Patriotism and the Lord of the Rings

[William Cloud Hicklin]

since ethics and morality should always trump "My country right or wrong".

That's really a very modern notion, and fairly American, or at least a reflection of American thinking's influence on the world. The old paradigm, which certainly dominated the aristocratic Junker officer corps, was indeed mein Kaiser/Vaterland/Fuehrer, richtig oder falsch. The idea of disobeying an order just because you personally disagreed with it (for any reason) was utterly alien- as indeed it would have been to Napoleon's marechals or Marlborough's subordinates. It's fairly hard today to grasp the extent to which the Subject's Duty of Obedience was the assumed basis of political thinking in former times.

Even under the original Hague Convention of 1899, the first attempt to create or at least codify a Law of Armed Conflict, responsibility for a war crime fell entirely on the authority who ordered it: his subordinates could not be held culpable for obeying the order. In the Neumann Trial (1922) the Leipzig Supreme Court explicitly ruled that Befehl ist Befehl was a complete defense. (The Nuremburg Tribunals may have advanced 'human rights,' but as courts of law they were pretty much kangaroo courts).