mrswdk wrote:Dukasaur wrote:mrswdk wrote:
There was barely even a pretence at morality. It was a show trial of a few Nazi leaders for PR purposes, nothing more.
Now that's bullshit if there ever was some. If you made even a cursory attempt at studying the trials, you'd know how what strenuous care was taken to make sure that these were not show trials, and that every defendant had every opportunity to defend himself.
So why, as the OP pointed out, were lots of senior members of the Nazi Party and administration let off without trial? Why were no allegations of war crimes committed by Allied troops included in the trials? Allied forces committed numerous acts that violated the rules of war at the time (e.g. unrestricted submarine warfare, killing shipwrecked sailors, looting, torture, prisoner executions) and yet the majority of those guilty were never tried, and those who were tried were subject to court martial by their own governments.
You're moving the goalposts. First you're claiming they were just show trials, now you're broadening the scope to ask why they didn't include everyone. I don't have time to address the full scope of the new, broader inquiry, though we might come back to it later.
On the more narrowly-focused issue:
why, as the OP pointed out, were lots of senior members of the Nazi Party and administration let off without trial?
That doesn't seem to me what the OP pointed out, and if it was he was mistaken. No senior members of the administration were let off. Many committed suicide to avoid prosecution. Many others were captured by the Russians who, as noted, did not participate in the Trials. A few escaped. Of the senior officials in Western custody, all were tried. A handful were acquitted, which is further evidence for the fact that these were not show trials, but in fact real trials where the accused had a fair opportunity to defend themselves and a few succeeded in doing so. But nobody significant was let off. If they weren't dead, escaped, or held by Stalin, they were tried.
What the OP was referring to was Operation Paperclip, which swept up scientists and engineers that had worked for the Nazis. Some of them were Nazi Party members, but none were high-ranking or particularly important in the party. The parameters of the operation excluded anyone wanted or suspected of war crimes. A handful did slip through. Of 1600 scientists and engineers in the program, 3 were eventually accused of war crimes. That's less than 0.2% -- a failure rate that suggests to me legitimate failure on the part of the authorities to know everything. If there had been intentional harboring of fugitives in the program, I would expect that vastly more than 0.2% would eventually turn out to be complicit in war crimes.
