Quote:
Originally Posted by Gorshkov
I have read many times that trial of Karl Doenitz in Nuremberg was unfair...
|
In a war that killed some 50-million people you might want to define what you consider as fair.
The judges at Nuremberg did not take into account the alleged violations of the Submarine Protocols so his conviction on the charges of "Crimes Against the Laws of War" were basically irrelevant.
The conviction for "Planning and Waging Aggressive War" was sort of a Catch-22 charge since he was only a Captain and essentially a Squadron Commander, a very junior appointment at the national command level when the war was planned and started. Subsequently as BdU and later Navy Commander, waging an aggressive war was his duty so this conviction is often seen as "unfair".
On the flip side, six-years of wartime propaganda had demonized the U-Boat waffe, tens of thousands of Allied sailors had died and many more had spent their war fighting the Battle of the Atlantic and keeping the sea lanes open.
How "fair" would letting the Nazi who led that fight walk away on a legal technicallity be to the veterans and victims of the naval war in the West? A campaign started by the Nazi's and dominated on the Axis side by Doenitz practically from day one through to the bitter end.
As Hitler's designated successor Doenitz solidly established his pro-Nazi bona-fides so I don't think that ten-years and twenty days was an overly harsh sentence for such a senior member of that odious regime. For the short time he was Head of State he did absolutely nothing to mitigate the Nazi excesses or even order an end to actions in the death camps, something that might have had no tangable effect but would have at least indicated a clean break with Nazi dogma. Instead one of his last acts was to authorize and attend a Nazi showpiece funeral for KzS Wolfgang Luth, commander of the naval school at Marwick and second highest scoring U-Boat commander, shot accidentally shortly after the Nazi surrender.
So, even if the actual war-crime charges leaned towards the bogus in his particular case, a prison sentence of some type was not unwarranted, all thing considered. Just one opinion...