Word: brinkleys
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...high commissioner, McCloy--whatever the outside pressure--had ultimate responsibility for the decision to commute the sentences, argue Brinkley and Peretz Still, they point out, that outside pressure was great...
...fact acting as little more than a mourthpiece for higher Allied officials who had already decided on a course of action for strategic reasons. "McCloy was not in a position to order the bombing and was not responsible for the veto," says Dunwalke Associate Professor of American History Alan Brinkley, author of a recent Harper's article on McCloy...
While McCloy's guilt--if any--concerning the Auschwitz decision remains in doubt, Peretz and Brinkley agree that he was totally responsible for the decision after the war to commute the sentences of 21 prisoners who had been sentenced to death at the Nuremberg trails. That decision came in 1951, when McCloy had held for two years the post of American high commissioner in occupied Germany...
Calling the commuting the issue for which McCloy was "most culpable." Brinkley explains that the onset of the Cold War put pressure on members of the Western alliance to normalize retions with Germany as soon as possible. The review of the Nuremberg sentences was viewed by many observers as a symbol of the easing of the postwar occupation, he adds...
...furthermore unclear to what extent McCloy influenced these policies. As assistant secretary of War, he oversaw the internment program, but no historical evidence credits him with the idea. And Brinkley, in his Harper's article, credits McCloy for whatever shred of humanness the program may have had. The refusal to bomb Auschwitz was again in the hands of higher military personnel, and Roosevelt and Churchill themselves. An American review board initiated the commutation of Nazi sentences; McCloy mainly followed its instructions...