@The:
@Gargantua:
Most of the crimes… (there were technical terms for the charges but I don’t have them handy)
“Waging agressive war”
“Waging war in enemy uniforms”
“Using corporate slave labour”
“Killing innocent civilians + torture”
Were also committed by the allies, and some were even occurring during the trial. No Soviet or western brass ever saw a courtroom.
Hence - where there is no universal statute of everyone being equal before the law. Then there is no law.
It would have been better to forgoe the trials (Due to the way they were run) and let street justice prevail. The same thuggery applied.
I agree
The soviets had their own concentration camp see:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag:
-No trial
The Western Allies bombed many cities including the infamous bombing of dresden see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II:
The bombing of Dresden was one of the many occasions (including hamburg and Pforzheim)managed to achieve the “firestorm” which meant that the German fire fighters would be unable to control the flames. This was the same tactic that the Germans attempted to do during the Blitz but when the attacked london for 76 nights in a row but it was on the 29th of december (Help needed) that they attacked london and attempted to create a “firestorm” that the British firefighters would be unable to control
Good post!
Just to add to what you’ve written, Dresden was bombed in waves. From Wikipedia:
“It had been decided that the raid would be a double strike, in which a second wave of bombers would attack three hours after the first, just as the rescue teams were trying to put out the fires.[42]”
The objective of the above was to draw firefighters and other rescue workers into Dresden with an initial attack, then to kill them off with a follow-up attack. The Dresden bombing resulted in eight times as many deaths as did the September 11th terrorist attacks, and about half as many deaths as the U.S. experienced as a result of the Vietnam War.
Unfortunately, Dresden was far from being the most significant war crime committed by the Allies during the WWII era. From a different article:
A significant percentage of this death toll, however, occurred when evacuation columns [of German civilians] encountered units of the Red Army. Civilians were run over by tanks, shot, or otherwise murdered. Women and young girls were raped and left to die (as is explored firsthand in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Prussian Nights).[48][49][50] In addition, fighter bombers of the Soviet air force penetrated far behind the front lines and often attacked columns of evacuees.[48][49] . . .
The Red Army’s violence against the local German population during the occupation of eastern Germany often led to incidents like that in Demmin, a small city conquered by the Soviets in the spring of 1945. Despite its surrender, nearly 900 civilians committed suicide, fueled by instances of pillaging, rape, and executions.[citation needed]
Although mass executions of civilians by the Red Army were seldom publicly reported, there is a known incident in Treuenbrietzen, where at least 88 male inhabitants were rounded up and shot on May 1, 1945. The incident took place after a victory celebration at which numerous girls from Treuenbrietzen were raped and a Red Army lieutenant-colonel was shot by an unknown assailant. Some sources claim as many as 1,000 civilians may have been executed during the incident.[notes 1][51][52]
Also there is this:
Antony Beevor describes [the Soviet invasion of Germany] as the “greatest phenomenon of mass rape in history”, and has concluded that at least 1.4 million women were raped in East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia alone.[17] According to Natalya Gesse, “the Russian soldiers were raping every German female from eight to eighty.”[18] Soviet [19] and Jewish [20] women were raped also. . . .
According to Anthony Beevor revenge played very little role in the frequent rapes; according to him the main reason for the rapes was the Soviet troops’ feeling of entitlement to all types of booty, including women. Beevor exemplifies this with his discovery that Soviet troops also raped Russian and Polish girls and women that were liberated from Nazi concentration camps.[36]
Unfortunately, American policy toward Germany from 1941 - 1948 was altogether too similar to the Soviets’ policy. On the one hand, American soldiers were generally far more civilized and humane than their Soviet counterparts. There was no widespread rape-murder in the American zone as there had been in the Soviet zone. On the other hand, the postwar occupation formulated under the FDR administration, and carried out by the Truman administration, resulted in the deliberate starvation and murder of millions of German civilians.
