Why did the WW2 Allies insist in unconditional surrender?

Lonewolf

Banned
The LAW

Yes, you're bleating about Vian's illegal actions while ignoring Dau's illegal actions and Norway's failure to perform it's legal duty as a neutral. Vian acted illegally because Dau's and Norway's illegal actions left him in a position where he was forced to act illegally.

And we're not talking about murders, butchering captives, or defiling the dead either so your pathetic attempts to link Vian's actions with the horrific acts committed by both sides are disgusting.

Vian boarded the Altmark in defiance of the law in order to rescue prisoners. He did not commit an illegal act in order to murder people or defile their corpses and your deliberate inability to discern any difference between Vian's actions and Eichman's is just one of the usual semantic tricks which have employed by Axis apologists since 1945.

In your disgusting mind, the fact that Vian boarded the Altmark and the fact that US troops collected "relics" in the face of constant official prohibitions means that the UK and US are "guilty" of war crimes on the same level as a Germany which industrialized genocide and a Japan which used Manchurian villages and Allied POWs alike as biowarfare subject.

We're talking about a matter of degree, not kind here, and the fact that degrees matter in war crimes was firmly established at Nuremberg when every person convicted wasn't executed.

You either can't comprehend that degrees matter, much like you cannot comprehend how to use the quote function, or you're refusing to understand the issue for political reasons which means you are either stupid or a Nazi apologist.

I know which way I'm betting.

Hello,
you forget one thing.

The allied forces made the warcrime tribunal of Nuremberg and they wanted to put one thing into every potential dictators mind:

You may make laws like the aryan laws of the nazis, you may make laws about anything BUT whatever law you make, if this law is against the Declaration of Human Rights its a one way trip to the gallows.

I do not know if you were ever told about the principles of law, but let me remind you of one:

We are all, without exemption, bound by the law. If we transgress, the law comes down on as hard.

Yes, in dictatorships this is not true, but we are talking of democracies, right?

But you and others leave me with the following expression:

The law applies only to the weak and to loosers.
The victors are not bound by the law.

Is this your opinion?

Yes or no?

If you say yes then you inderectly say, that it does not matter how an army behaves, just the victory counts. And then there are lots of bad ways of winning.

Our ways of fighting have been civilized. If you think not, then try to imagine how Iraq and Afghanistan would look like, if the Coalition forces would behave like its 1944, you know carpetbombing and so on.

And to your last guess:

I like to tweak your nose. You know: If you point one finger at another person you point three fingers at yourself.

We germans are still looking into every facet of nazism and contrary to the majority of the other european countries, we have no neo-nazis in our federal parliament. Our army is under constant supervision against nazism and we have the greens and leftists to look more than closely that even minimal infractions are published.
 

Orry

Donor
Monthly Donor
I have often thought if you could have got a conditional surrender in '43 rather than an unconditional surrender in '45 how many millions of lives would have been saved.

How many people in Eastern Europe - not Nazi's - would have lived? How much better 'might' their lives have been without an Iron curtain and communist governments. What might the world have looked like without the Cold War that many of us grew up with?

How do you imposed conditions that are strong enough to prevent a repeat in the 60's or 70's but that let the Axis know that they lost?

Maybe its just becasue it is a possible issue in one of my TL's but how many millions of innocent lives should you be willing to sacrifice to gain unconditional surrender?
 
I have often thought if you could have got a conditional surrender in '43 rather than an unconditional surrender in '45 how many millions of lives would have been saved.

How many people in Eastern Europe - not Nazi's - would have lived? How much better 'might' their lives have been without an Iron curtain and communist governments. What might the world have looked like without the Cold War that many of us grew up with?

How do you imposed conditions that are strong enough to prevent a repeat in the 60's or 70's but that let the Axis know that they lost?

Maybe its just becasue it is a possible issue in one of my TL's but how many millions of innocent lives should you be willing to sacrifice to gain unconditional surrender?


The question is how could you possibly get a negotiated peace. The fascist governments were so bloody die hard that it would have been near impossible to convince them to end the war even if the allies had been willing to discuss it.

If a peace was desired so much I think the most the Allies could have convinced the Axis members to would be something like this

-Leave the Fascist governments in control without punishment.
-Leave Germany all of its prewar territory plus its gains in Eastern Europe up to the Soviet border.
- Leave Japan pretty much all of its conquests in Asia with maybe some agreement to withdraw from southern inner China which the Japanese will be unlikely to ever follow through with.


So you leave the fascist governments in control and ready to start things up again in a few years. You leave millions at the mercy of the Germans and Japanese who will likely use the free hand to engage in slaughter the likes of which the world has never seen.

I believe that while unconditional surrender might have created a great bit of sorrow in the populaces both of the occupied areas and in the fascist states themselves in the end it worked out for the better. Both Germany and Japan were essentially destroyed and in their place modern nations both incredibly prosperous took their place. A long long peace among the developed nations could finally be had.

Of course its rather easy for me a privileged young man in a developed nation who will likely never know the horror and sorrows of war to moralize and justify. I mean I didn't exactly have to live through the shit I approve of. Knowing that I still think (For what its worth) that Unconditional surrender was the only and best possible choice that could be made.
 
Negotiating with Germany meant talking to Hitler - and given the fact that the man had broken, stomped on, and then effectively urinated on every single agreement that he had made over the years, it's unsurprising that no-one believed that he'd keep his word in the event of peace.
 
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