Bannon Threatens FBI Agents: Claiming ‘Just Doing Our Jobs’ Won’t ‘Save You. That’s What The Waffen SS Said’ (republicbrief.com)

In a 1962 letter, as a last-ditch effort for clemency, Holocaust organizer Adolf Eichmann wrote that he and other low-level officers were “forced to serve as mere instruments,” shifting the responsibility for the deaths of millions of Jews to his superiors. The “just following orders” defense, made famous in the post-WWII Nuremberg trials, featured heavily in Eichmann’s court hearings and has become a catch-all phrase for when the government has carried out outrageous acts. “In particular, acting under orders caused participants to perceive a distance from outcomes that they themselves caused,” said study co-author Patrick Haggard, a cognitive neuroscientist at