That's very debatable since none of it was discussed in any form of parliament.
And Hitler himself never gave any orders on paper, he typically talked to two underlings who had overlapping authorities and gave em verbal hints as to what he wanted to see done.. And then the underlings guestimated how they could please Hitler and trump the competing underling to become the favorite of Hitler.
The German Command structure was extrelemely vague at times, and the only things we do know is that Hitler had a tendency to overrule generals on strategic military or economical decisions, and was pretty much to blame for many defeats that way.

But as for the finer details of the Holocaust... You'll have a hard time explaining what or who the "govermenent" was that gave these "legal orders" you claim.

The definitition "legally ordered" combined with "by the governement" is very un proven and was the basis for a lot of the defence in Nuremburg trials "I only did as I was told" , uneffectivly might I add, a great many have swung with the noose around their neck, despite that claim of legal orders.

Video removed. Keep it polite, folks.

Read the books by Laurence Rees on the subject of the Holocaust and others on the subject of Japanese atrocities.
They give a great insight on how people rationalized and behaved during those times.
How the public became to hate the Jews and allowed it all to happen..

https://www.amazon.de/-/en/gp/product/B008NA42BC/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i3

https://www.amazon.de/-/en/gp/product/B005OYFY3K/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i6

They are quite scary books as they explain how the people who did it, didn't really all follow orders with much resistance.. They wanted to follow those orders, they were convinced those things were the right thing to do.
And if you know it happened then, you'll realize it can happen again, make no mistake.

Most people think looking back at Holocaust and WW2 "I would have been on the good side" "I would have resisted If i was in Germany"
The reality is, most people would have been just as much a part of that history, With the information and world known to them as they were then, they would do the same things.

Not my words, but a Psychology professor said that, don't have his name available now

This is why it is important that the "heroic" pictures that the lady complained about remain.
The National Socialist when some one looks at them in history should not be a caricature of evil super villians.
They should be pictured as they were across their stages.
They positioned themselves as scientific progressives, social justice warriors, and world saviors.
They weren't going around, "join us, we're evil!"

Some of them were tho.
Heidrich, Himmler, they really were evil super villains, in some respect they were worse then Hitler was (but Hitler encouraged them so well there's that).

Those who did the torturing at the Gestapo, the death head SS running the death camps, There's no denying those were men with an absolute talent for evil and willingness to exploit their talents.

But they all operated within a blanket of convenient approval/willful denial of the general public and regular military folk.
simplified example : folks who were fine with the idea that their Jewish neigbor was taken away. as it was convenient to follow Hitlers thinking to blame the jews for all that went wrong.. and it wa equally convenient to just would pretend the problem was solved for them, withouth any need to exercise any critical thinking as to "how" it was solved for them..

I cannot recommend Rees's books enough on that matter.

Heydrich is a most interesting person. Cashiered from the Kriegsmarine in the 20's joins the SS and quickly rises. Himmler was afraid of Heydrich. Heydrich would suggest something, Himmler woud agree and two weeks later would tell heidrich that the Fuhrer nixed it.

Hitler said of Heydrich that he had a heart of stone. Heydrich said of Hitler that if Hitler was dragging Germany down to defeat he would kill Hitler himself. Further Heydrich saved Jewish athletes from harms way..He flew fighter mission over the Russian front, being shot down behind Russian lines and making his way back to German lines, was an accomplished violinist as his relative was the famous composer

Heydrich and not Hitler nor Himmler was the architect of the Nazi police state. He was the driving force that coalesced bureaucratic power into the hands of the SS/Gestapo. Internal party police, national security and criminal police all into one..

"The Order of the Deaths Head" by Heinz Hohne originally published in German in 1962 chronicles the coalescing of that bureaucratic power.

Nurnberg Laws..Sept 1935

Average ordinary people did horrific things..their dark side was given permission to run loose..all in the name of the state.

The NAZI party became the state and the state became the religion..

The parallel to America in the 21st century is frightening when a prominent politician called apx half the people "deplorabes" and now that party has wrapped itself in the flag as defenders of democracy..as if the other party is anti democracy.

