The history of denazifying Germany shows that the Allies were torn on this.
To summerize:
Russia “Okay, let’s kill all the Germans.”
Britain “Oh, but then we’re no better than them. We must make due process for all the Nazis.”
USA “Yeah, I don’t think either of you understand the scale of this.”
And the Americans was right. A due process would have taken centuries, and nobody wanted to pay for it.
So that’s why the Nuremberg trials only reached the top of the iceberg and millions of Nazis got away with no other punishment than memories of shame.
Lmfao what ?
First of all it’s not Russia, it’s the Soviet Union, whichh is an important discussion, and secondly they didn’t want to kill all germans, but make sure denazification was fully done, with no risk of having a single nazi left in power.
You’re saying it as if they made an outlandish proposal and it was rejected by the others; in reality they had control of East Germany and had no need for anyone’s approval in their denazification efforts, which was successful.
Meanwhile nazis that werent notorious enough or part of the holocaust were basically put back in power in West Germany.
Soviet zone: From the beginning, denazification in the Soviet zone was considered a critical element of the transformation into a socialist society and was quickly and effectively implemented. Members of the Nazi Party and its organizations were often brutally beaten before being arrested and interned. The NKVD was directly in charge of this process and oversaw the camps. In 1948, the camps were placed under the same administration as the gulag in the Soviet government. According to official records, 122,600 people were interned; 34,700 of those interned in this process were considered to be Soviet citizens, with the rest being German
Let’s math: 122600-34700= 87900 Germans.
Former Nazi officials quickly realized that they would face fewer obstacles and investigations in the zones controlled by the Western Allies. Many of them saw a chance to defect to the West on the pretext of anti-communism.
Conditions in the internment camps were terrible, and between 42,000 and 80,000 prisoners died.
Sure they never directly stated that they deliberately wanted to kill all the Nazi, but the result is still that they did kill a good chunk of them (between 50-90%) in the camps.
We actually kind of have the alternative to that as well. In Iraq the US took all members of the Baath party of Hussein. It was very clearly a horrible organization, which commited genocide and many other crimes, but doing so removed all sorts of people from power, which had usefull skills and kind of needed to be party members. For example when you built roads, you really need engineers in the government to check if that road is actually going to be built correctly. Even worse they through the secret service and military members into the same prison as islamic terrorists. So when the US left Iraq, those terrorists got access to people with a very particular set of skills.
Really the only way to go about it, is to built up the alternative in the back, trial the worsed cases and keep the Nazis or whatever other evil group from gaining power.
Iraq did not collapse due to the Baath party members taking over. It collapsed due too few competent people in positions of power. That opened up the prisons and allowed the Baath party members to take over. Killing them would not have stopped Iraq from collapsing, when the US left.
The history of denazifying Germany shows that the Allies were torn on this.
To summerize:
Russia “Okay, let’s kill all the Germans.”
Britain “Oh, but then we’re no better than them. We must make due process for all the Nazis.”
USA “Yeah, I don’t think either of you understand the scale of this.”
And the Americans was right. A due process would have taken centuries, and nobody wanted to pay for it.
So that’s why the Nuremberg trials only reached the top of the iceberg and millions of Nazis got away with no other punishment than memories of shame.
Lmfao what ? First of all it’s not Russia, it’s the Soviet Union, whichh is an important discussion, and secondly they didn’t want to kill all germans, but make sure denazification was fully done, with no risk of having a single nazi left in power.
You’re saying it as if they made an outlandish proposal and it was rejected by the others; in reality they had control of East Germany and had no need for anyone’s approval in their denazification efforts, which was successful.
Meanwhile nazis that werent notorious enough or part of the holocaust were basically put back in power in West Germany.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denazification
Let’s math: 122600-34700= 87900 Germans.
Sure they never directly stated that they deliberately wanted to kill all the Nazi, but the result is still that they did kill a good chunk of them (between 50-90%) in the camps.
I think the Russians did the best job.
We actually kind of have the alternative to that as well. In Iraq the US took all members of the Baath party of Hussein. It was very clearly a horrible organization, which commited genocide and many other crimes, but doing so removed all sorts of people from power, which had usefull skills and kind of needed to be party members. For example when you built roads, you really need engineers in the government to check if that road is actually going to be built correctly. Even worse they through the secret service and military members into the same prison as islamic terrorists. So when the US left Iraq, those terrorists got access to people with a very particular set of skills.
Really the only way to go about it, is to built up the alternative in the back, trial the worsed cases and keep the Nazis or whatever other evil group from gaining power.
That literally is what we did and it didnt work. Kill them. So they can never do it again. The Soviets were right.
Iraq did not collapse due to the Baath party members taking over. It collapsed due too few competent people in positions of power. That opened up the prisons and allowed the Baath party members to take over. Killing them would not have stopped Iraq from collapsing, when the US left.
For whatever reason I thought you were talking about ww2 and the nazis. I must have not been paying enough attention scrolling the chain