Max Hastings Quotes
If all the collaborators were removed from their posts in bureaucracies, industries and utilities, the machinery of society would grind to a halt. Punishment of the guilty had to be balanced by other interests. Too much zeal would have made the rebuilding of societies impossible.
This was the point of view that was adopted by the Western Allies about the German Nazis and collaborators in the other European nations. However, not everyone agreed at the time with this policy. Lord Russell, the British Nuremburg Prosecutor resigned over this policy. He had case files against over 100,000 Nazi’s who had committed war crimes that he was not allowed to pursue. There was one Western county that did not follow this policy—Norway. They actually tried, convicted and jailed 10 percent of their entire population for collaboration. Their rehabilitation was just fine without the services of these criminals and they became the richest per capita country in the West including the U.S. The issue will be debated by historians of each generation.
Max Hastings, British Historian & Writer Referring to Nazis and Nazi collaborators in the German occupied territories, “The Spoils of War: The Horrors and Hopes of 1945”, Foreign Affairs, November – December 2013
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Referring to the Serbian atrocities in Bosnia:
The allies—mostly under American Pressure—only tried the highest ranking Nazi war criminals. Many wanted to try the rest, but they did not prevail. Lord Russell, the English prosecutor at Nuremburg resigned in protest as he had case files on over 100,000 Nazi war criminals who were never prosecuted. The main object was to use those officials to establish a strong anti-Communist government in post war Germany.
He was a brutal, sadistic war criminal who was assassinated by one of his many enemies in 2000 before he could be brought to trial.
After the FBI had been spying on him for years. He was convicted of mail fraud for allegedly defrauding one man of $25. He spend 2 years in Federal prison and then was pardoned by President Calvin Coolidge. When he was released, he was deported.
Sir Max Hugh Macdonald Hastings FRSL FRHistS is a British journalist and military historian, who has worked as a foreign correspondent for the BBC, editor-in-chief of The Daily Telegraph, and editor of the Evening Standard. He is also the author of numerous books, chiefly on defence matters, which have won several major awards. Hastings currently writes a bimonthly column for Bloomberg Opinion.
