"(The Allies) didn't want the trials because they were colonial countries. They owned Africa. It was not in their interest. How could they have condemned racial discrimination?" Mark Boden
Great talk show TV from Russia. The officer explains that Stalin insisted that Nazi war criminals receive a trial rather than be immediately executed, to the consternation of Churchill and De Gaulle.
The Nuremberg trials allowed a remarkable speech by Nazi leader Göring, who was a brilliant orator, in which he pointed out Western hypocrisy over racial war crimes: the Allies, after all, maintained their own form of racism in their colonies, and the Americans practiced segregation. Who were they to lecture Germans on racial oppression?
The wily Stalin new this would come up, and looked forward to scoring propaganda points against his hypocritical and cynical allies.
Göring’s speech so impressed the American sergeant guarding him, that he procured the poison with which Goring took his own life, avoiding the humiliation of a public hanging.
The officer (high-ranking, retired), Yakov Kedmi, then goes on to talk about how the US had no reservations of committing heinous war crimes in Vietnam, and that Colin Powell, a young major at the time, argued that war crimes trials were not needed for what happened in Vietnam.
He then goes on at some length about how and why so many high-level Nazis were protected by the US so that they would help the Americans in the impending cold war with the Soviet Union.
This is a long (11 minutes) and fascinating peak into great Russian TV. Good stuff.
Transcript below:
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