The Nuremberg Trials weren't perfect. One notable example was Albert Speer, Hitler's Architect and part of his inner circle who got away with a 20 year sentence (before moving to London where he died years later) by claiming to not know anything about the Final Solution. He got away with this by basically being a "gentleman" without their being a smoking gun. It was a classic "he's one of us".
But Nuremberg was very successful in de-Nazifying the country. I mean there are neo-Nazi elements in Germany today but they're really fringe elements. If anything they're far less fringe in the United States now (fun fact: the United States had a lot of Nazi sympathizers eg the Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden).
This is where we went wrong with the Civil War: we failed to cull the slave-owning class when such attitudes needed to be snuffed out entirely. I mean Emancipation came with compensating the slave owners rather than the slaves themselves. Lincoln's assassination was really unfortunate here too just because of who his VP was: a Confederate sympathizer who, among other things, pardoned all the secessionists and rebels.
I really wonder if we'd snuffed out the slave owning class and compensated the former slaves where we'd be today. Slavery economics simply moved to the prison system and forced labor.Segregation persisted for another century and the echoes of all that still exist today.
I can accept a parallel between the systems in which slavery and nazism are tolerated.
But it seems an important difference, in judging the participants, whether those systems were inherited from hundreds of years of precedent, or newly-built by the current perpetrators.
But Nuremberg was very successful in de-Nazifying the country.
Denazification was an entirely different process. The Nuremberg trials were for the very top leaders (and only a handful). The apparatus of the Nazi government never went to trial, they went through a Denazification process that was abandoned pretty quickly.
There are numerous examples of relatively high level Nazi's being a part of the new German government. The best example is Reinhard Gehlen who led the build up of West Germanys entire intelligence agency. Numerous Nazi officers ended up in high ranking positions in the Bundeswehr (German Armed Forces) and in high ranking political positions.
You're not wrong. Classic example: Adolf Neusinger [1] who went from the Nazi High Command to Chairman of the NATO Military Committee. Von Braun was another well-documented example.
We just differ on what "de-Nazification" means. It's partly about cutting the head off the snake but also making a public spectacle of it, laying Germany's war crimes bare for all the world to see, especially ordinary Germans. The Nuremberg Trials weren't solely responsible for this but they provided a key focal point.
Imagine if we'd cut the head off the Confederate snake in the same way.
Stalin once proposed during one of the Allied conferences to take and execute 50,000 German officers after the war. Since the Nazis kept detailed documentation about who did what, I think one could have easily found 50,000 SS and Wehrmacht members that committed war crimes severe enough to do so. Part of me thinks that should have happened, way to many Nazi scumbags got away to hold positions of power in the BRD.
> But Nuremberg was very successful in de-Nazifying the country.
Um what?! You seem to know very little about post-war bureaurcats in West Germany. They failed completely at de-nazifying then country.
Example, the first secret service (Organisation Gehlen, precursor to BND) was headed by a Wehrmacht general. The CIA put him there and didn't care. He was useful against the Soviets.
Even the first chancellor (Adenauer) eas basically blind on the right eye.
The East was much more effective in de-nazifying, sometimes a little too eager even. (And Adenauer refused to accept even the existence of the East German state. Surprise.)
But Nuremberg was very successful in de-Nazifying the country. I mean there are neo-Nazi elements in Germany today but they're really fringe elements. If anything they're far less fringe in the United States now (fun fact: the United States had a lot of Nazi sympathizers eg the Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden).
This is where we went wrong with the Civil War: we failed to cull the slave-owning class when such attitudes needed to be snuffed out entirely. I mean Emancipation came with compensating the slave owners rather than the slaves themselves. Lincoln's assassination was really unfortunate here too just because of who his VP was: a Confederate sympathizer who, among other things, pardoned all the secessionists and rebels.
I really wonder if we'd snuffed out the slave owning class and compensated the former slaves where we'd be today. Slavery economics simply moved to the prison system and forced labor.Segregation persisted for another century and the echoes of all that still exist today.