Sadly I have to agree with most of what you've said. I do not believe anyone "Just following orders" should have been given a free pass.
That's not necessarily true. You have to take psychology into account. Yes - these specific kinds of orders were illegal in German law, so soldiers could refuse them. In theory, the worst that could happen to them is that they'd be sent to the Eastern Front. But... well, first up, the Eastern Front certainly was a fearsome punishment enough. Secondly, given that we're talking about illegal orders, can we be sure that refusing soldiers wouldn't be meted out an illegal punishment (most of the time,
apparently they weren't, though)? And finally... it's just plain bloody difficult psychologically to refuse an order when you're in the military. Heck, it's tough enough to refuse to stay an extra hour or two at work when you work for a corporation, and nobody's threatening to kill you there. I imagine many soldiers found it literally impossible to refuse, and the best they could do was to adopt a "I'll smoke, but I won't inhale" attitude, where they followed orders but tried to shirk the worst duties as far as they could.
Now that I think about it, possibly the worst thing is the fact that for most people, the punishment for refusing orders was
not death. A few weeks ago, doing some research, I came across a photo of a Jew kneeling over a pit, filled with bodies. He was surrounded by Germans - about to be executed. His face was absolutely peaceful. People usually can collect themselves in the face of death - more than that, they're often willing to accept death rather than risk further suffering if they struggle to get away. That's why, so often, Germans were able to draw people at random from a crowd, line them up against the wall, and kill them. The people in the crowd were so relieved that they weren't chosen, that they didn't want to risk intervening (even though they could easily overcome the small group of soldiers in these situations), and the people being executed were either terrified that resistance would result in an even more painful death, or were simply determined that if they have to die, they won't show the Germans an ounce of fear.
What's my point? Well, the average German soldier didn't have the choice of death. If a soldier, ordered to shoot a civilian, had a gun pointed to his own head, many would of course follow the order because they wanted to live - but there'd be quite a few who'd recoil at that point, and allow themselves to be executed rather than kill the civilian. After all, while religion was already on the decline at this time, most people still believed that they'd be held accountable for what they did. But their situation was worse - they weren't being threatened with death, but with suffering. Do it, or you'll freeze on the Eastern Front. Do it, or we'll discharge you and reduce your family's food rations. Do it, or we'll send your uncle to a concentration camp. And so on, and so on. That kind of thing is much more insidious than death.
...I mean, hell - if my boss ever threatened to kill me if I didn't stay past work hours to finish off a project, I'd probably snap and tell him to screw himself. But he didn't have to - the fact that he could fire me was enough. Sure, I believed I could get another job - but to go through the
bother of it all, possibly having to move to another city in the process? Eh, I'd rather just stay overtime.
...For three months straight
. That's how human psychology works.
However like was earlier stated, I believe that eliments of the navy should be absolved. There are accounts of German naval officers refusing to allow Jewish crewmembers and specialists to be transferred off their ships... I believe there were even a few on the Bismarck. I need to find my original source material though.
You have to be careful on that. Refusing to allow Jewish crewmembers and specialists to be transferred was hardly a huge risk - the people faced with this choice were pretty much irreplaceable (go on, find yourself a new U-Boot captain when you had fifty altogether before the war, and now you're building fifty new U-Boots
every month), and they had the backing of their superiors, all the way to Admiral Roeder. Although the Navy
was more traditional, and therefore more honour-bound than the Army (there's that old joke, stating that when Hitler went to war, he had the Kaiser's Navy, the German Army, and the nazi Luftwaffe), ultimately the thing that saves their honour was simply the fact that there was no Holocaust at sea. The Kriegsmarine is relatively clean not because they were better men, but because they were luckier men.