Are there any records of Nazi soldiers being summarily executed for refusing to participate in war crimes?

by Tired8281
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There is no documented case of a soldier of the Wehrmacht or Waffen-SS or any other formation of the Nazi state being executed for refusing to participate in war crimes, summarily or otherwise. Not a single one.

And it isn't that people haven't looked. Going back to the IMT in Nuremberg and even the Soviet War Crimes trials in 1944, members of German military formations have pleaded "Befehlsnotstand" (I don't know the direct translation but it means that you receive orders from your superior and are forced to carry them out under the thread of serious bodily harm or death – a plea that didn't even exist legally in Germany at the time). Given how common this idea was and still is that German soldiers had to shoot Jews and others or be shot themselves, historians have scoured the archives to see if this actually holds up but, alas, not one single case where this happened exists.

And it is also not the case that disobedience did not occur. For the SS and Police Courts disobedience was one of the most frequent reasons to indict people (10-20% of their cases) thought that number includes all kinds of disobedience, not just refusal to participate in war crimes. To illustrate this, there is only one single case of Waffen-SS member being sentenced to death for disobedience: He tried to drunkenly shot a can off of a subordinates head and injured the man deadly in the process. Most other cases of disobedience deal with having intercourse with Polish or Soviet women.

As for what did happen when members of an SS and Police formation or the Wehrmacht or the Waffen-SS refused to participate in war crimes: Most often, officially nothing happened. They might be transferred to another unit or might be demoted, if anything officially at all happened. However, the real pressure was applied unofficially in that, as Christopher Browning details in his book Ordinary Men, people who refused to participate were under social pressure form their comrades and officers. They were made out to look weak, mocked, and accused of "betraying" their comrades.

"Next to ideological indoctrination", writes Browning, "a decisive factor [for participation in war crimes] was group conformity." He details how those who contemplated refusing to shot were afraid of being ostracized, of letting their comrades down and so on and so forth. So, it was not the thread of death but rather social dynamics that served to penalize those who refused.

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