corporations. The closed, or totalitarian, form of society looks strong from outside, it looks neat and streamlined, but internally its life tends to be cramped and to lack spontaneity when not kept young by regular blood transfusions from those who direct it and who themselves remain relatively free.
It is fashionable nowadays for some critics of the Church to compare the Church with a totalitarian state. Clearly there are resemblances between any well-organised hierarchical societies when viewed from outside: but such a comparison overlooks the essential difference in spirit between the Church and the secular state.
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- Copyright © 1953 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 Part 19 of the Proceedings, H.M.S.O., 1949, p. 400.
2 1929 ed. In XIII, p. 246.
3 The Peleus: L.R. of War Criminals, H.M.S.O. 1947, Vol. I, Case No. I.
4 Dreierwald Case, ibid. Case No. 7.
5 ‘The fact that a rule of warfare has been violated in pursuance of an order of the belligerent Government or of an individual belligerent commander does not deprive the act in question of its character as a war crime; neither does it, in principle, confer upon the perpetrator immunity from punishment by the injured belligerent. Undoubtedly, a court confronted with the plea of superior orders adduced in justification of a war crime is bound to take into consideration the fact that obedience to military orders, not obviously lawful, is the duty of every member of the armed forces and that the latter cannot, in conditions of war discipline, be expected to weigh scrupulously the legal merits of the orders received. The question, however, is governed by the major principle that members of the armed forces are bound to obey lawful orders only and that they cannot therefore escape liability if, in obedience to a command, they commit acts which both violate unchallenged rules of warfare and outrage the general sentiment of humanity.’ (British Manual of Military Law, Amendment No. 34, April 1944.)
6 The full story of the Amendment is to be found in The History of the U.N. War Crimes Commission: the Development of the Laws of War (H.M.S.O., 194.8, pp. 274–88).
7 Part 18, p. 352.
8 Nüremberg Proceedings, Part 4, p. 372.
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