WI: All Nazi Party members executed after WWII

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CalBear

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I was thinking more along the lines as how they treated the jews and other "utermensh" getting that same treated. Forced to do pointless exercises, barely being fed, worked to death, etc etc.
Wow.

Murdering in the most brutal manner possible 2 million people as punishment? Revenge? Hmmm... Ya' that's genocide. See ya.

As a farewell thought, think about this: Oskar Schindler was a member in good standing of the Nazi Party. You would have, happily it seems, have worked him to death for the crime of saving over 1,000 people from certain death.

We Divorce you.

To Coventry with you.
 
What happened to Nazi party members in East Germany, were any thrown in gaol once the communists were in power? I was listening to a radio programme about modern China the other day - it's the same problem for people there. People were asked why they did or didn't join the Communist party. Those that joined said that it was the only way to get promoted or to get certain types of jobs. That's usually the way things work in one-party states.
 
What happened to Nazi party members in East Germany, were any thrown in gaol once the communists were in power? I was listening to a radio programme about modern China the other day - it's the same problem for people there. People were asked why they did or didn't join the Communist party. Those that joined said that it was the only way to get promoted or to get certain types of jobs. That's usually the way things work in one-party states.

I think in East Germany quite a few Gestapo personnel and other Nazis in similar positions ended up in the Stasi, irony of ironies.
 
I think in East Germany quite a few Gestapo personnel and other Nazis in similar positions ended up in the Stasi, irony of ironies.

From my understanding those of that mindset are mostly more attracted to the power and control versus the actual politics.
 
When I first read Soundgarden's words I have a feeling he/she would be expecting a ban hammer soon. The mods giveth birth to membership and they taketh away.
 
As others have said it would be mass murder on a horrific scale. Probably the vast majority of the millions of people who joined the Nazi party did of for reasons of expedience, career advancement, and so forth. I don't have a problem with punishing all 20+million people who knowingly or unwittingly abetted Nazi crimes, but murdering them all would make the allies far worse than the Nazis. If you want to be reasonably humane but still make all Nazi party members pay for their bad judgment, I would propose the following:

1. Execute and Imprison the big-wig Nazis who were treated this way OTL
2 Confiscate all property, wealth, and possessions of Nazi party members beyond the bare minimum for survival and distribute to victims of the holocaust and to help defray the cost of Allied occupation. This would apply to Germans as well as members of explicitly national socialist parties in other former axis or occupied states.
3. Deprive all former Nazi party members of voting rights in any subsequent independent German nations (including Austria) - require this in the laws of any German (and other Axis state) state given independence after the end of allied occupation.
4. Prohibit voluntary emigration of former Nazi party members out of Germany and Austria.
I do have a few questions.

On point 2, You're pretty much stripping property from entire nations.

On point 3, who the hell is going to vote?
 
Not Speer!!!:eek::mad:

We can argue over who among the Nazi higher-ups deserved execution, but executing Speer, who oversaw a murderous system of slave labor, would be much less wrong than executing, say, a housewife who joined up for the extra ration coupons in 1943.
 
Well, that's why I gave everyone the chance to get out by resigning from the Party. It would seem plausible enough to conclude that those who don't resign are those who deserve something more than a slap on the wrist. And, of course, this would require some change in the Big Three's thinking, though I think you could convince Churchill and Stalin to go along with it.

So "Life? Membership? Hmmm. Life... Membership? What to chose, what to chose?"

I think the way it transpired in actuality was the best way to deal with this kind of things. The people for whom it could be proven were actually commiting crimes were tried and executed. As others have pointed out, Nazi part was the only avenue to secure personal advancement in Nazi Germany, so people joined. Same as the Communist party in Communist countries.

Denouncing the institution and its ideology is quite sufficient.
 

Narnia

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Never gonna happen. Not even the USSR would go this far. Any government to seriously suggest this would be just as evil as the Nazis.
 
Some groups, such as the Kripos (the members of Germany's non-"secret" national police agency), were simply told "You're all in the Party now" with the prospect of getting sent to a concentration camp for anybody who dissented.

Really? What are your sources for this claim?
 
Let's leave aside morals, ethics, what the democracies would have tolerated and all of that. Let's be practical.

In actual history, the Germans did not cause any problem at all.
They put their tails between their legs and they meekly came to the fodder pail. That's because there was fodder to be had. Nazi party members did everything they could to get a Persilschein - a squeaky-clean certificate - and/or to be classified as humble Mitläufer, insignificant followers.
Meanwhile, the Werwolf resistance fighters remained the same as most of the Nazi propaganda - pure fiction.

But if the occupiers are out to kill a few million Germans? Then this quiet, disciplined behavior disappears. The Werwolf will exist. Counting the actual party members, their relatives, the brainwashed HJ youths and a few tens of thousands of non-party member Germans who will nevertheless oppose this because of what it is, you'll have a situation comparable to the German occupation of Soviet territory.

Guerrilla always hardens the occupying army, which will mean a spiral into worse violence. Civilians will die in droves who were not party members.

Note there are many hundreds of thousands of former armed forces servicemen still behind barbed wire. Many of those were party members. When the detainees understand that party members are selected, brought in the woods and shot, there will be riots in the camps; some non-members will side with members. The death toll goes up.

Add that Germany was actually already informally divided into two separate occupation zones, with occupiers that were at odds on many issues. If one of the two implements such a radical policy, I'd bet good money that the other doesn't, casting itself as the stern but human and understanding occupier vs. the bloodthirsty one. You'll have even worse population shifts than in OTL (and of course a concentration of former party members on one side). This will hasten the polarization of the confrontation between the Soviets and the Westerners. It is conceivable that the guerrilla in the area where the policy is implemented will be strongly supported from the area where it is not; at least sanctuary will be provided, but more likely armaments and training too.

In short, any 16-year-old boy would understand that this is a bad idea on purely practical grounds, and decide against it.
 

CalBear

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The first point, I agree wholeheartedly.

The second point, well, maybe a bunch of dead American Indians would love to speak with you about that.


Well, there is a bit of a difference between the two.

The vast majority of the Original Americans died from accidental exposure to European diseases. Not that the early explorers would have really cared, but it was not intentional, or even a matter of indifference since the entire concept of "germs" was centuries into the future.

Even the specific campaigns by the various colonial powers (and eventually the independent states that developed, including the U.S.) to suppress/push out the Native Americans were not designed to take every single Mohawk or Paiute, place them into a concentration camp and intentionally work them to death. The treatment of the Native populations by the colonial powers (particularly by the U.S. post Civil war) is inexcusable and classic examples of ethnic cleansing but it is still several orders of magnitude below the Reich or this plan to emulate the Reich.
 
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