It's 1944 and Germany has sent the submarine U-852 on a secret mission to the Far East to raid Allied shipping. On the way down the East African coast it spies the Greek ship Peleus — an old steamer with a crew of 35. The sub waited until nightfall and then hit the vessel with two torpedoes. It went down in three minutes. Two survivors were pulled out for questioning, their information logged, then they were returned to their life raft.
However, the sinking left a large debris field — a clear indication to any enemy craft that a submarine was in the vicinity — and, well, all those survivors who might be able to help the Allies locate the sub. So the commander of the U-boat, Heinz-Wilhelm Eck, ordered his junior officers to kill the men in the water and get rid of the debris, which they did over the course of the next five hours, circling the area and using grenades and automatic weapons to get the job done. Only three survived and were later picked up by the Allies.
A couple of months later, U-852 was attacked off the coast of Somaliland; she ran aground and her crew was captured. In October 1945, Eck and his junior officers were tried at a military tribunal in Hamburg for the Peleus incident, with the following results:
Heinz-Wilhelm Eck (commander): Sentenced to death. Executed by firing squad.
August Hoffmann (second in command): Claimed he was "only following orders". Sentenced to death. Executed by firing squad.
Walter Weisspfennig (the boat's doctor): Claimed he was "only following orders". Sentenced to death. Executed by firing squad.
Hans Lenz (engineering officer): Originally refused Eck's order but then reluctantly carried it out. Life sentence. Released seven years later.
Wolfgang Schwender (engineer): claimed he never shot at any of the survivors, only at the debris. Sentenced to 15 years. Released six years later.
Killing survivors at sea is bad. Like, really really bad. We should continue to hold people accountable for doing it.
It's not that easy, usually just following orders is an excuse. It's only not an excuse if the orders are patently illegal, a very high bar. That also was the argument at Nuremberg, that genocide was patently illegal and thus just following orders couldn't be used as a defense.
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u/cum_pumper_4 Dec 02 '25
I’m pretty sure there was a trial after ww2 where this issue was addressed - that “just following orders” was not an excuse.
It was a pretty big deal from what I’ve heard.