Do you think Nazis Soldiers were all bad people?

Question:I know Hitler was a bad person and loads of Nazis soldiers but they were just following orders from Hitler. Either follow, believe, or die as well.....

There must have been a few, but do you know any that were risking their lives to save refugees? Im quite curious actually.

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: I know Hitler was a bad person and loads of Nazis soldiers but they were just following orders from Hitler. Either follow, believe, or die as well.....

There must have been a few, but do you know any that were risking their lives to save refugees? Im quite curious actually.

There are many. I worked as a newspaper reporter for seven years and met several people who were survivors, legal prosecutors, etc. It was a difficult time. Not every one who were members of the Nazi party were bad. You had to be a party member to get a job and feed your family. You were required to join the Hitler Youth program if you were a kid. The current pope of the Catholic Church was a member of the Hitler Youth when he was 13.

There is a book called "Rescued from the Reich" by Bryan Mark Rigg that tells the story of a Nazi soldier who saved a rabbi and some people from the camps. A very good book.

Also, there was a man named Oskar Schindler. An opportunistic businessman, he was one of many who sought to profit from the German invasion of Poland in 1939. Schindler gained ownership of a factory in Kraków from a Jewish industrialist named Nathan Wurzel, under Nazi Germany's Aryanization policies.

Schindler, on Wurzel's advice, renamed the factory Deutsche Emaillewaren-Fabrik, or DEF, to manufacture enamelware. He obtained around 1,000 Jewish slave labourers to work there with the help of his Jewish accountant Itzhak Stern. When Stern and Schindler were first introduced to each other, Schindler held out his hand. Stern declined to take it. When Schindler asked why, he explained that he was a Jew and it was forbidden for a Jew to shake a German's hand. Schindler replied with a German scatological term, "Schei?e"[6]. Initially Schindler may have been motivated by money — hiding wealthy Jewish investors, for instance — but later he began shielding his workers without regard for cost. He would, for instance, claim that unskilled workers were essential to the factory. Harming his workers would result in complaints and demands for compensation from the government.

While witnessing a 1942 raid on the Kraków Ghetto, where soldiers were used to round up the inhabitants for shipment to the concentration camp at P?aszów, Schindler was appalled by the murder of many of the Jews who had been working for him. He was a very persuasive individual, and after the raid, increasingly used all of his skills to protect his Schindlerjuden ("Schindler's Jews"), as they came to be called. Schindler went out of his way to take care of the Jews who worked at DEF, often calling on his legendary charm and ingratiating manner to help his workers get out of difficult situations. Once, says author Eric Silver in The Book of the Just, "Two Gestapo men came to his office and demanded that he hand over a family of five who had bought forged Polish identity papers. 'Three hours after they walked in,' Schindler said, 'two drunk Gestapo men reeled out of my office without their prisoners and without the incriminating documents they had demanded'". Schindler also reportedly began to smuggle children out of the ghetto, delivering them to Polish nuns, who either hid them from the Nazis or claimed they were Christian orphans. He arranged with Amon G?th, the commandant of Plaszow, for 700 Jews to be transferred to an adjacent factory compound, where they would be relatively safe from the depredations of the German guards.

Schindler was arrested twice on suspicion of black market activities and complicity in embezzlement; G?th and other SS-guards used Jewish property (such as money, jewelery, and works of art) for themselves, although according to law, it belonged to the Reich. Schindler mediated such sales on black market and also preserved many stolen items. He managed to avoid being jailed after each arrest. Schindler would typically bribe government officials to avoid investigation.

As the Red Army drew nearer to Auschwitz and the other easternmost concentration camps, the SS began evacuating the remaining prisoners westward. Schindler persuaded the SS officials to allow him to move his 1,100 Jewish workers to Brněnec (German: Brünnlitz) in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia (then in the Sudetenland province), thus sparing the Jews from certain death in the extermination camps. In Brněnec, he gained another former Jewish factory, where he was supposed to produce missiles and hand grenades for the war effort. However, during the months that this factory was running, not a single weapon produced could actually be fired. Hence Schindler made no money; rather, his previously earned fortune was getting steadily smaller from bribing officers and caring for his workers.

