WI: All Nazi Party members executed after WWII
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Generaloberst
Banned
So that makes the genocide of millions of Germans, Austrians, Czechs, Dutch, Belgians, French, and the other ethnicities justified?
Soundgarden
Banned
Not wishing to be an alarmist, but you might want to edit or clarrify this.
I'm talking about the Nazis getting the same treatment their victims got in concentration camps. That's what I meant.
So who, exactly, is going to carry out this mass murder? Will the Allies simply repair the gas chambers, fire up the crematoria, and get cracking? Will they do it retail, with their own little Einsatzgruppen, a couple dozen British or French or American or Soviet troops buzzing into town, grabbing all the people on their incredibly long lists, throwing them up against a wall, and gunning them down? What's the domestic opinion going to be, in the United Kingdom or the US, when word comes of the deliberate slaughter of millions? How will Allied soldiers react to these orders? The high-ranking officers who will have to organize and plan this mass murder, what will they do?
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.
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.
Joining the Nazi Party was a gateway to better jobs, newer housing, quality medical care, and a host of other benefits. I suspect most members joined for these benefits, not because they had a deep and abiding love of Hitler.
By the way, I remembered an old anecdote. Teacher in the russian school asks students: What your grandfather was in the war?
One says: My grandfather served as a tank driver. Second: And my gunner.
Boy: And my grandfather was an electrician.
Teacher: Electrician? And what he was doing at the front?
Boy: I do not know, but I found him hard hat, on it two zipper drawn.
One says: My grandfather served as a tank driver. Second: And my gunner.
Boy: And my grandfather was an electrician.
Teacher: Electrician? And what he was doing at the front?
Boy: I do not know, but I found him hard hat, on it two zipper drawn.
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.
amphibulous
Banned
This doesn't make any moral sense: most Nazi party members did not know how bad the camps were. It would be much fairer to kill every US voter who supported Nixon's genocidal bombing in SE Asia, which certainly killed enough people to count as genocide. Or to condemn every White in the Southern US states to a life of poverty and repression.
If you want a society without civil servants to make things work where the entire population hates you and where they throw in with the Soviets to kick you out of their country as they will see them as better choice I think you have found the solution.
Good luck fighting millions of guerrilla with state-of-the-art technology and weaponry.
Stalin would be all to happy to provide weapons to these people who would be happy to pick them up and fight for him. It would be like the mistakes of immediate post war occupied Iraq magnified massively as the stakes are far higher.
That's a bit of an oversimplification. The Nazi's goal to create a politically radicalized "people's community" more or less failed beyond some radicals; regional and religious ties proved impossible to break, and the majority of the people were more concerned with their daily lives than the nation as a whole. However, the vast majority of Germans supported and agreed with Hitler for large portions of his rule (Or the rule of the Party, as Hitler wasn't involved in day to day affairs). While there were periods of dissatisfaction, and by 1941-45 growing hatred, people were willing to support the Party's rule at the very least by doing nothing to oppose it. Propaganda also hammered in the association that Hitler was Germany, and that without him the nation was doomed, tying support for the Party to not only ideological but nationalistic loyalties. Even towards the end civilians, police, non-Party officials, etc were fully willing to go beyond what was expected to support the Party.
So the German people's reasons for joining the Party and supporting it were a mix of ideological agreement, nationalism, desire for better wages/conditions, doing what they felt was their duty, and lack of other clear options.
It would be a horrific and stupid thing to do.
It seems to me like it would have taken an effort in many cases to not be a member of the Nazi party.
It seems to me like it would have taken an effort in many cases to not be a member of the Nazi party.
It is worth remembering that the National Socialist Party was "workers" and thus attracted workers brought to extreme poverty crisis of the early '30s.
Considering the fact that the Nazis had been in power for 12 years this would probably cripple Germany's ability to govern itself as Party membership was all but mandatory for civil servants and all branches of government down to the local level. You only have a small pool of exiles to draw expertise from in this case. Former Nazis were left in charge of local governments etc for a reason, neither the occupiers nor the recently returned exile would have been able to cope.
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