Germany was closed to relief shipments until December 1945. The given reasons were that they might tend to negate the policy of restricting the German standard of living. CARE package shipments to individuals remained prohibited until 5 June 1946. U.S. troops and their families were also under orders to destroy their own excess food rather than letting German families have access to it.
In 1945 the German Red Cross was dissolved,[57][58] and the International Red Cross and other international relief agencies were kept from helping ethnic Germans through strict controls on supplies and on travel.[59] The few agencies permitted to operate within Germany, such as the indigenous Caritas Verband, were not allowed to use imported supplies. When the Vatican attempted to transmit food supplies from Chile to German infants[60] the U.S. State Department forbade it.[60]
In early October 1945 the UK government privately acknowledged in a cabinet meeting that, German civilian adult death rates had risen to four times the pre-war levels and death rates amongst the German children had risen by 10 times the pre-war levels.[61] In early 1946 U.S. President Harry S. Truman finally bowed to pressure from Senators, Congress and public to allow foreign relief organization to enter Germany in order to review the food situation. In mid-1946 non-German relief organizations were finally permitted to help starving German children.[60] . . .
By February 28, 1947 it was estimated that 4,160,000 German former prisoners of war, by General Dwight D. Eisenhower relabeled as Disarmed Enemy Forces in order to negate the Geneva Convention, were used as forced labor by the various Allied countries to work in camps outside Germany: 3,000,000 in Russia, 750,000 in France, 400,000 in Britain and 10,000 in Belgium. [4] Meanwhile in Germany large parts of the population were starving [5] at a time when according to a study done by former U.S. President Herbert Hoover the nutritional condition in countries that in Western Europe was nearly pre-war normal. . . . William Clayton reported to Washington that “millions of people are slowly starving.”[70] . . .
Reports such as this by former U.S. President Herbert Hoover, dated March 1947, also argued for a change of policy, among other things through speaking frankly of the expected consequences.
. . . There is the illusion that the New Germany left after the annexations can be reduced to a “pastoral state”.
It cannot be done unless we exterminate or move 25,000,000 people out of it. This would approximately reduce
Germany to the density of the population of France.[76]
Also from the article,
On March 20, 1945 President Roosevelt was warned that the JCS 1067 was not workable: it would let the Germans “stew in their own juice”. Roosevelt’s response was “Let them have soup kitchens! Let their economy sink!” Asked if he wanted the German people to starve, he replied, “Why not?”[44]
It is worth noting that General Patton strongly opposed the Truman administration’s genocidal postwar policies.
Patton was relieved of duty after openly revolting against the punitive occupation directive JCS 1067.[55] His view of the war was that with Hitler gone, the German army could be rebuilt into an ally in a potential war against the Russians, whom Patton notoriously despised and considered a greater menace than the Germans. During this period, he wrote that the Allied victory would be in vain if it led to a tyrant worse than Hitler and an army of “Mongolian savages” controlling half of Europe. . . .
In addition, Patton was highly critical of the victorious Allies use of German forced labor. He commented in his diary “I’m also opposed to sending PW’s to work as slaves in foreign lands (in particular, to France) where many will be starved to death.” He also noted “It is amusing to recall that we fought the revolution in defence of the rights of man and the civil war to abolish slavery and have now gone back on both principles.”[56]
WWII and the immediate postwar era represented the time during which American political leadership was most similar to that of the Soviet Union–both from an ideological and a moral perspective. But things began changing in the postwar era. The U.S. abandoned the genocidal directive JSC 1067 in the summer of 1947, and in 1948 it adopted the Marshall Plan. The humane spirit of the Marshall Plan represented a radical departure from the Yalta Conference of February 1945. That conference represented direct American and British cooperation with Soviet mass murder: citizens of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia who had taken refuge in Germany were to be handed over to their respective governments, regardless of their consent. In addition, the Western democracies were also to hand over the vast majority of their German POWs to the Soviets. Finally, Germany was to lose 25% of its prewar territory, with ethnic Germans in East Prussia, West Prussia, and the Sudetenland forcibly expelled/ethnically cleansed from those lands.
