Interesting. I'd like to see a list sometime (doesn't have to be this thread, I've digressed enough) of which others you would approve of as deserving no punishment.
Could Rommel have survived the purge?
- Thread starter UrbanRedneck
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BlairWitch749
Banned
Canairis is the exception rather than the rule
Generally; its relatively easy to make a case for army and army group commanders, their staff, high command and members of the actual nazi government
there are plenty of people of lower rank who would be deserving of death BUT I assume it would be too complicated and time consuming to prosecute down to lower levels.... army and above is probably the minimum to send a message that we don't tolerate people committing or enabling mass murder and the maximum that a fairly large prosecution team could handle in a 3 year period
I remember a thread was made just for the purpose of subjecting people to the Blairwitch Test and determining whether they were war criminals.
Yeah, but I was just wondering with other officers other than Von Witzleben would be relatively innocent to not deserve death. Like say von Leeb, I dunno.
My test is somewhat different, it is based in large part on what is considered important war crimes in a certain era not what is considered war crimes decades or centuries later. At my high school they had busts of a number of American political and military leaders up. And, all of them were criminals in one way or the other that by today's standards would spend decades to life in jail for their actions (like slavery, war crimes, etc) and some of them like Andrew Jackson would almost certainly be executed for ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. But, that is measuring these peoples actions by modern standards instead of the standards at the time they were alive.
In the case of Rommel there was no chance of him serving a day in jail given the opinion of the Allied government's, their publics and their militaries regarding him and his actions if say after being strafed he went into a coma for most of a year and that kept him from being suicided.
Lets put it this way when the film about Rommel came out just a few years after the war in the only country that might have lodged a criminal complaint against him (France) it was very well recieved with no protests. It was better recieved in France then even in England and Australia where it sold well, but there were some protests against the film. In fact there were protests in Germany itself.
I have found its Germans themselves, even moreso after the Cold War ended that are the most divided about the legacy of Rommel. Discussions of if he did or did not commit a war crime or two like being involved in say the plans for constructing the Atlantic Wall is really non-existant other then for some hard core historians. The main debate is and will continue to be for decades if not centuries to come what did Rommel represent.
Did he represent those in Germany that opposed Nazism as by 1943/44 he was trying to find ways of getting rid of the Nazi leadership and was at the end of 1944 forced to suicide himself as he knew about the plot against Hitler and advised the plotters to kill Goering and Himmler as well? Or did he represent Nazism because he fought in France and North Africa on behalf of Nazi controlled Germany? That is the real debate that will continue long past our deaths.
In my view he represented Bismarckian militarists with the values of Imperial Germany. During the 30s and early 40s he represented the alliance between that faction in Germany with the Nazis as they shared some of the same goals of making Germany a world power again and paying the WAllies back for the Treaty of Versailles. In the mid 40s he came to represent the disillusionment and hatred of the Nazi leadership by some in the Germany over them mass killing innocent civilians as well as Hitler's moronic military decisions.
If he somehow managed to survive the war which was very unlikely given all his different 'plans and ideas' to save Germany including ideas to the June 20th plotters he would have had alot of options. If he wanted he could have become a NATO general like Hans Speidel his chief of staff or he could have gotten into politics. But, I suspect he would have retired and simply given speeches and wrote a few books as the man was an emotional wreck by the end of 1944 over his failure the save Germany.
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BlairWitch749
Banned
I remember that thread... didn't go well for most who served on the eastern front
stratego,
we had a long debate thread on the blairwitch test and theory... which came about from trying to figure out how an "expanded" nuremberg trial could or should have gone; urban fox (who wasn't wrong, but perhaps too ambitious) suggested trying people at the regimental level; but I argued that given the fact that at any one point there where over 500 regiments on active service in the heer and waffen ss and luftwaffe field divisions, and their commanders and staffs where in a state of near constant rotation, I felt that would involve tens of thousands of prosecutions and that the task would be far too great for even a massive judicial effort;
at corps level its a mixed bag... there are certainly many including their staffs who where highly guilty like Hausser when he commanded 2nd ss panzer corps (who allowed the totemkempf and leibstandarte to get out of control when taking prisoners; particularly Pieper's "blow torch battalion which liked to liquidate Ukrainian villages) BUT there where corps commanders like Bayerlin, Von Sauken and others who fought a largely clean war;
when we took it to army level it was pretty much universal guilt because even if the fellow didn't committ war crimes as an actual army commander their previous assignments as staff officers or lover level almost always saw them do so
Leeb is not any different than Kluge...because he was anti hitler doesn't make him a saint. as commander of army group north he arranged and facilitated the movement and operation of einsatzgruppen A and as army group commander bears responsibility for the out of control actions of the 4th ss polezi division which was one of the most sinister formations ever employed in warfare (and thats not making any moral judgements about his seige of leningrad or the vicious anti partisan sweeps in his rear areas)
He could be hung with no issues on the BW method
Would you aplly that logic to slavery? Imagine a post civil war Nuremberg in the States where slavery is persecuted as a crime against humanity? Would you hang every confederated corps commander? Every slave owner?
