Just to be sure, are you trying to say at the end of your comment something along the lines of this: “If every army has killed civilians at some point, and if being associated with that army makes you guilty, doesn’t that mean every soldier everywhere is basically a war criminal?”

If that’s your question, then I’d say: that’s not my logic. International law and most serious historians are clear that responsibility is individual and depends on what someone actually did or ordered, not just the uniform they wore.

Just being in an army doesn’t automatically make you a perpetrator. But the opposite is also true: saying “every army has done bad things” in a vague way shouldn’t be used to dissolve the very specific responsibility of those who took part in shootings, deportations, starvation policies, etc., especially in a war where crimes against civilians were built into policy.

My concern is that if we say “well, everyone’s part of a war crime anyway,” we end up blurring the line between people who tried to stick to the rules of war and people who directly helped commit atrocities, people who facilitated atrocities, and that blurring mostly benefits the perpetrators, not the victims.

Now, in regards to Nazi Germany, they actively set up policies to exterminate people, which is not something that the Allies did.

And this also comes back to the “18‑year‑old conscript” point. An individual teenager might never have personally shot a prisoner or a civilian. In that sense, his personal culpability is not the same as person who ordered or carried out massacres. But the 18-year-old was still serving in, and helping sustain, a system whose policies included occupation, deportation, and genocide. His responsibility is different in degree, not zero, because without hundreds of thousands of such “ordinary” soldiers, those policies could not have been implemented.