en.wikipedia.org
Here you go, meinen Kameraden!!..... More shit about Nazi Germany.
Overview
A 1948
denazification clearance certificate from
Wattenscheid in the
British Zone
About 8 million Germans, or 10% of the population, had been members of the Nazi Party. Nazi-related organizations also had huge memberships, such as the
German Labor Front (25 million), the
National Socialist People's Welfare organization (17 million), the
League of German Women, and others.
[8] It was through the Party and these organizations that the Nazi state was run, involving as many as 45 million Germans in total.
[9] In addition, Nazism found significant support among industrialists, who produced weapons or used slave labor, and large landowners, especially the
Junkers in Prussia. Denazification after the surrender of Germany was thus an enormous undertaking, fraught with many difficulties.
The first difficulty was the enormous number of Germans who might have to be first investigated, then penalized if found to have supported the Nazi state to an unacceptable degree. In the early months of denazification there was a great desire to be utterly thorough, to investigate every suspect and hold every supporter of Nazism accountable; however, it was decided that the numbers simply made this goal impractical. The
Morgenthau Plan had recommended that the Allies create a post-war Germany with all its industrial capacity destroyed, reduced to a level of subsistence farming; however, that plan was soon abandoned as unrealistic and, because of its excessive punitive measures, liable to give rise to German anger and aggression.
[10] As time went on, another consideration that moderated the denazification effort in the West was the concern to keep enough good will of the German population to prevent the growth of communism.
[11]
The denazification process was often completely disregarded by both the Soviets and the Western powers for German rocket scientists and other technical experts, who were taken out of Germany to work on projects in the victors' own countries or simply seized in order to prevent the other side from taking them. The US took 785 scientists and engineers from Germany to the United States, some of whom formed the backbone of the US space program (see
Operation Paperclip).
[12]
In the case of the top-ranking Nazis, such as
Göring,
Hess,
von Ribbentrop,
Streicher, and
Speer, the initial proposal by the British was to simply arrest them and shoot them,
[13] but that course of action was replaced by putting them on trial for war crimes at the
Nuremberg Trials in order to publicize their crimes while demonstrating that the trials and the sentences were just, especially to the German people. However, the legal foundations of the trials were questioned, and many Germans were not convinced that the trials were anything more than "
victors' justice".
[14]
A 1948 denazification clearance certificate from Wattenscheid in the British Zone