It's easy to judge from a safe 50 years distance. Those who where making decisions in the 40s, and who had been mass bombing civilians all over europe and japan rcently, where not so radical, and they had a closer view of the situation.
Yes. As with the ACW, there were good political and practical reasons to let the majority of former German commanders go unpunished for their undoubted crimes - it certainly made the transition to peace a lot easier in both instances. But that doesn't mean no crimes were committed or that we should continue 60 years later to whitewash men like Rommel, who were astonishing moral imbeciles at best and, at worst, no different from any other prominent member of the Nazi hierarchy.
1. Very difficult moral dilema. The United states whitewashing of slavery might of been cynical, but was crucial to national union. Take the case of the decolonization wars in Africa. I've met people who fought on both sides, and their attitude (the fighters, not the politicians) is of saying "war is war" and swaping war stories while pretending nobody did anything wrong on either side. It's very difficult to judge. Imagine a Senior RAF officer had tried to prevent the bombing of dresden for moral reasons. He would have been regarded as a lunatic, or a traitor, and probably earned the contempt of his own troops. Could the officers who rallied to the cause of their home states in the civil war have done anything else? Could the Germans?
2. As for Rommel, he played the Hitler's boy card early on his career. He was with Hitler's staff on Poland, used Hitler's influence to get command of the 7th PzD in France and had a nazi propagand team embebed on his divison for that campaign. The movie that team made made him a star and got him his africa command. But we must remenber that, not having taken the General Staff course, he was a outsider and felt he had a score to settle with General Staff Officers. And like many German officers he felt that his country had been wronged at Versailles and that this time they just had to win by whatever means necessary.
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Nor should we whitewash men of other "tags"
who did as bad as the Nazi, but justified their crimes with other
more euphonic ideologies. What about those behind, and inside OPERATION KRATES? What about the real, behind the curtains mechanics of Viet Nam? What about Iraq? What about the Bhopal genocide? Let there be an equal lawlessness or an equal law.’ I am completely against the nazi - because they did behave as monsters, and therefore were/are monsters. I won't, however, support treating them worse, or better, than any other monsters. Nor will I support the whitewashing of non-nazi monsters because they aren't nazi... Those behind (and inside) Krates were officially whitewashed. By the un-biased Bh criteria, they should have hung. Unfortunately people will only apply their biased BH criteria.
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I was just hoping to get a list of German military officers other than von Witzleben or Canaris who get a pass. It seems interesting to find the few who are innocentish.
BlairWitch749
Banned
at what rank are you looking for non war criminals? if you keep it to generaleutant and below there are plenty
BlairWitch749
Banned
Given his beloved status in the British/German press it might be deemed politically expedient to shift all the punishment for that to Speer
Talk about non Nazis?How about the commander of the Xiv(?)Ppanzer Corps-Von Senger und Etterlin.He was the defender at Monte Cassino and a devout Roman Catholic.Performed a good fighting withdrawal at Cassino.BTW he maintained he had NO artillery or other WMD at the vacinity of the abbey.
BlairWitch749
Banned
Corps is the lowest level where you find a fair number of people who would not require hanging under the BW method
Erwin Rommel believed forced conscription of citizens in a time of war to 'help the war effort' was acceptable, but he also wrote they must be paid for their work and therefore its not slavery. He did write to the German High Command a directive which was ignored that the French workers should be paid.
