Are henchmen worse than their masters ?

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What I mean is, is a henchman more responsible for doing terrible things than their master. I have read plenty of books and other sources of information on dictators and the henchmen in the secret police who enforce the rules and do their dirty work for them. I remember watching a video about the Night of the Long Knives in Nazi Germany in which Hitler had many of his real or imagined opponents shot in 1934 and in it, a historian was explaining how it was people like Goring, Himmler and Heydrich who fed Hitler with information on his opponents that was completely false and many were loyal to him anyway but still got shot. It even reminds me of when I watched the TV series The Tudors where Henry VIII (played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers) had thousands of people executed including two of his wives and there were people in his court who were probably more bloodthirsty than he was and feeding his paranoia with false information about people who might oppose him.

Lavrenti Beria is a good candidate

Yep, I should have mentioned him and Stalin.

As long as leaders have plausible deniability over any involvement with the crimes committed by their henchmen (i.e., loyal followers, not necessarily paid), they can retain credibility when they condemn those crimes and promise full investigations and justice against the perpetrators.

For example, King Henry II is believed to have said, "What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and brought up in my household, who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born cleric?", in reference to Archbishop Thomas Becket of Canterbury.  Later, some of the king's loyal followers assassinated Becket.  The king was able to truthfully declare that he never gave the order.  The assassins were never prosecuted in secular court, but were excommunicated from the Church, which later reinstated them after 14 years of penitent service.

Source:  This Wikipedia Article 

And while Maffia Dons may never actually give orders, their wishes are still somehow carried out by their henchmen.

So, in a way, it could be argued that henchmen are indeed worse than their 'masters', even though they are all complicit in the same crimes.

Kind of a meaningless question.

The master gives the order (either explicitly, or implicitly) and the henchmen carry it out. Both are mutually dependent and both complicit equally.

I suppose that if the henchmen "go above and beyond the call of duty" and do more that what the boss ordered than they could be said to be worse than him.

If I ordered my minions to quietly and discretly "take you out" and my minions use it as an excuse to make a party out of it and to...torture you...and dismember you...and decorate your front yard with your disembodied body parts then ...yes that might be a rare case of my henchmen being "worse than me".

It so hard to get good help these days!

Actually if you take the Nazis, then there are several levels of henchmen down from Hitler leading to the actual grunts/peons who actually do the mass killing.

Question is giving the order as bad as being the one chopping up innocents?

Even here in South Africa in the 1950s through to the 80s a culture was created where minions such as police thought they had carte blanche to do as they pleased and pretend it was for the "greater good". Certainly they felt free to commit murders and torture knowing that even if there were investigations, they would simply get a slap on the wrist. Many of them felt it gave them power, and were thus corrupted.

They only faced retribution / Nemesis for their actions after apartheid was dismantled.

The answer to that question is "of course its as bad".
Next topic.

Followers must be held accountable to prevent similar incidents from happening again.

There are reasons for pardoning them, either for the sake of humanitarianism or because they have corrected their evil ways. But it's hard to believe that in the current society they would have true remorse.

I don't know the purpose of comparing them to the master. Punishment should be based on the deterrent effect it will have on society. Skinning people in primitive tribes has the same crime-reducing effect as putting people in "open" prisons in Northern Europe in modern society. The above are my general thoughts.

But that opens up a can of thought worms, doesn't it?

By this logic, can we say that anyone who serves in any military bears equal responsibility for the consequences of war?

Our leaders couldn't drag us into their wars (which most of us have zero investment in btw) if people didn't sign up to serve in armies. It would just be Putin and Zelenski slugging it out in a boxing ring, for example.

You could say that was a better way of handling things but would you say it was the soldiers fault for enabling their leaders? Are they not henchmen?

I think these soldiers have a responsibility, if everyone can serve according to their own political opinions and not for military pay. Then the military strength of the side that should win will be greatly increased, thus hastening the end of the war.

The relevant social expectation is to "raise the muzzle one centimeter"—Sorry, this social expectation exists in my country. I don’t know if there is a similar concept in your country.

A negative example is that if simply confessing to Jesus could erase one's criminal record without having to follow the Ten Commandments, then murder and arson would become common among Christians.

I don't think it's that simple. After WWII there was a massive debate over culpability for war crimes committed by the German troops and Japanese imperial forces. The vast majority (I suspect > 95%) of foot soldiers, militia and others who carried out war crimes were never prosecuted. This same debate emerged after the Rwandan genocide. Others like the genocide of Cambodians by Pol Pot's followers, Bangladeshis by Pakistani or Burmese troops or Sri Lankan Tamil civilians by the Sinhalese army go completely unpunished.

Prosecuters can only go after readily identifiable individuals with some level of notoriety (like camp guards) or prominent leaders or leaders who gave orders. In the layers of heirarchy those middlemen who gave orders go unpunished.

To quote Star wars - "Good soldiers follow orders". There is one train of thought that when orders are given by those in authority you have no choice but to follow orders.

I think it could only be answered on a case-by-case basis, not in general. And even for a given specific case, it may be hard to find out how much free choice the henchman had, how much coercion had been applied, whether or not they'd been brainwashed, and to what degree. We don't even have scientific units of measurement for those things.

Then there's the problem of the word "worse" - which means "more bad." Do good and bad people exist, or would we be better off asking "are henchmen more dangerous than their masters?" If so, how do we measure how dangerous a person is?

So I don't think there's any useful answer to the question, except maybe "it depends."

Would be case by case, Interestingly Hitler and Stalin had a habit of disposing of certain henchmen when the need arose.

I would say the orange shirts are worse than the orange man but he does urge them on.

You probably can't generalize.

There's henchmen who use the authority their master gives them to be even worse than their boss requires, whether it's abusing that authority for personal issues or just by being needlessly petty and zealous in their pursuit of the boss' goals.

There's also henchmen who try to undertake the boss' plans in the least terrible way possible, at least some of the time.

Some henchmen also have limits to the sort of evils or the scale of evils they're willing to participate in.

There's evil overlords who largely just want to achieve their goals, the suffering inflicted to do so is merely a means to an end. There's others for whom the suffering inflicted is a major goal unto itself (especially in fiction).

With that in mind it seems like you'd be hard pressed to form a generalized rule of thumb about who's worse.