None of the Nurnberg laws discuss shooting, gassing and murdering jews or gypsies.
None of those laws made orders to murder people legal.

They were administrative of nature, they only set the tone of things to follow.

If anything the Nurnburg laws simply made it difficult for Jews to make a living, or just live in Germany.. but it did not outlaw them as such.
It did create an economical problem for them, and took away rights to anything within the German State.

There isn't anything in the Nurnburg Race laws, that you can legally connect to an order to "put those old women in the gas chamber" and state that the order to gas them was in fact based on that written law.

The Final Solution, then came about to sort out the problem of all those Jews who were in the country, but not of any use because they were banned from making a living, and thus redundant.
That Final Solution was not voted or written in any kind of law, by any kind of governement.
It was a practical way of dealing with things, and NONE of it was legally backed up by any kind of law or governement.
It was off the books. It was a chore handed out to select people of ruthless nature.. Who took the task, ran with it, with personal goal to please their Fuhrer and personally progress their standing within the regime.
And the civilians they pretended none of it happened (for the most part the problem was taken care off outside of the real Germany).. But in some camps in germany, they simply pretended nothing wrong was happening and stated "We're haben das nicht gewust."

How could anyone pretend not to know, if there had been actual laws to order it? Answer : there were no such laws because that made it easier for all to deny it. ergo, there were no legal orders.

And yes, ordinary people did horrible things.
On all sides might I add, clearly more in Nazi Germany, Japan but it was not exclusive to to the Axis. The USSR but even the Western Allies have seen horrible things done during the war.

NAZI Germany under Hitler was run like a feudal state..where everybody had their own fiefdoms often with overlapping interests. Hitler liked it that way..

Hitler basically did nothing but sit around espousing his ideas which his feudal lords slavishly wrote down as to do lists. He remained the Bohemian Bum of his youth in Vienna..

Correct, I said that in my earlier post.

he typically talked to two underlings who had overlapping authorities and gave em verbal hints as to what he wanted to see done.. And then the underlings guestimated how they could please Hitler and trump the competing underling to become the favorite of Hitler.
The German Command structure was extrelemely vague at times,

He would suggest what some kind of end result ought to be, not how.
and then the underlings would try to outdo one another to get that result

that he wanted rid of the jews was no secret, but he never officially ordered any deathcamps or gas chambers or mass shootings.
He wanted them gone

He did not state how that was to happen, so any order to do anything murderous, did not come from a governement, it came from one of those underlings who figured that was the way to please hitler.

Legal orders don't work that way

The Dutch volunteer legions... Nederlandsche SS

Hitler was a duly elected official who issued executive orders in the excercise of his official authority..

Source for that?

I know some state he was part Jewish himself and Himmler had dirt on him (Himmler had dirt on just about anybody).. And that Heydrich as such was extra ruthless to take all suspicion of his jewish genes out of the picture.

But never read he saved any Jewish athletes at all??

Except nobody has ever seen such an order to gas or murder people based on their race or ethnicity, from Hitler..
He never officially issued such an order. Books have been written , historians have tried to find it, But nobody has been able to accurately timeline or trace orders to Specific people..

Despite all direct action at the bottom, at the top it was all murky ,vague and handled informally. Accountability as such can't be attributed to just Hitler or any governement.. None of it were legal orders that would stand up in a modern court of law.
People did it, because they figured it was necessary.

Obviously his ideas about the outcome were very clear
But that doesn't make any of the practical ways tried to get their outcome legal.

They could just as well have put every unwanted soul on a boat to Africa with a pamflet "we don't want you, good luck abroad".

And for the most part, that would have been fine(to them), if it weren't for the war aspect , the Holocaust for a big part was triggered and accelerated by practical needs of the War.
They didn't have the time or money or room to deal with it in any other way, so in the field, they just "took care of it".. As they would take care of a pest problem. And orders to take care of such a problem did not come from Hitler in fine detail.. He never sent it downstream
The policy of extermination was not on papers. It was handled at lower ranks, then the goverment, as a chore. They weren't ordered to by the governement.,

To clarify, I do not believe in selective choosing of pictures to erase how they posed to the public in their time of power.

