re: Were the Allies Too Soft on Germany Following WWII? (Trump Related)

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Churchill was unique among the big 4 while the war crime trials were going on. He did not believe Nazi officers should be hung for following orders. He was afraid it would cause a slippery slope in future wars where the winners could hang the losers using it as a precedent.

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Yep. He wasn't openly very vocal about this view, but many others were. Nuremberg was actually relatively controversial in many political circles. Perhaps even more importantly, there were serious legal objections raised. Among them, most of the criminal charges brought at trial were for violations of laws that, strictly speaking, didn't exist at the time they were being violated.

To have mercy on the German people and commit to allowing them to reindustrialize and reintegrate with the west, we had to go hard on the leaders. Kind of excise them like tumors for the betterment of the body.