Was Albert Speer’s sentence at Nuremberg justified?
- Thread starter Captain Homicide
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Berger was released from jail in 1951. He didn't even serve his full sentence. He died a free man in 1975. And he was one of Himmler's closest henchmen, Dirlewanger's patron and played an important role in occupation policy in occupied Soviet territories, which included proposing the 'Heuaktion' - an operation to kidnap and enslave children.
While Bach-Zelewski eventually went to jail, he was never tried for the war crimes and crimes against humanity he committed in Poland, Belarus etc, only for some politically motivated murders committed before the war. Bach-Zelewski was a major player in Nazi 'Bandenbekämpfung' and the Holocaust and never held accountable for it. Also while he was sentenced to hard labour for political murders in 1951, he didn't serve until 1958...when he was convicted for murdering another SS officer. Sure, he was eventually convicted again in 1961, but once again it didn't refer to what he did during the war. Better than Berger since he actually remained in prison till he died, but hardly sufficient.
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I really don’t feel like turning a thread about Albert Speer into whether or not Churchill did anything wrong in his political career and risk it getting sent to Political Chat but you can easily find articles and sources on the topic with a simple Google search (try typing “Churchill war crimes”).
When you are having a conversation about whether a prominent Nazi was punished too lightly and someone’s sole contribution is that “justice” demands half of the major allied leadership ‘also dance in the air’ that could not be farther from nuance and good faith. Nonetheless I’m perfectly open to hearing what you and @aaronupright think puts Churchill and even Stalin on the same moral and legal plain as the architects of the Holocaust.
This debate has been had a thousand times before so I won’t get too into the weeds about it and get locked into an endless back and forth. Nazi Germany and the Holocaust are at the far end of the immorality spectrum historically. They’re evil in a way that hasn’t been surpassed or matched. With that in mind I’d place Stalin and the USSR under his rule in the tier directly beneath the Reich in terms of evil. You can look through this link for details but Stalin was responsible for over 10 million deaths through starvation, exposure, disease, slave labor and deliberate execution along with a wide scale use of oppression, surveillance and slave labor.
Stalin didn’t have the desire to wipe out entire races for the crime of existing and his ideology wasn’t based off the idea that one group should dominate everyone else by virtue of their intrinsic superiority like the Reich since Socialism and Nazism are much different ideologies but his crimes were still awful in a way rarely seen in history. If I had to rank them I’d say Nazi Germany is the number one worst with Imperial Japan in the second tier and Stalin’s USSR close behind Japan but in the same tier. After that would be countries like Saddam’s Iraq and Idi Amin’s Uganda.
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Another important factor is that Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were ethnosupremacist. Their entire worldview was built on it.
Getting your ass kicked by inferior races means everything you believe in is gone. It's easy to remake that society because you're almost starting from scratch.
The Khmer Rouge might be on the same level for evil. They just weren't as effective in racking up a body count.
I disagree. Nazism is a far worse and far more explicitly murderous ideology and the Reich had far worse intentions and plans than the Khmer Rouge (killing every Jew in Europe and then the world, the Hunger Plan and Generalplan Ost). As an example there was no Cambodian equivalent to Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec. That alone puts the Reich in a different league of immorality.
Most of the Reich’s victims were deliberately killed while most of the victims of the Khmer Rouge died from government incompetence and brutality as opposed to the leadership explicitly desiring their extermination (though some groups were explicitly targeted and there were deliberate executions for a variety of reasons).
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I am going to be remarkably generous and give you an opportunity to explain this.
Better be one hell of good explanation, for Churchill in particular. It would be extremely unfortunate if you were trying to equate the West Bengal Famine with the Final Solution.
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I am going to be remarkably generous and give you an opportunity to explain this.
Better be one hell of good explanation, for Churchill in particular. It would be extremely unfortunate if you were trying to equate the West Bengal Famine with the Final Solution.
I believe the post you quoted is clear enough though obviously I can’t speak for the person whose post I was referencing. I elaborated on the matter over the last page of the thread. I don’t know what else I can say without repeating myself.
I wasn’t trying to equate them and my last few posts in the thread make that clear. I never mentioned the Bengal Famine or anything Churchill explicitly did or did not do.
You put Stalin and Churchill on the same level of action as Hitler. That isn't an interpretation or an extrapolation. You wrote it in a simple declarative sentence. That clearly indicates that you attributed a similar level of malevolence to Churchill and the British as to Stalin and his dictatorship and to the Reich.
That you threw Churchill (which, given the UK is a democracy, is the same as saying the British people) were at the same level as at least Stalin if not the Reich is not anything your later posts demonstrate or justify. You haven't even bother to retract it.
So, another chance. Support your contention or withdraw it.
Gottlob Berger really should've swung... von dem Bach-Zelewski, a man with acknowledged Polish ancestry (though I believe late in the war he legally dropped the "Zelewski" from his name), was a real ruthless bastard, including to his own distant kinsmen. I place him in the same category as Gauleiter Erich Koch... how both of them managed to avoid either the gallows or the firing squad is a mystery to me...
aaronupright
Banned
Same reason as an ordinary murderer is distinct from Ted Bundy but deserving of punishment nonetheless.
And anyway don't practically all wars, in the end, come down to a choice between bad and worse?
No one's hands are ever totally clean, but as shades of grey go, the Third Reich was a *lot* blacker than the Allies - or at least the Western ones.
Daleks are more or less what the Nazis would become if they won and took over the planet. Their ideology is that evil
So you are functionally saying:
Churchill is to Hitler as an "ordinary murderer" is to Ted Bundy
Please qualify or quantify that