Wednesday, September 03, 2003
AN INTERESTING COMPARISON BETWEEN THE OCCUPATIONS OF POST-WAR GERMANY AND IRAQ by Jeffrey Herf. The German "werewolves" didn't amount to much but the effort to entirely eradicate Nazism was more determined and thorough than we will probably ever see in the case of Baathism in Iraq
Yet the Allies took no chances. Between 1945 and 1949 the Western Allies alone interned 200,000 former members of the Nazi Party, its various organizations and former Nazi government officials. Over 100,000 were indicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Of them over 6,000 were convicted and something over 800 death sentences were carried out. The Nazi party was crushed and outlawed and the German state ceased to exist as a national body for the four years of the occupation. The state apparatus, including the diplomatic and military leadership was dissolved and many of its leading officials were indicted and put on trial in the "successor trials" in Nuremberg between 1947 and 1949 which followed the main International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg of fall 1945 to fall 1946.Read, as they say, the whole thing.
