History WorldWarII / TheAftermath

Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan's scientists are not prosecuted for their war crimes because they are useful sources of information about human anatomy, biological weapons, and rocket science. While both the US and USSR were willing to turn a blind eye to how it was obtained in order to secure any advantage they could in the emerging Cold War, the USA ended up with virtually all of the actual scientists (including Rocket Scientist Werner von Braun and Biowarfare Specialist Shiro Ishii) and the USSR ended getting most of their research labs and factories (chiefly the V-2 factories in east Germany and Unit 731's half-demolished laboratories in Liaoning province). The members of the wartime live-human medical research groups of Germany and Japan, and the Imperial Japanese Army's biological-weapons research unit (Unit 731 of the Kwantung Army), were also spared prosecution for their inhuman treatment of people as guinea pigs in return for the data they gathered. Despite having made extensive use of slave labour, Werner von Braun and the Nazis' other top rocket-research scientists avoided trial when they were [[DrVonTurncoat poached]] for the USA's strategic rocket and [[UsefulNotes/TheSpaceRace space programmes]][[note]]To be fair, their research and the resulting weapons were considered so militarily counter-productive for Nazi Germany by the Allied scientific community that Freeman Dyson described the waste of resources as tantamount to an act of unilateral disarmament by Nazi Germany, which means you could see von Braun and his colleagues as inadvertently helping to undermine their own nation's war effort. There are also claims that if von Braun or his colleagues had protested such treatment of the slave labor, they would have been killed on the spot; if that's the case, their only options would have been to resign, which would hardly likely to be accepted in that desperate time, or attempt to defect to the Allies, which would have been a long shot by itself, and counterproductive anyway considering they were being more help to them where they were[[/note]]. This was executed by the OSS, the wartime predecessor to the CIA, in ''Operation Paperclip'' (1944-46).

France is an interesting case-study in this period. Despite the informal revenge-killings of 25,000-30,000 people in France and the widespread grassroots collectivisation of business that had been seen to collaborate with the Germans[[note]] e.g. the workforce of the entire motor-vehicle industry rose up and seized ownership of all the companies in it, making them into collectives (a change in status the government later formally recognised). More than 92% of French motor-vehicle production in 1941-45 had been for the Wehrmacht [[/note]], only a few thousand people were imprisoned and formally tried with treason (many of these being found guilty and sentenced to death)[[note]] Note that they were tried exclusively for betraying their country, ''not'' for being evil (beyond the 'evil' of betraying their country) [[/note]]. 98+% of French Public Servants retained their positions (a figure quite typical throughout Europe, including Germany and even Japan). Moreover, many of those who had (by post-1980s moral standards) committed Crimes Against Humanity went on to become very rich and powerful. In France the UrExample would be Maurice Papon, who had organised the efficient deportation of Jews to Germany for extermination while a Police Chief in Occupied Bordeaux. Papon, valued for his competence and lack of moral qualms, was later dispatched to Algeria to organise repression in the Constantine Prefecture when the War in Algeria was just getting off the ground. (His condoning of random reprisal killings and torture negatively affected the humane conduct of the forces involved.) Later, as head of the Parisian Police, he was responsible for the 'Paris Passacre' (in which at least 200 were killed without trial by his men) and other measures to stamp out public protest of the Algerian War at home before going on to even higher office in the service of the French people. It was not until the 1980s that Papon was charged with 'Crimes Against Humanity', a new concept which stemmed from the belief that all humans had certain inalienable rights that it was immoral to violate (e.g. the right not to be the victim of murder/Genocide).

Papon's defence centered around the argument [[JustFollowingOrders that he had only done his duty to his country]] and that he had acted to protect France from the excesses of the Germans. These were the two central themes of the 'Shield Argument' that had been put forward by many collborators and their sympathisers in the Post-War period. However, his lengthy trial made it clear that he and many like him had actually done far more than they needed to - in many cases because they liked Nazi goals and policies. Not only had they been highly efficient in carrying out the Nazis' wishes, but they had also ''exceeded'' them (this perhaps being UrExample of institutional ''Working Towards The Fuhrer'' involving a non-German organisation). The UrExample of this would be the French Police, who saved the SS a lot of time and manpower by rounding up the French Jews and Gypsies and deporting them to Germany even though they had not been asked to do so (the SS had just wanted their identities so they could do it themselves). The French Police also gave the SS French quarter-Jews, even though the SS had only asked for the identities of their full- and half-Jews. Papon was found guilty of Crimes Against Humanity, and during and after his trial his actions were often contrasted with those of one of the Bordeaux Police secretaries, who physically destroyed (at great personal risk) the identity cards of many of the Jews filed away in the Bordeaux Police Archive and thereby saved many of them from being deported by the Police and exterminated by the Germans.

Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan's scientists are not prosecuted for their war crimes because they are useful sources of information about human anatomy, biological weapons, and rocket science. While both the US and USSR were willing to turn a blind eye to how it was obtained in order to secure any advantage they could in the emerging Cold War, the USA ended up with virtually all of the actual scientists (including Rocket Scientist Werner von Braun and Biowarfare Specialist Shiro Ishii) and the USSR ended getting most of their research labs and factories (chiefly the V-2 factories in east Germany and Unit 731's half-demolished laboratories in Liaoning province). The members of the wartime live-human medical research groups of Germany and Japan, and the Imperial Japanese Army's biological-weapons research unit (Unit 731 of the Kwantung Army), [[KarmaHoudini were also spared prosecution]] for their inhuman treatment of people as guinea pigs in return for the data they gathered. Despite having made extensive use of slave labour, Werner von Braun and the Nazis' other top rocket-research scientists avoided trial when they were poached for the USA's strategic rocket and [[UsefulNotes/TheSpaceRace space programmes]][[note]]To be fair, their research and the resulting weapons were considered so militarily counter-productive for Nazi Germany by the Allied scientific community that Freeman Dyson described the waste of resources as tantamount to an act of unilateral disarmament by Nazi Germany, which means you could see von Braun and his colleagues as inadvertently helping to undermine their own nation's war effort. There are also claims that if von Braun or his colleagues had protested such treatment of the slave labor, they would have been killed on the spot; if that's the case, their only options would have been to resign, which would hardly likely to be accepted in that desperate time, or attempt to defect to the Allies, which would have been a long shot by itself, and counterproductive anyway considering they were being more help to them where they were[[/note]]. This was executed by the OSS, the wartime predecessor to the CIA, in ''Operation Paperclip'' (1944-46).

Despite their deep complicity in POW- and partisan-related war crimes, many senior Wehrmacht members also go free because they can advise the US and British militaries on how to improve their combat effectiveness and can be used to construct a new German military [[note]] In some senses this is a continuation of the British wartime contingency plan to re-arm more than a hundred-thousand odd German combat troops who had been captured as POW (and whose weapons, equipment, and ammo had been stockpiled for the purpose) against the Soviets as the need should arise, though it must be said that this was largely the doing of Sir Winston Churchill (who also ordered [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Unthinkable a study into the feasability and likely outcomes of an Allied-Soviet war]], ''Operation Unthinkable''). These preparations instilled no small measure of suspicion and fear in the Soviets, who during the Berlin Offensive of May 1945 actually held a full third of their force back (under General Konstantin Rokossovsky) in reserve just in case the Western Allies should attack them during it [[/note]]. General Franz Halder is arguably the most influential of those senior German officers complicit in war crimes who was never brought to trial. Having headed the Army General Staff from 1939-42 and enforced regulations of the 'Commissar' and 'Commando' orders, he went on to advise the US Army in tactical and historical matters including a detailed critique of the US Army's 1952 FM-100-5 ''Field Service Regulations'' (tactical doctrine) manual and later helped found the West Germany Military (''Bundeswehr''). General Heinz Guderian, on the other hand, is the most ''famous'' of those Generals who was never imprisoned. Guderian (who presided over the show-trials following the ''Valkyrie'' coup attempt) [[note]] though he also helped improve the theories of mobile warfare (pioneered by JFC Fuller, Wilhelm Ritter von Thoma, Hans von Seeckt, and Oswalt Lutz) and masterminded the 1943-45 expansion and rationalisation of panzer production [[/note]] was tried for war crimes but was acquitted with the help of friends including the military theorist Captain Hart (assistant to the widely influential armoured warfare theorist General JFC Fuller) and Sir Winston Churchill.

The main trials, conducted at Nürnberg in Bavaria, resulted in more convictions and harsher sentences as the defendants were merely administrative personnel who had no scientific or military expertise which made them useful and were mostly unrepentant Nazis who'd used the war to line their pockets with the wealth and treasure of plundered nations while sending their peoples to death camps for the crime of being non-German. Former Luftwaffe commander Hermann Goering was the poster-boy for the occasion, his [[SmugSnake defiant sociopathy]] setting the tone as he apologized for nothing and mocked his captors throughout. The main trial saw 23 of the highest-ranking surviving members of Nazi government brought before an Allied military tribunal to answer for both war-crimes, and "crimes against humanity" to account for the horrors of the Holocaust. Though a handful of the accused were acquitted, the majority received lengthy prison terms if they were lucky, and dates with the hangman's noose if they weren't[[note]]Some of these sentences were commuted by the Western Allies[[/note]]. Subsequent rounds of smaller trials would convict additional persons who had participated in other atrocities such as the systematic mistreatment of Soviet [=POWs=], enslavement of conquered civilian populations in war industries and unwilling human medical experimentation. Or at least, the more high-profile and less scientifically-rigorous members, like 'Doctor' UsefulNotes/JosefMengele - who himself [[KarmaHoudini wasn't tried]] on account of him hiding in {{Argentina|IsNaziland}} -[[note]][[NotThatKindOfDoctor His doctorate was in Eugenics. Mengele's experiments were criticised - by his colleagues - as having zero scientific value and constituting outright and depraved torture]][[/note]] - and the running of the [[KangarooCourt "justice" system under the courts, SS courts, Order ('Green') Police, and Secret Police (Gestapo).]]

