OptionalExtremely Normal
GreatWhiteBuffalo41Too bad our government was just like, we’ll pardon your war crimes and forget you’re a Nazi if you’re good at science and can help us do science things better than other countries!
vaultdweller013Pretty much everyone has done this historically, fuck even Rome did it. Smart people are often times worth their weight in gold especially if they made life annoying for you and your army, so they basically fall into the category of war loot.
Also it’s usually a either you join us or we kill you situation.
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.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denazification
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.
Well yeah, killing the Nazis is effective denazification, I don’t object to that in any measure.
You didn’t say “kill all the Nazis” though, you said “kill all the Germans”