How many Nazis can survive Nuremburg?

Iirc, reading an article on Doenitz, one of the major cases against him was the order to not rescue allied sailors sunk by the U-boats, which was considered "uncivilized" or something of the sort. The US Navy however at a point stopped rescuing Japanese sailors from boats sunk by our subs, so if I'm remembering it all correctly, Nimitz thought it would be slightly hypocritical to hang Doenitz for something America did also. To a point.
 
Doenitz rewarded POWs murdering their inmates in camps.
He was also fiercely antisemitic and pro-Nazi so no tears lost on that one.


To see how many crimes went unpunished-just one example:
http://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/549.html





I disagree-the trials didn't work. They were largely only symbolic and largely spared one of the most atrocious perpetrators:Wehrmacht-leading to its unfortunate myth. Many, many crimes went unpunished, and the German public believed it were only the selective few Nazis responsible for atrocities in Nazi Germany. Thus the Nuremburg Trials I see as a failure.

OK, if Doenitz supported illegal executions of POWs and was an ardent Nazi, his sentence was just.

Regardling whether or not the trials "worked", it depends upon what their purpose was. If you were after real justice, no they didn't. But to the extent that they contributed to the reconstruction of the Federal Republic as a civil, democratic republic willing to accept responsibility for Nazi crimes (which by and large it did - unlike the DDR), they were a huge success.
 
Iirc, reading an article on Doenitz, one of the major cases against him was the order to not rescue allied sailors sunk by the U-boats, which was considered "uncivilized" or something of the sort. The US Navy however at a point stopped rescuing Japanese sailors from boats sunk by our subs, so if I'm remembering it all correctly, Nimitz thought it would be slightly hypocritical to hang Doenitz for something America did also. To a point.

My point regarding Doenitz and Raeder as well. German submarine policy was a response to the real risk that submarines offering assistance to sailors stranded at sea endangered the submarine. In the Atlantic, where the allies maintained air control and a massive ASW campaign from 1943 on, this was a legitimate military consideration. I may be wrong, but I am unaware that the US submarine campaign against the Japanese merchant marine ever considered saving Japanese sailors.
 

Lucian

Banned
But to the extent that they contributed to the reconstruction of the Federal Republic as a civil, democratic republic willing to accept responsibility for Nazi crimes (which by and large it did - unlike the DDR)
Federal Republic was actually notorious for protecting former Nazis, giving them amnesty as well as top governmental posts. DDR at least came to terms with victims of Nazi agression like Poland and Czechoslovakia much, much earlier then FGR did. Plus it didn't harbor as much Nazi criminals and nationalist revanchists.
 
Federal Republic was actually notorious for protecting former Nazis, giving them amnesty as well as top governmental posts. DDR at least came to terms with victims of Nazi agression like Poland and Czechoslovakia much, much earlier then FGR did. Plus it didn't harbor as much Nazi criminals and nationalist revanchists.

Well the problem there is that punishing all the Nazis meant punishing a pretty big chunk of the country. See, despite the claims of the German people that showed there were no Nazis in Germany from 1933 to 1945, it turns out that there were quite a lot of them... On top of that any officials with the authority, influence, and capability to get anything done on local levels had been Nazis for at least twelve years. Necessity meant giving a bunch of low level Nazis a pass or actively babying the country through recovery for a decade or two.

The DDR overcame that problem with Communism. Either find some loyal Communists that managed to flee or survive or ship some in from elsewhere. The west was less about such ideology and just getting the job completed so the worst of it could be done and some semblance of normalcy could return. With Hitler and the nastiest of the bastards gone and thoroughly defeated, a former minor Nazi was a lot less worrisome to the west than a current Communist.
 

Lucian

Banned
With Hitler and the nastiest of the bastards gone and thoroughly defeated, a former minor Nazi was a lot less worrisome to the west than a current Communist.
Well, I wouldn't call minor Heinz Reinefarth responsible for up to 100.000 murdered people, minor, nor Hans Globke who helped Hitler get dictatorship and write racial laws. Both became prominent West German politicians after the war. Just a sample of course.
 
Fair enough, and a good point. I only say that for the most part, the West couldn't have prosecuted every Nazi, and made their decisions with their rationale of being rid of the most dangerous threats and moving on to deal with rebuilding, domestic issues, and the Red menace.

Reinefarth and Globke managed to slip through and play the game to their benefit among this. The former was spared as a witness then released, and the latter overlooked due to lack of official party membership and then made useful as a spy against the Soviets. Ideally their crimes would have seen them face trial alongside Rosenberg and Frick, who acted similarly - or sent to Poland and Israel...

Unfortunately pragmatism often finds such a way to conflict with justice... not saying its right, just saying how it happened.

As for their election to politics... democracy sometimes produces such weird results. The USA had a former Exalted Cyclops of the KKK become its longest serving Senator. You wouldn't necessarily expect that either, but people have a short attention span and a large capacity for forgiveness, I guess. (No I'm not saying what Byrd did is as bad as Nazi murder, btw)
 
Federal Republic was actually notorious for protecting former Nazis, giving them amnesty as well as top governmental posts. DDR at least came to terms with victims of Nazi agression like Poland and Czechoslovakia much, much earlier then FGR did. Plus it didn't harbor as much Nazi criminals and nationalist revanchists.

Ah...I can see a political axe here. Tell me, did the DDR pay any reparations to the State of Israel? Did it ever admit to or apologize for the criimes of the Nazis? Did it ever admit responsibility for the Holocaust? Of course not. The DDR had no responsibility because they were communists and of course they were victims of Nazism just like the Jews and Poles. Poppycock! Perhaps being a satellite of the USSR thrust into the Warsaw Pact might have had something to do with the DDR "coming to terms" with Poland and the Czechs sooner than the Federal Republic. It's pretty hard to "come to terms" with Poland or Czechoslovakia when for 20 years they were in the enemy camp.
 
As a slight aside, why did Schellenburg (Second-in-command of the Gestapo, head of the SD) only get six years?
 
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