In December 1947 Field Marshal Von Leeb and others were brought up in front of a US Military Court on the following charges: From Wiki: High Command Trial - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The accused faced four charges of having committed war crimes and Crimes against Humanity: 1. Crimes against Peace by waging aggressive war against other nations and violating international treaties. 2. War crimes by being responsible for murder, ill-treatment and other crimes against prisoners of war and enemy belligerents. 3. Crimes against humanity by participating or ordering the murder, torture, deportation, hostage-taking, etc. of civilians in occupied countries. 4. Participating and organizing the formulations and execution of a common plan and conspiracy to commit aforementioned crimes Here is another link to the details about the trial: The German High Command Trial. Part I. United Nations War Crimes Commission, 1949 I suppose I'm just wondering why these individuals? There were other Generals such as Von Manstein, Kesselring or even Guderian who could have been charged and in the atmosphere post 1945 no-one would have asked why. So why werent they indicted also???
I wonder what the relationship is between these trials in the US and the main trial at Nuremberg. Perhaps these are the senior generals that fell into US hands, certainly many others spent a long time in the east....
Maybe thats it Capt. They fell into the US's hands. I know that Von Runstedt and Von Manstein were held by the British. So maybe the British decided not to perosecute whoever was in their custody. Mind you I think they handed Von Kleist over to the Soviets for trial.
(Taken from Ueberschär (ed.), Der Nationalsozialismus vor Gericht. Die alliierten Prozesses gegen Kriegsverbrecher und Soldaten 1943-1952, Frankfurt/M 1999) The name OKW-Prozess is actually quite misleading because only 3 out of the 14 generals were actually part of the High Command (Reinecke, Lehmann and Warlimont). At first the prosecutors hat wanted to indict the whole OKW as "criminal organisation" (with 130 generals listed who had been in the OKW between Feb38-end of war). They found however that such an indictment would be too difficult to prove. Instead they decided to just have "single cases" (which should not be taken as general absolution for the rest of the generals as was done after the war! They should rather be "representative" for the whole OKW). However, WHY exactly those generals were indicted, it doesn't say here. There's a reference however to IMT, Vol 1., p. 311f. (maybe you'll find something here) Doesn't really answer your question, does it...
I started a similiar thread a while ago about the trials using Admiral's Raider and Donitz as examples regarding their sentences. Cheers Andy
Kesselring was charged and convicted of war crimes - atrocities against paritisans -including the Murder of 355 Italians of all ages in the Ardeantine caves near Rome - then released by the British after a spell in jail Cheers
