Pretty much everyone has done this historically, fuck even Rome did it. Smart people are often times worth their weight in gold especially if they made life annoying for you and your army, so they basically fall into the category of war loot.
Also it’s usually a either you join us or we kill you situation.
The history of denazifying Germany shows that the Allies were torn on this.
To summerize:
Russia “Okay, let’s kill all the Germans.”
Britain “Oh, but then we’re no better than them. We must make due process for all the Nazis.”
USA “Yeah, I don’t think either of you understand the scale of this.”
And the Americans was right. A due process would have taken centuries, and nobody wanted to pay for it.
So that’s why the Nuremberg trials only reached the top of the iceberg and millions of Nazis got away with no other punishment than memories of shame.
We actually kind of have the alternative to that as well. In Iraq the US took all members of the Baath party of Hussein. It was very clearly a horrible organization, which commited genocide and many other crimes, but doing so removed all sorts of people from power, which had usefull skills and kind of needed to be party members. For example when you built roads, you really need engineers in the government to check if that road is actually going to be built correctly. Even worse they through the secret service and military members into the same prison as islamic terrorists. So when the US left Iraq, those terrorists got access to people with a very particular set of skills.
Really the only way to go about it, is to built up the alternative in the back, trial the worsed cases and keep the Nazis or whatever other evil group from gaining power.
Pretty much everyone has done this historically, fuck even Rome did it. Smart people are often times worth their weight in gold especially if they made life annoying for you and your army, so they basically fall into the category of war loot.
Also it’s usually a either you join us or we kill you situation.
The history of denazifying Germany shows that the Allies were torn on this.
To summerize:
Russia “Okay, let’s kill all the Germans.”
Britain “Oh, but then we’re no better than them. We must make due process for all the Nazis.”
USA “Yeah, I don’t think either of you understand the scale of this.”
And the Americans was right. A due process would have taken centuries, and nobody wanted to pay for it.
So that’s why the Nuremberg trials only reached the top of the iceberg and millions of Nazis got away with no other punishment than memories of shame.
We actually kind of have the alternative to that as well. In Iraq the US took all members of the Baath party of Hussein. It was very clearly a horrible organization, which commited genocide and many other crimes, but doing so removed all sorts of people from power, which had usefull skills and kind of needed to be party members. For example when you built roads, you really need engineers in the government to check if that road is actually going to be built correctly. Even worse they through the secret service and military members into the same prison as islamic terrorists. So when the US left Iraq, those terrorists got access to people with a very particular set of skills.
Really the only way to go about it, is to built up the alternative in the back, trial the worsed cases and keep the Nazis or whatever other evil group from gaining power.
I think the Russians did the best job.