> It was a highly lawful state.

I know what you mean, and I do agree with your main point about not blindly following orders. I hope most people do. It's just the way you phrase it, I also have to disagree. The Nazis at their core were not "lawful", not even "lawful evil". Not unless the one law is "as long Hitler says it's fine, it's fine".

> Any hierarchy, no matter how authoritatively managed, and any communication of orders, no matter how autocratically and dictatorially issued, would stabilize and thus limit the total power of the leader of a totalitarian movement. In the language of the Nazis, it is the dynamic, never-resting "will of the leader" (and not his orders, which could be given a definable authority) that becomes the "supreme law of total rule".

-- Hannah Arendt, "Origins of Totalitarianism"

Also: https://www.hdot.org/debunking-denial/ah1-hitlers-orders/

> Hitler did sign an order for the T-4 euthanasia program. In the T-4 program as many as 100,000 German citizens who were thought to be ‘unworthy of life’ were murdered by Nazi party authorities and other German collaborators. When the German population caught on to what the Nazis were doing with T-4, they protested and Hitler was forced to publicly back down and cancel the program (although it continued secretly in the camps). Having been embarrassed by a written order once, Hitler became wary of doing it again. Important Nazi officials confirmed the oral transmission of Hitler’s secretive orders.

>all people and institutions within a country, state, or community are accountable to the same laws

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Extrajudicial_killing...