Why forced labor (paid or unpaid) wasn't treated that harshly after the war was that the France and the USSR had a huge number of German POWs they were working unpaid for some time after the war. Hell, the brother of that German soldier I knew who was captured by the Russians as a POW died in the 1950s in Sibera of starvation at a forced labor camp and one can be certain he wasn't 'paid' for his services to the USSR.
Rommel believed killing military soldiers and officers in a time of war was acceptable even though he wanted a 'war without hate' where there was a certain degree of reciprocity so that he could meet with British officers in the desert and talk to them without either side hating one another when there were lulls in the fighting. Rommel also believed killing/executing political officals was also acceptable. He supported the Night of the Long Knifes and believed in the 30s up to the early 40s that Hitler when he felt secure in his political position would evenutally have a Night of the Long Knifes part II this time against the SS leadership.
Of course Rommel's view on Hitler was quite wrong and on his return from Africa in 1943 he found out from army officers fighting in the East that mass killings of innocent civilians were going on in Eastern Europe by the Waffen SS. The officers didn't tell him the regular army was involved in any of the mass killings. He came to believe in 1943 that Himmler was behind it and was taking advantage of Hitler's declining mental health to do what he wanted. By early 1944 though according to his son he learned of the death camps from the anti-Nazi factions in the government and learned that Hitler was aware of these camps and supported what was going on.
It was at this point that he decided that Hitler and the entire Nazi high command needed to be removed by force. The problem is the German public still loved Hitler and most of the Army supported Hitler and knowing history Rommel knew how the Roman public reacted to the murder of their beloved dictator by Senators (they burned the Senate down and drove the killers out of Rome) and the Army mostly sided against those who killed Caesar leading to their deaths.
Going by Rommel own statements as well as those around him his ideal plan would have gone something like this.... he kicks the ass of the Anglo-Americans at Normandy and traps their forces and then invites Hitler and the Nazi leadership to France to witness the defeat of the Anglo-American invasion. When they show up Goring, Himmer, Hitler, and company would die in an big explosion which would be blamed on an allied bombing raid while Rommel meets with IKE and Monty and hammer out peace terms for the hand over of German held lands in Western Europe and the de-Nazification of Germany in exchange for peace with the WAllies so Germany could focus on fighting the USSR. Then he contacts the Field Marshal's in the East to get them to agree to a military run government until at least the end of the war.
Of course he wasn't successful in dealing with the WAllied landings which limited his options and he fished around and dabbled in different ideas and plots to save Germany, some of them pretty far fetched, his best plan was probably his organizing the mass surrender of forces in the France to the WAllies so they got to Berlin before the Red Army. That would have saved perhaps millions of lives, but it likely wouldn't have avoided the occupation of half of Germany by Stalin which was one of Rommel's central goals as he viewed Stalin as negatively as he viewed the likes of Himmler. But, if he wasn't injured and was ready to order a mass surrender in the West he would have had to have gotten his family somehow out of the country or they would have been killed.
The funny thing is he probably would be viewed alot more negatively today if that happened. By many in the West he would be viewed as a failed general trying to save his own skin. In Germany for a long time he would be viewed as a traitor who stabbed his country in the back during a time of war. After the war because he was killed by the Nazis it was ok to promote him as a positive symbol of Germans in the West and in Germany after the war the Anglo-Americans used Rommel both as an anti-Nazi and anti-Communist symbol, but they didn't push the notion that he tried to organize a surrender and they didn't release alot of their evidence that has only been released with the end of the Cold War that Rommel was told about the entire plan to kill Hitler. They did this to let the pro-Nazi Germans or at least Germans who would be opposed to killing their leader in a time of war believe that Rommel didn't really know about it and the evidence was all cooked up by torture by Rommel's enemies (some of which it was).
The Anglo-American allies wanted to leave open the notion to the legions of young Germans who were hateful towards those Germans who wanted to surrender or kill Hitler that Rommel's forced suicide was just a setlling of political scores by people like Himmler and Goring. The WAllies wanted Rommel to be a symbol both to anti-Nazi and pro-Nazi Germans after the war as both groups were going to be used in what many in the West believed was the inevitable third World War against the USSR. In life Rommel was used and he was suicided and still used by the Nazi's even in death. After the war he was used by the same nations he fought during the war for propaganda purposes. Of course Rommel isn't exactly around to shake his head at the sad irony of it.
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