Choices leaders make

I am haunted by a photo. 

The location is inside the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau in southern Germany, on the day in 1945 when U.S. troops fought their way inside. They found starving men and corpses all around. A train engine was hitched to 39 boxcars packed with the bodies of some 2000 prisoners. The SS camp guards had meant to hide their crimes, steaming away with the physical evidence. U.S. troops, hardened veterans who had fought their way north from Italy, just lost it.  At one confused moment, some lined SS men up against a wall and began gunning them down.

Their commander, Lt. Colonel Felix Sparks, ordered the Americans to stop shooting, holding up his hand and firing into the air. Confronted with horror, he demanded discipline.

Subsequently, Dachau became the site of the first postwar war crimes tribunal which set the legal precedents and patterns for the subsequent Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders. Sparks' intervention in the midst of natural human reaction to atrocity created the context for that legal process to be invented. Some number of Germans were killed, but Sparks would not allow his men to unleash their appropriate passions.

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Under the Trump presidency, it has repeatedly felt as if rightful order -- the rule of law, simple decency -- depended on a fragile bulwark provided by career professionals whose conception of doing their job impeded the Leader's autocratic aspirations. Most recently I pointed to the security professionals working to ensure we could have an undamaged election; one of these, Christopher Krebs, has since paid the price of doing his duty, getting fired by tweet for his honesty.

At Dachau, Lt. Colonel Sparks' adherence to his professional code interrupted what could have been mass vengeance. His soldiers' reaction to the vile house of horror they had liberated feels utterly understandable. Sparks stood apart. How does that happen?

His commanding officers certainly preferred that the troops maintain good discipline, if only because the alternative -- massacre responding to massacre -- would have led to lengthy inquiries. But somehow the leaders of the time, civilian and military, had inculcated a sense that their armies were fighting for higher purposes than necessity and survival. Even in the midst of death and destruction, many of these men believed their sacrifice was not only for their buddies and to get back to their families, but also for democracy, decency, humanity.

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It was empire up against other peoples' aspirations -- and Vietnam in particular -- that shattered that belief structure, I think. It had value, even if always partially delusional. Once broken, it became almost impossibly hard to reestablish, though the contemporary US military has tried pretty hard. No wonder Donald Trump had to pardon the war criminal SEAL Eddie Gallagher.

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I've written about Dachau before when I was surprised to discover an uncle had been a figure in that story.

Apparently Netflix has issued a new documentary about Felix Sparks' unit. I won't be watching it because I don't watch war films. H/t to an interview in Task and Purpose for introducing me to the photo.