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The injustice aside, I wonder if Nazis fleeing German might have had the side effect of making German reconstruction easier while limiting those who fled into m

• IAmEveryone 9y ago
  That's unlikely... Those who fled probably did so for a reason, namely the fear of serious prosecution. They would have had a rather difficult time to continue exerting any influence after '45. It may have had an influence in reducing the number of trials and possibly resentment in the German population, but from what I gather there wasn't ever a risk of widespread open disagreement with the Nuremberg trials etc. In a certain way, the most significant effect on reconstruction (and de-nazification) may have been their use as a reservoir for prosecutions in later years. The Eichmann trial, for example, had a lasting positive influence for German-Israeli relations, provided us with one of the most meticulously researched accounts of the bureaucrats' guilt, and an excellent treatise on responsibility. In Hannah Arendt's seminal work "The Banality of Evil" it changed the narrative from "Some Germans were evil" to today's "it happened once, so it can happen again". The dark truth of de-nazification was that large parts of the German upper-middle class almost seamlessly continued their careers after the war. There were simply too many to prosecute them all, or even to shut them out of leadership positions. The rise of the cold war also changed the incentives for the western powers to quickly rebuild the country's economic and political strength. A few hundred or thousands in Argentina simply didn't matter in the grand scale of things.