The Entire Surviving Nazi Officer Class Executed Post WW2?

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?
 
There's one big problem with that proposal--as the Nazis themselves found out. Executing millions of people is a rather difficult logistic problem.

Honestly, to execute that many Germans, Stalin and/or the Allies would probably have had to reopen Auschwitz.
 

Markus

Banned
What Nazi officer class? By 45 most were reservists and enlisted men(=draftees) who had risen through the ranks. The last german army that had an officer class was the Reichswehr.
 
Logistics aside, at least we would avoid being subjected to a bunch of crap books about how "ze war could have been won but for Hitler!"
 
I think a more realistic proposal at the time was to ban every German of colonel and higher from public office for being a supporter of the Nazi's (the myth of the Good German hadn't been created yet to support NATO).

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.

And so the whole idea of getting rid of the Nazi's quietly disappeared and they managed to live long and prosper.
 
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Eurofed

Banned
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.

Which is a phenomenon far from limited to Nazi Germany, but an hard social limit all new regimes face about running the state and pacifying society after the overthrow of the old regime.

Past a certain limit, to purge the middle management and lower personnel compromised with the old regime, no matter how you want to enforce ideological purity or perfect justice, becomes *really* unfeasible if you don't work to wreck the state and society, because a) only guys somehow compromised with the old regime know something useful about running a military, police, intelligence service, civil service, judiciary, corporation, state industry, etc. etc. b) soon after the top officials of the old regime are done away, the aims of the new rulers, be them a revolutionary class or foreign conquerors, and of society at large, turn from avenging the past to build up for the future, and ongoing extensive purges get in the way of that.

History has seen it happening after Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, Communist Eastern Europe, Soviet Russia, Apartheid South Africa, South American dictatorships, Franco's Spain, etc. etc. so it seems to be a universal social phenomenon about regime changes.
 
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?
I believe Stalin said 50,000 should be executed IIRC (FDR suggested 49,000).
 
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.
 
Germany would be gutted, and might harbor more resentment against the Allies. I don't think it would too hard to whip the populations of the Allies into the frenzy necessary to approve of it either. But it's ASB just because it serves no practical purpose.
 
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.
 
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.

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
 
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.
 
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.


That kind of mirrored what happened in Doenitz trial... the US and the British did the same stuff to the Japanese; it was an extraordinary piece of two faced-ness to try Donut for the same tactics which helped the allies win the war (Ships making the run to tripoli to supply Rommel where not exactly treated with the prize law either)

The German army cycled 10 million men through it during the war... einsatz gruppen even at their largest total strength where not more than 75 thousand operating on a 2800 mile front... you could be a field officer like my grandfather and literally never see one of these people
 
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. Even the old canard about ''fighting the Russians to allow the US-UK to occupy more of Germany'' dosnt work given the level of German resistance in the west until early 1945, when their forces had crumbled into small holdouts.
 
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.

Rundstedt most certainly allowed and knew the activities of Einsatzgruppen D with army group south in 1941, which was the largest single group of murdering assholes assembled in one area; they executed tens of thousands more murders than even the commisar order called for Rundstedt and his staff facilitated their transport and ammo; hell they even provided graves companies to help when they got overwhelmed by the sheer number of people turned over to them

Loyalty to your government (as fucked up as it was) is not a capital offense, every single person from the lowest grefrieter to Rommel himself swore a personal oath to Hitler... military guys are big on honor for the most part; not the sort of thing you cast away publicly easily

And they had examples to go on to for people who spoke out against the regime or where too critical of Hitler's military strategy... in one example, General of panzer troops Gustav Von Weitersheim (a frequent Hitler opponent) advised that the 16th panzer corps and the six army as a whole's flank was in severe jeopardy and that it was one hundred percent necessary to pull out of the city and take up winter quarters instead of having Verdun esque casualties and being tied down on small section of the front (now of course he was proven right)

Hitler fired him, through him out of the army, stripped him of his pension, seniority and pay, threatened to put him in a concentration camp for spreading defeatism and sacrificed his men to die in Stalingrad.... not exactly inspiring for other generals to mirror his activities (side note, Weitersheim's next service was as a buck private in a volksgrenadier division... and he was one of the 4 or 5 people who convinced Hitler sicklecut could work and a was a brilliant corps commander)
 
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