London, Oct. 26 (ANI): The British government opposed the establishment of the Nuremberg war crimes tribunals at the end of the Second World War because it wanted selected Nazi leaders to be summarily executed and others to be imprisoned without trial, according to a report.
Winston Churchill made the proposal at the 'Big Three' conference at Yalta in February 1945, according to the account.
The proposal was, however, overruled by Franklin D Roosevelt, who believed the US public would demand proper trials, and Joseph Stalin, who argued that public trials possessed excellent propaganda value.
According to the Guardian, the British eventually agreed to the war crimes trials, despite misgivings of some senior government officials who believed the decision to prosecute the surviving Nazi leaders for waging a war of aggression would set a dangerous example.
They also feared the prosecutions would be on a par with the high-profile show trials in Stalin's Russia.
The insight into British thinking at the time that allied leaders were attempting to reach agreement over the political shape of postwar Germany is mentioned in a diary that Guy Liddell, head of counter-espionage at MI5, kept during the 1940s and 50s, the report said.
According to the report, codenamed 'Wallflowers' and supposedly kept in a safe in the office of successive MI5 director-generals, the wartime volumes of the diary were declassified in 2005, and redacted copies of the postwar volumes are available at the National Archive. (ANI)
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