SUPERIOR ORDERS

We are bound to obey the legitimate orders of our legitimate superiors in any society we claim to be part of. The defendants at Nuremberg admitted themselves to be members of the Nazi State; both the defendants and the prosecutors admitted that Nazi Germany was a state in the international sense of that term, and in that state orders could be legitimately conveyed down the appropriate chain of military or civil command. Because authority was legitimately vested in the state, it could be presumed to be properly exercised by those tn whom commands were addressed. This presumption was not irrebuttable to the ordinary European mind; but the Nazis strove to make it irrebuttable. The Nazis sought to make the state the sole society to which a Nazi could belong, and to make the head of that state the sole source of legal and moral obligation; this monolithic conception, intended to be the strength of the Nazi state, in fact became its greatest weakness. When the Fuhrer destroyed himself, he also carried the Nazi state to destruction: as he intended. A strong society is one which allows the free growth of legitimate aspirations expressed in different forms of societies and corporations. The closed, or totalitarian, form of society looks strong from outside, it looks neat and streamlined, but internally its life tends to be cramped and to lack spontaneity when not kept young by regular blood transfusions from those who direct it and who themselves remain relatively free. It is fashionable nowadays for some critics of the Church to compare the Church with a totalitarian state. Clearly there are resemblances between any well-organised hierarchical societies when viewed from outside: but such a comparison overlooks the essential difference in spirit between the Church and the secular state.