“I was just doing my job” is no excuse.

No. It really is. Or, more specifically “I was just following orders”.

Jacob Geller semi-recently did a pretty good overview of what a shitshow the Nuremberg Trials were. It has some… questionable taste dramatic readings and shots but it really drills home how little anyone cared and how much we, as a people, outright justified the atrocities by trying to apply “law” to them.

But the biggest lasting impact of that was the sheer limitation of court time and human attention spans. There were legal consequences but the only people we heard about were the high ranking officials because there just wasn’t time to try every single person who “served” and people got bored after reading about the twentieth Captain’s trial. It built the groundwork for “The guy operating the gas chamber wasn’t at fault. Only the camp kommandant was. Err, actually, only his boss was. You know what? It was all hitler”.

Which is what led to decades of “Rommel was actually a great guy who just wanted to fight wars and didn’t care who he fought them for” or “There were a lot of good men in the German Army and they should not all be considered nazis” and so forth.

And that is what people (and the shitbags in the military) are counting on. If there are any consequences it will be for trump and miller and hegseth, not for the people who were pointing guns at people and disappearing folk. Hell, a bunch of useful idiots will come out bragging that the 82nd Airborne only shot ten black people when they raided Portland and it could have been so much worse and we should be thankful they all suited up and deployed so that worse people wouldn’t!