Was any Nazi prosecuted by the Nazis for going too far?

by [deleted]
Imazagi

I guess we could talk a lot about the concept of "Nazi" and "too far". Of course not every member of the Wehrmacht, everyone doing guard service at a camp was an ideological national socialist.

The other thing is that one of the key aspects of nazi "crimes" is that a lot of it was legal within the legal framework of an developed, "western" nation. The exclusion of Jewish Germans from the economy and many other steps of anti-jewish policy were done in a legal way within the NS state. Only the most horrible crimes and mass murders in the East were kept secret.

Dealing with enemies of the state was still regulated, there were rules on how Soviet POWs had to be handled (differently from French).

As an example, I just read a report about 2 soldiers in a forced labor camp for the Reichsautobahn in Austria, who got drunk and almost shot each other. Infuriated, they then removed two Soviets from the camp and shot them. The soldiers were apprehended, prosecuted and convicted. They had to serve jail sentences.

Fifty_Stalins

I am currently reading "The Order of the Death's Head" by Heinz Hohne, and he notes that while wholescale murder was the Nazi objective, mistreatment of prisoners was officially considered beneath the dignity of an Aryan. Unfortunately I can't remember the details, but Hohne mentions the execution of an SS officer by the German state for the murders of concentration camp prisoners.

kieslowskifan

One thing to contextualize discussion about prosecution of Germans who "went too far" is that such legal actions tended not to be about soldiers violating the legal rights of other individuals, but the authorities seeing their activities as somehow harming the German war effort. This was especially prominent on the Eastern Front, where a lot of the excesses occurred. The Barbarossa Decree of 13 May 1941 actually spelled out this calculus quite clearly. They make it clear that unlike the Reich or Western Europe, crimes against civilians will not be prosecuted unless these activities had an adverse effect on military discipline. This carte blanche also gave front line commanders a degree of arbitrary authority to prosecute malcontent soldiers for alleged disciplinary problems, which some front commanders did.

Source

Kay, Alex J., Jeff Rutherford, and David Stahel. Nazi Policy on the Eastern Front, 1941: Total War, Genocide, and Radicalization. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2012.