Vice President Henry Wallace, influenced by the writing of leftist German emigres, “hoped that Germans would mete out justice to their own ‘Nazi overlords’, negating the need for denazification from abroad.” Among those who might have carried out that mission were leaders of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) who had been chased into exile. For example, the SPD politician Willie Brandt had an expansive sense that “not only Nazi party leaders and Gestapo terrorists” were guilty, “but also Junkers, big industrialists, generals, bureaucrats and professors who were involved and who unleashed terror
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