Those glamour shots should be included in an article about them.
To reiterate myself; they weren't each posing with a "I'm an evil bad guy" signs for what was spread by the media.

"He's the GOAT"

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So didn't the United States break international law at the time by funding munitions and personnel to Britain. Seize German merchant ships, imprisoned Germans, ect while maintaining neutrality....


United States and Britain refused peace with Germany to fund the munitions that brought the US out of the Great depression.
Peace in 1940 would have lead to the biggest scandal of fraud the United States have seen since well ever.... Yeah let's talk real history folks. Or erase it completely.

I think it's a bit of a stretch to say they refused peace just to bring the US out of the Depression with ammo bizniz. They all knew what Hitler was up to and that he had to be stopped.
There's a lot of personal conviction by Roosevelt and others in governement, who were privy to a lot more information then the public knew.


I don't think that pre declaration of war is about breaking international law, but US law.
the US was involved with things , that Roosevelt knew, Hoover even knew, there was cooperation on US soil when Roosevelt could not politically even go public about it till he got reelected and the Japs did their thing.

international law doesn't prohibit anybody doing trade with anyone
hell the Dutch sold to both sides in WW1 as a neutral country, WW1 was good for business , the amsterdam cocaine factory never did better then during WW1.

The only risk is that if you sell to A, that B might at some point declare war against you.. That's not a function of international law but of diplomacy and war objectives.

As for other law and what not
the only thing that made orders legal or illegal is wether or not your side won.
And the only thing that made somebody actually go through with atrocities, is personal integrity and peer pressure.

Most did, would and will give in to that peer pressure since it's all around them and overwhelming.. people will usually fall in line with the group around them.
I won't start naming atrocities and massacres comitted post WW2 since i'm sure you know plenty of those names just as well and I don't want to be accused of something i'm not and PARF this thread up. War is terrible, and in war people do terrible things.

It's way more difficult to take a moral stance in life when you have been indoctrinated in the military and 1 taught how to just follow orders 2 taught how to kill.
That alone isn't the problem, but when things really start to go sideways and it lasts a long time, Fatigue and PTSD get thrown in the mix.. And people will do horrible things that no sane objective person will call acceptible in peacetime.

But that doesn't make the orders they followed ...legal , Not for international law, not even for German law.
If no laws were written to declare Jews and Gypsies subhuman and as such liable to get gassed, then any order that led to Deathcamps would have been illegal.
And despite hte Nurnberg race laws (administrative) nobody has been able to find actual laws that permitted the death camps.

And that's my point, there never was a blue print for how they did should run the deathcamps, or how even that those deathcamps had to be built..
The only thing that came down from the top on those matters was ideology, and a statement that those people were not desired in the Reich. Leaving it up to middle management to figure it out how to get the Reich rid of them.
Did Hitler OK it. off course, but he didn't sign any order for it. Cause he knew damn well it would not be legal.

It's the same with the battles on the east front... Political Commissars were in uniform, technically they were covred by the Geneva protocols, but whenever they were encountred and caught, they were summary executed by the Germans.

Later in the war, SS troopers were in many cases Summary executed by the Allies
None of those orders were legal, but hey, it's a war.. chit happens.
None of those orders came fromt Eisenhouwer either.. But they were issued by some battallion commanders. And they weren't on paper either.

Obviously they were a direct response to SS atrocities on other allied troops, but that doesn't change the legalities.

I think to accurately compare at the time and what was known at the time.... breaking down the argument due to what was known later is deflection.

US provided more than just ammo to Britain... when you're providing pilots while claiming neutral. Seizing assets that the US does not recognize as a valid government. Ect the United States didn't want peace. There's plenty of examples in the literature of Churchill making the comments regarding getting the United States in the war. You even have the recent quid pro quo against Roosevelt trying to get hitler to buy American oil from his friends in Texas in 37.

There's so much misinformation and censorship of the word nazi that you have to ask yourself why. We're a few generations away from comparing nazis to the t-rex and the censorship won't be able to dispute that fact...

International law as recognized at the time did not prohibit Germany (or any nation) for doing as they wished with their own citizens. That is why the Nuremburg trials were restricted to acts committed in other countries to their citizens.