Not quite understanding the situation, the Americans and Soviets try to get the Chinese Nationalists and Communists to form a government together. Throughout the negotiations and the war which follows, the two powers' intervention is notable by its absence[[note]]but for the Soviets giving the Communists all the Japanese equipment and weaponry they confiscate from the Empire and the Americans giving the Guomindang all of their surplus arms, ammunition and equipment from the Pacific Theatre. This second move, which came as the negotations ground to a halt, made Jiang - mistakenly - believe he actually had the USA's backing even as they criticised him for not taking the peace talks seriously[[/note]]. The Guomindang's factionalism and dysfunctional command structure bite Jiang in the ass one last time as he bungles the war effort and after three years of further fighting ''loses'' the war, fleeing to Taiwan with what remained of his forces. As the tide of the war turns against the Nationalists, Churchill makes his 'Iron Curtain' speech and the Americans begin to see Communism as a new and very real threat. The borders and 'zones of influence' that Roosevelt and Churchill negotiated with Stalin at Yalta take on sinister dimensions as the US realises just how powerful the Soviets are now, and how vulnerable their Allies are to [[DirtyCommunists 'being overrun by the Red Menace'.]] After years of dithering, America speedily moves to invest in rebuilding the economies and militaries of Germany and Japan, changing their earlier program of peaceful 'nation-building' to create strong Allies under the 'Marshall Plan'. [[note]]Much of the Japanese LDP Cabinet of the 1950s was, for instance, in gaol in 1945 for having committed - or on suspicion of having committed - war crimes. Kishi Nobusuke, the Prime Minister of '57-'58, is probably the most prominent product of this kind of forgiving forgetfulness.[[/note]] Of course, the Soviets don't want to be vulnerable to another surprise invasion of the kind the USA may be planning, so they maintain a large military and start upgrading it just to be on the safe side. Thus do the Americans see the Soviets upping their military capabilities, possibly for a war upon the capitalist world. [[SelfFulfillingProphecy Following this logic]], [[UsefulNotes/ColdWar the Americans up their military budget some more]]...

The war has ended, but the fighting hasn't. Some isolated bands of Axis forces and numerous partisan and revolutionary groups continue to fight the Soviets, the Allies, the Axis and each other. Whole Japanese platoons disbelieve the Emperor's surrender and continue fighting the Allies for months. [[TheRemnant Individual soldiers slip into the jungle on isolated islands and fight the Emperor's enemies well into]] TheSeventies. Many other units simply transition from partisan activities to organized crime, with banditry rife as the Allies find themselves unable to police effectively the huge areas and populations that have come under their nominal control. In China, particularly, the country's sheer size and political fragmentation mean that the transition from Imperial to nominally-republican control is rarely a smooth one, with Japanese garrisons in many cases being ordered to hold their positions until the Americans can fly loyal Guomindang troops over to take over from them. The Nationalists' underwhelming and inglorious victory by mere association with the USA increasingly looks like the prelude to a second and bloodier phase of the Civil War as Jiang vows to unite the country and eradicate its true enemy - Communism, as embodied by the recently-unified Chinese Communist Party under Mao Zedong.

The war has ended, but the fighting hasn't. Some isolated bands of Axis forces and numerous partisan and revolutionary groups continue to fight the Soviets, the Allies, the Axis and each other. Whole Japanese platoons disbelieve the Emperor's surrender and continue fighting the Allies for months. Individual soldiers slip into the jungle on isolated islands and fight the Emperor's enemies well into TheSeventies. Many other units simply transition from partisan activities to organized crime, with banditry rife as the Allies find themselves unable to police effectively the huge areas and populations that have come under their nominal control. In China, particularly, the country's sheer size and political fragmentation mean that the transition from Imperial to nominally-republican control is rarely a smooth one, with Japanese garrisons in many cases being ordered to hold their positions until the Americans can fly loyal Guomindang troops over to take over from them. The Nationalists' underwhelming and inglorious victory by mere association with the USA increasingly looks like the prelude to a second and bloodier phase of the Civil War as Jiang vows to unite the country and eradicate its true enemy - Communism, as embodied by the recently-unified Chinese Communist Party under Mao Zedong.