General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: The South was not sufficiently punished after the war [View all]thucythucy
(8,069 posts)after which came the Nuremburg trials for the major war criminals. I seem to recall Goring, Hess, Speer being tried, convicted. Goring was sentenced to death, Hess to life in prison, Speer to twenty years. Doenitz, commander of the U Boats, got ten years.
There were also trials of lower level Nazis, a program of "DeNazification" which, inconsistently enforced though it was, cleared tens of thousands of Nazis from public life. Those that didn't get jail time were forced to flee--some to cushy jobs with the US military (Werner von Braun comes to mind) but many to South America. BTW, Lincoln himself was quoted as saying he would prefer Jefferson Davis and the major southern leaders to flee to Mexico, and his "forty acres and a mule" program was land reform pure and simple--breaking the power base of the white slave owning elite, while giving poor whites and emancipated slaves a vested interest in the new social order.
The ONLY "Southerner" tried for war crimes was the commandant of Andersonville, and he was a German born northerner! Nathan Bedford Forest should have been tried for the Fort Pillow massacre. Lee and Davis should have been tried for needlessly extending the war when it was certain by November, 1864, that the south couldn't possibly win.
Had there been true land reform--with the breaking up of the white elite power base--I think this country would be very different today, and I mean different for the better.