Anne Frank Ethical Questions

I recently saw the play Anne Frank at the Stratford festival. Before the play began all the characters stood in a line introducing themselves telling us their names, who they played and gave a little anecdote about themselves or about their character. When the character who played the general got up to give his story he said that after war when his character was interrogated as to why he did what he did he said that it was only because he was taking orders. This brings up a very interesting ethical question. Should soldiers be punished for crimes that they completed while under the ordered of another?
I personally don’t believe so. If you were to live in a country that is at war there, are two sides that could probably be taken. The first

being that you support your country and contribute to the war effort. The other is that you you don’t support your country and are seen as a traitor by the law. It is very rare that the latter opinion is more popular among the people, making the it the more dangerous opinion to have. If a person who is part of the government of your country were to give you an order to kill a person, it can, can and most probably will, be considered treason if you were to disobey. So when a person, like the general, tells us that he committed his crimes only because he was ordered to it gives a good point.
On top of that, if he were to say no, it wouldn’t matter. During the time of WWII, the Nazi party was extremely popular among german citizens. If he would have said no, they would have simply turned to the next guy who would have probably say yes!
Especially when looking at wars that happened a long time ago like the holocaust, there is another factor that must be applied to the decision, age. It was just two days ago when a 91 year old woman was charged with accessory to murder in Germany for being a telegraph operator at Auschwitz death camp between april and july of 1944. The prosecutors say that she an accessory to the murder of about 260 000 people. The thing is though is that she was 20 in 1944, not even 21 and therefore a minor, and just as many people of that age, she probably had no idea of what she was doing. On top of that, just like with the general, she probably had little to no choice on the matter.
The similarity with most of these cases is that the people who committed with these cases are faced with a catch 22.If we were to dumb this down, all this really is, is a more complex version of the age old parenting question “If *insert name here* were to jump off a cliff, would you?” Except if you don’t jump off the cliff, someone else will push you off for not doing it.