Conflict between Conscience and Obedience to Orders

The conflict between conscience and obedience to orders becomes decisive at Klooga, where Captain Kleiber orders soldiers to help execute Jewish prisoners. Heinrich Beyer refuses to fire on the women and accepts that his refusal is insubordination; Kleiber shoots him. Adrián Gallardo, who witnesses Beyer’s choice, briefly imagines following his example, but ultimately takes aim and kills. Their opposed actions make the cost of moral refusal visible while showing how obedience can continue, afterward, as a story the perpetrator tells himself to evade responsibility.

The order at Klooga

Kleiber presents the killings as an operation to be completed efficiently. He proposes two firing squads of twenty-five men, working in turns, with the shootings to resume in the afternoon. His instructions reduce the prisoners to an unspoken object of procedure: he refers neither to their identities nor to their humanity, speaking instead of finishing the work cleanly, easily, and quickly. The soldiers’ unease gives way to silence as the captain’s calm language makes mass murder sound like an ordinary task.

The scene puts obedience under the pressure of a direct, unmistakable command. The prisoners are separated by sex, and the women are placed in a line before the firing squad. There is no uncertainty about what the soldiers are being ordered to do. The ethical question is therefore not abstract: it is whether a soldier will carry out an order to shoot unarmed people standing before him.

Beyer’s refusal and its cost

Beyer does not raise his rifle when Kleiber orders the squad to fire. He remains upright, holding his weapon with its butt on the ground, and prays while the women face the armed men. When Kleiber approaches him with a pistol and demands an explanation, Beyer acknowledges that he heard the order. He says he cannot carry it out because his conscience will not allow him to shoot the women.

The refusal is neither concealed nor mistaken for a failure to understand. Beyer explicitly recognizes that he has committed insubordination by disobeying a superior and knows the punishment. Kleiber shoots him in the forehead, then orders another German soldier into the vacant place in the firing line. Estonian volunteers are told to remove the body. Beyer’s conscience interrupts the machinery of the execution only briefly; the unit replaces him, and the killing proceeds. His act does not save the prisoners, but it establishes that obedience was not the only choice available.

Gallardo’s choice

Gallardo watches Beyer’s refusal and death. In a later firing detail, he imagines remaining motionless, as Beyer had, and telling Kleiber that he will not shoot because he has already killed too many innocent people that morning. The imagined refusal briefly softens him and brings the first line of the Lord’s Prayer back to his lips. But this possibility remains a fantasy: when Kleiber gives the order, Gallardo loads, aims, and fires.

He shoots women in successive groups of twenty until he has killed one hundred. The contrast with Beyer is exact and consequential. Gallardo understands what refusal would mean, sees its immediate cost, and chooses not to risk his life. His moment of inward resistance does not alter what he does; prayer and imagined solidarity cannot substitute for refusing the command.

From obedience to self-exculpation

After the executions, Gallardo’s conscience returns as an accusatory question: what has he done? He answers himself by comparing the killings with earlier deaths in combat, insisting that he had killed Russians at Kolpino and Krasny Bor and that otherwise they would have killed him. Yet the scene he has just witnessed is not presented as combat between armed opponents: the victims are unarmed prisoners, and he has followed an order to shoot them. His appeal to the necessities of war cannot make those circumstances disappear.

Gallardo eventually silences the accusation by constructing a theory that makes the killings appear coherent to him. He decides that the Jewish prisoners themselves are making him a murderer through their passivity and acceptance of martyrdom. This reversal places responsibility on the people being killed and recasts their innocence as a weapon against their executioners. The narrative exposes the move as self-exculpation: Gallardo’s account does not change his action, but helps him live with it by blaming those who suffered it.

Moral choice under coercion

The episode distinguishes the force of a command from the consent that makes its execution possible. Kleiber supplies the order and the punishment for disobedience; Beyer’s death demonstrates the threat behind military discipline. But Gallardo’s conduct shows that coercion does not erase the moral difference between refusal and compliance. Beyer pays with his life for naming the boundary his conscience sets. Gallardo sees that boundary, imagines crossing it, and steps back.

The aftermath sharpens the distinction between remorse and responsibility. Gallardo’s memory of Beyer and his brief prayer register an awareness that he could have acted otherwise. His later theory, however, turns that awareness outward into accusation. The episode thus treats conscience not as a guarantee of virtue but as a demand that can be resisted, followed by an effort to make resistance seem impossible. Beyer’s death cannot halt the executions, yet his refusal remains the measure against which Gallardo’s obedience—and the self-deception that follows it—can be judged.