Is it morally wrong to not support the troops?

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In that case are the Nazis off the hook for the Holocaust (the soldiers/guards etc, not the leaders)?

History provides you with that answer about the soldiers and the leaders.

Either this is one huge game of devil's advocate, or you are hiding something. I of course cannot confirm or deny anything.

im pretty sure the nazi soldiers weren't punished in Nuremburg, but morally are they scot-free?

Nope. they are perhaps less culpable but no where close to innocent.

War is completely different from normal life. They have a different set of rules and cannot be confused with each other. Can you define what is morally acceptable in a war?

War itself is not morally acceptable.

It wasn't all self defense, and Dresden in particular was an atrocity. However, it was more legitimate on tha part of the U.S. and Great Britain than on the part of Japan and the Third Reich.


It was certainly self defense for the U.S. against Japan.


If Hitler had defeated the Soviet Union - not a foregone conclusion even with the U.S. not in the war - I do agree he would still not have been able to invade the U.S., and there are strong indications that he would have been willing to leave Great Britain's home islands alone if they had been willing to sign a peace treaty. Again, though, it was Japan that pulled the U.S. into commitment of troops, not the Third Reich.


The Soviet Union was at least as bad as the Third Reich, possibly worse. In the U.S., pacifists managed to prevent FDR from committing troops, if not from economic support of one side, until the U.S. got attacked in Pearl Harbor. The U.S. did give peace a chance, if perhaps not quite as much of a chance as Chamberlain did.


There were no massacres in the European war until after Britain and France declared war on Germany. Oppression yes, massacres no.


Traditionally, the rules are that it's okay to target enemy combatants, but not enemy civilians.

By the way, I find the poll unsatisfactory. I don't think one should always support the troops, but I don't think we should never support them either. I think it depends on the war.

True. Of course, Hitler wasn't so much a German unifier like Bismarck as an empire builder like Napoleon.

It depends on whether the military's cause is justified.

I support the troops so much that I wish we'd bring them all home.

Was it morally wrong for Germans NOT to support the Nazis?

I don't think it is immoral not to support the troops, regardless of whether one feels the current war is just.

well i implore you to remember the fact that history is the truth according to the victor, now WWII the Nazis DID commit many atrocities but it is safe to assume they would not have fallen to the Nazis had not put them through their Great Depression(the Great Depression in Germany is what allowed Hitler to gain so much power because he fixed the economy) Germany didnt even start WWI yet we made them pay the most reparations so WE caused all the atrocities of WWII NOT the Germans yet we claim they did even though us raping their economy and blaming them, wrongly, for WWI allowing Hitler to take over and Chamberlain taking his pacifist stance only made things worse(again allies NOT axis) because we didnt stop Hitler early on like we should have

the Napoleon comparison is apposite.
and like the short man from Corsica he would have been broken by Russia.

If we could have committed our full effort to the Japanese theater that war would have been over sooner too.
even better we could have stopped baiting the Japanese.

Hmmm..... Hitler had already had Gemrany mostly unified when came to power in 1933 except for Austria, the Sudetenland, and the assorted random fringe territories that had been hacked off to Poland + border adjustments with France, Belgiam, Denmark. It was his task to redeem Germany's honor that had been sort of lost in WWI and at least get the old borders back and the old eastern territories from the 'inferior' and hated slavs and Poles.

Hitler's task was as much as well to rebuild the German army and restore independence from the prison of the Versailles treaty and interference from England and France in German affairs. Tasks like reoccupying the Rhineland and rearmament while avoiding war over those causes were a tall order.

The Soviet Union was every bit as bad as Nazi Germany, but the atrociites of Stalin were more hidden and 'outofsight-outofmind' from the western view. Atrociites against groups like Jews and British airmen drew more flak than Stalin's atroiciites against people like Armenians and what-not who were well hidden deep in the Soviet Union.

Probably the prejudice and bias today that I think still exists of Western people having 'more value' in the eyes of people who matter in the Anglosphere world might have something to do with it. All of the Ukraninas, Belorussians, and the others are "just statistics," while Jews and western white people have a huge prominence and a level of common public identification with them.