After the war

By the end of the war, Schindler had spent his entire fortune on bribes and black-market purchases of supplies for his workers. Virtually destitute, he moved briefly to Regensburg, Germany and, later, Munich, but did not prosper in postwar Germany. In fact, he was reduced to receiving assistance from Jewish organizations. Eventually, Schindler emigrated to Argentina in 1948, where he went bankrupt. Returning to Germany in 1958, he had a series of unsuccessful business ventures. Schindler settled down in a little apartment at Am Hauptbahnhof Nr. 4 in Frankfurt am Main, West Germany and tried again – with help from a Jewish organization – to establish a cement factory. This, too, went bankrupt in 1961. His business partner cancelled their partnership. In 1971 Oskar Schindler moved to live with friends in Hildesheim, Germany. Due to a heart complaint he was taken to the Sankt Bernward Hospital in Hildesheim on 12 September 1974, where he died on 9 October 1974, at the age of 66. The costs for his stay in the hospital were paid from social welfare of the city of Hildesheim. [7][8] He was buried at the Catholic cemetery at Mount Zion in Jerusalem.[9]

No one really knows what Schindler's motives were. However, he was quoted as saying "I knew the people who worked for me... When you know people, you have to behave toward them like human beings."[10]

The writer Herbert Steinhouse, who interviewed Schindler in 1948 at the behest of some of the surviving Schindlerjuden (Schindler's Jews),[2] said
“ Oskar Schindler's exceptional deeds stemmed from just that elementary sense of decency and humanity that our sophisticated age seldom sincerely believes in. A repentant opportunist saw the light and rebelled against the sadism and vile criminality all around him. The inference may be disappointingly simple, especially for all amateur psychoanalysts who would prefer the deeper and more mysterious motive that may, it is true, still lie unprobed and unappreciated. But an hour with Oskar Schindler encourages belief in the simple answer.

Hope this helps.

Ever seen "Letters from Iwa Jima" Its about the oridinary Japanese soldiers there who didn't want to be there, thought the commanders were pretty stupid and didn't really hate the Americans; they just wanted to get back to their families. Probably pretty much the same for all grunts at war.

Quite a few were bad and quite a few weren't probably

I heard some time ago that there were Nazis soldiers who went crazy for what they were doing to the Jews in the concentration camps. Some may have committed suicide. If that is true, I would like to see a movie about that, because most people believe that all of the Nazis soldiers were bad. but some of them probably did have a concsious.

The first thing you have to understand is the relationship between the German Military and the Nazi Party so be careful about using a term like "Nazi soldier".
Soldiers in the Army were not necessarily Nazis just as our soldiers today are not necessarily Republicans or Democrats.
Many of the top leadership of the German military were NOT Nazis and dozens of them were actually in on a plot to assassinate Hitler at one time during the war.
The closest thing to a "Nazi soldier" would be members of the SS. The SS was an elite corps of Nazi Party members that had its origins in the para-military organizations and goon-squads that carried out the party's dirty work on its rise to power.Hitler folded them into the Army as special regiments meant to be loyal to him and nobody else.That is the reason it was the SS and not the regular Army that carried out mass executions and operated concentration and death camps.

There is the idea of separating the concepts of Nazi's and the military. More so there is definitely a difference between German citizens and the Nazi party. No not all German's where or are evil. Just ones that perpetuated it or want to hide what happened.

But keep in mind, something that major and that big is not just the machinations of one man or even a handful. It was a hatred under the surface that was given a place to rise.

As for the following orders, the Nuremberg trails would not accept that as a defense. For that many pp to die more people had to support it then object to it. So to support, or just stand by during genocide is indeed evil.

I have to agree with anumber!
There is a difference between the normal soldiers who had to follow their orders (do it or die because of high treason) and thought they have to protect their country and their families!
And the nazi-soldiers (SS) who were totally loyal to Hitler and ruled the concentration camps.
There was also a conspiracy from high military people who planed a assassination on Hitler (Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg)
And I know also some other no-name soldiers who refused to follow their orders and for that they were sent to a concentration camp or were sent tu Russia!
You can start asking every single soldier from every single country if they like their current President, some like them some don′t but it is their job, to go and fight

Not at all. Most were just doing their job. Many were brainwashed with propaganda. Quite a few of the higher up officers were concerned with the way the war was going and wanted to surrender but Hitler wouldn't have any of it. Then they tried to kill Hitler with a bomb. Irwin Rommel, one of the best German Field Marshals, was one of the conspirators in Hitler's assassination attempt and was later voluntarily killed by the Nazis as retribution.

There were many atrocities committed by the Allied soldiers as well, but the winners aren't tried in war crimes tribunals.

It was mainly they, the German soldiers being raised in the Hitler Youths Camps and all the Nazi propaganda and making the German people believe they were scientifically better than any race, a large number of German infantrymen in France were Polish and other Eastern European "volunteers" and both German and Russian commanders in Stalingrad referred to the battle as "The War of Rats" so I say the SS were probably the worst while the simple infantrymen usually didn't really believe in the Aryan ideas just the simple fact they were fighting for thier country, because the Allies did bomb German cities during the war.