Good god. Allow a little shorthand here will you? I'm not presenting a freaking thesis.Originally posted by czerpak
very dangerous thing to say for someone who is ( or considers himself to be - whichever is your case) a profi.
German officers were interviewed by allied officers after the war. Many of these officers were in prison at the time, some were not. The nature of the interview ran from the rather mundane attempt to find out what the Germans were doing tactically at some particular battle because the allies wanted to learn the reasons behind their successes and mistakes. For example, Speer got interviewed alot by the team that put together the US Strategic Bombing survey, to find out what real effect the bombing campaign had on the German economy.
Other interviews were not so routine. Such as attempts to find evidence by confession or inadvertant admission of participation in war crimes. Once again, Speer was interviewed by officers, and later by the Nuremburg prosecution team, over the extent of his complicity in the collection and use of slave labor.
So, the reliability of information gathered here was highly variable. A mundane interview could lead to evidence of war crimes, just the same a prosecutorial deposition could lead to contradictory evidence on the tactical viability of area bombing of cities or industrial areas.
There are hundreds of questions one has to ask about the material thus gathered.
As the world entered the Cold War, the constellation of motives for everyone began to change, the nature of information gathered also changed, and the reliablity of that information also changed, and it went in both directions at once. German officers became more willing to talk about things that might get them into trouble, and western allied officers and prosecutors/judge advocates became slightly more tolerant or forgiving.
Its a long and complicated story. So allow a little shorthand. Suffice to say no one can know "everything" about it, but one can at least understand the nature of those times and the nature of men and place everything into those contexts.
