Talk:Hugo Sperrle

Nuremberg trials

An article called "Bomber Boys: Good men doing an ugly job" by Patrick Bishop, in BBC History magazine Vol 8 no 3, March 2007 page 17 first paragraph, states that:

Hugo Sperrle, commander of the German Air Fleet Three, was not charged at the Nuremberg trials with war crimes relating to the Blitz, for fear of drawing attention to the damage done to German cities.

Patrick Bishop who writes in the Daily Telegraph has written a book called "Bomber Boys: Fighting back 1940-45" that is scheduled to be published in April 2007.

If someone has time I would really like to know more about this decision, as it could show that no one was tried for aerial bombardment for Allied political expediency and not legal considerations that there was no chance of a conviction on such charges --Philip Baird Shearer 12:43, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

Here is a paragraph from Jörg Friedrich about his book the Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940-1945 in a piece entitled "Afterword for American and British readers

No interviewer with the English-language press failed to ask if it was not Hitler who started both the war and the bombing of cities. "They that sow the wind shall reap the whirlwind." If only that were true! A characteristic of air wars is that those who sow the wind do not reap the whirlwind and those who reap the whirlwind did not sow the wind. One of the sowers was certainly Field Marshal Hugo Sperrle, who as commander in chief of German Air Fleet 3 led the bombing of London and Coventry. Tens of thousands of British citizens died by his hand. In 1948 he stood before the U.S. military tribunal in Nuremberg. His prosecutor was the great American international law scholar and historian Brigadier General Telford Taylor. But Taylor did not even charge him with that bloody act—though 40,000 victims were a lot even by Nuremberg standards. That act did not appear in the proceedings; the charges included only the Russian prisoners of war allegedly assigned under Sperrle's command to build military facilities. That is prohibited by the Geneva Convention. The judges acquitted Sperrle due to insufficient evidence. Why was his documented annihilation of London schoolchildren, hospital patients, and churchgoers not consider a wrong? And why were the firestorms that consumed the schoolchildren of Hamburg, Dresden, and Cologne their proper punishment for Sperrle's unpunished attacks? Why was every soldier in the Nazi Wehrmacht—even the Waffen SS—who was captured in the invaded countries of Poland, Russia, or Belgium taken into custody and treated and protected according to the Geneva Convention while his wife and child at home were outlaws? The enemies could do what they wanted with them, albeit only if the attack came from the air. If Charles Portal or Hugo Sperrle had run amok through Berlin or London with a machine gun, then Taylor would of course have charged him for the action. At least that is what he later wrote. According to the legal position in Nuremberg, it was not the willful killing of noncombatants that determined the crime, but the direction of fire. The horizontal fire of a machine gun is illegal; the vertical direction of the bomb munitions, on the other hand, is legal.

--Philip Baird Shearer 17:55, 1 June 2007 (UTC)