As Stallin wanted, I think he actually wanted every soildier from sargent up to be executed, but it was vetoed as an insane idea by Churchill, a man no stranger to insane ideas himself! What impact on the post WW2 world?
It floundered when it became clear you couldn't run Germany without the support of the middle management levels, e.g the faceless bureaucrats who had actually made the whole Nazi empire possible.
I believe Stalin said 50,000 should be executed IIRC (FDR suggested 49,000).As Stallin wanted, I think he actually wanted every soildier from sargent up to be executed, but it was vetoed as an insane idea by Churchill, a man no stranger to insane ideas himself! What impact on the post WW2 world?
Still the myth of the ''good'' German army will be a harder sell without all those old generals still alive and trying to whitewash their own past. Understanding of the war in the east might be better, as the record was grossly distorted by former-Nazi generals trying ''set the record stright'' in print.
A lot fewer memiors are published, most German officers of higher rank deserved hanging. It's shocking how few of them bar scapegoats like Jodl and Keitel faced the hangman OTL...
Still the myth of the ''good'' German army will be a harder sell without all those old generals still alive and trying to whitewash their own past. Understanding of the war in the east might be better, as the record was grossly distorted by former-Nazi generals trying ''set the record stright'' in print.
I think it would be the other way around:
It would make it very easy to react to all Nazi crimes with an:
"Such is war and the Allies weren't any better themselfs" attitude.
How so?
There would be trials and everything. Or you're saying that Germany would feel embittered to some point of great significance if they didn't get a huge whitewash like OTL?
Here's another perspective then - the Allies would be sharing collective guilt over this mass show trial, which, as BW says, will not actually nab everyone responsible by any means, and though there would on occasion be scholarship trends to say "we were no better", overwhelmingly the default position everyone would fall back on would be "we were right", because that is how these things work.
The Heer etc. would still get the whitewash of course, you can't exactly start sorting through the entire army. Everything would be blamed on the particular squads.
Eh, its VERY hard to force accountability on such things during war, even as a winner (I didn't see much punishment go out for the squalor and horror of the Andersonville prison, or even the Japanese American internment camps)
The problem was that it was near impossible to prove the guilt of Heer and Waffen SS fellows, and the SS/SD douchebags who did most of the dirty work for the most part where either caught, kia or disapeared
At worst a lot of those people where indirectly guilty, meaning their conduct during the war allowed the regime to hold territories which it brought in it's douchebag squads to ethnically cleanse. Based on my grandfather's experience as a battalion commander on many fronts and during many battles, it didn't seem like very many people below army group command level and the staff actually knew what was going on (people to be turned over under the commisar order aside)... there where a lot of whispers and rumors, but Hitler was VERY good at compartmentalizing his command structure so that the left hand not only had no responsibility for the right, it had no idea what the right hand was even doing
Well I was mostly talking about men of at least general (and whatever the SS ranks were) rank anyway, and they'd run into the hundreds not thousands.
The vast majorty of German generals remained loyal to Hitlerm even with the Western Allies on the Elbe and Russians on the Oder. True they hated Hitler and talked about what a dope and how ungrateful he was behind his back (aside from a few rare cases who'd argue face-to-face within limits) even so they slavishly followed him to his gotterdammerung.
This was long after they knew the nature of the regime and long after the slightist chance of victory or even defeat on any terms except total surrender was possable. The likes of von Rundstedt were lucky not to be hanged on general princaple.