Home: Blog: 2006-04-12 Free the Nuremberg 18

Kendall-Smith: Betrayed tradition
of mindless patriotic obedienceThree cheers for Assistant Judge Advocate Jack Bayliss for finally releasing our soldiers from the odious burdens of individual thought, and letting them get on with the vital work of killing foreigners.

Obedience of orders is at the heart of any disciplined force. Refusal to obey orders means the force is not a disciplined force but a rabble. Those who wear the Queen's uniform cannot pick and choose which orders they will obey. Those who seek to do so must face serious consequences.

These were the Assistant Judge's memorable words as he sent Flight Lieutenant Malcolm Kendall-Smith off to chokey for refusing to fight in Iraq, on the irrelevant grounds that the war was not legal. OK, so they didn't have the weapons of mass destruction on which our Prime Minister Tony Blair premissed the invasion, but they were still (a) thoroughly inconvenient to US foreign policy, and (b) largely bearded.

I may be suffering from a long-term mental illness, and taking a course of powerful psychoactive drugs, but that's good enough for me.

And not a moment too soon. Previously, our boys were hampered by the liberal eyewash of the Nuremberg Principles, established to try senior Nazis at the end of the second world war, which stated that:

Any person who commits an act which constitutes a crime under international law is responsible therefore and liable to punishment...The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.

It was sophistry like this which was used to condemn those models of obedience, the Nuremberg 18, and I for one would like to commend the Assistant Judge for finally rescuing their reputations:

Martin Bormann, Nazi Party Secretary
Karl Donitz, German Admiral
Hans Frank, Ruler of occupied Poland
Wilhelm Frick, Hitler's Minister of the Interior
Walter Funk, Hitler's Minister of Economics
Hermann Goring, Hitler's Commander of the Luftwaffe
Rudolf Hess, Hitler's deputy
Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Concentration camp commander
Wilhelm Keitel, Head of Oberkommando der Wehrmacht
Konstantin von Neurath, Protector of Bohemia and Moravia
Erich Raeder, German Admiral
Joachim von Ribbentrop, Minister of Foreign Affairs
Alfred Rosenberg, Protector of the Eastern Territories
Fritz Sauckel, Head of the Nazi slave labour program
Baldur von Schirach, Gauleiter of Vienna
Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Gauleiter of occupied Holland
Albert Speer, Minister of Armaments
Julius Streicher, editor of Der Sturmer

These men were all under the direct command of the German Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, and (as the Assistant Judge correctly explained) could not "pick and choose which orders they obeyed". It is a stain on our national character that 60 years since the execution of men like Ernst Kaltenbrunner, an SS officer who never refused an order, he is still dead.

I say, a bit "hats off" to Assistant Judge Jack Bayliss: and fair play to our government's social rehabilitation scheme which is allowing rather dim people to gain some self-respect through this kind of apprenticeship. Let's hope the Assistant Judge gets enough time between fetching coffees and nipping out to buy ciggies for the real judges to reopen the case of the Nuremberg 18!

Manny