Page "Erich Raeder" Paragraph 69

Erika Raeder's campaign to free her husband was joined by German veterans, who bombarded the American, British and French governments with demands that Raeder, who they claimed was an innocent man wrongly convicted at Nuremberg, be freed.

Admiral Gottfried Hanson, head of the Verband deutscher Soldaten veterans ' group in a letter in support of Raeder sent to the three western high commissioners ' for Germany declared: " As a friend of many years ' standing, and certain that all ex-members of the Navy will agree with me, I venture to say that no military leader could had educated and influenced his subordinates from a higher moral and Christian level than did Raeder ... both as a man and a Christian ... How can genuine peace and real understanding among the nations of the occident be brought about ... if true right and justice is not applied to the Germans that are still be kept prisoners?

" In an interview in November 1950, Admiral Hanson claimed that American and other United Nations commanders fighting in the Korean War would have been convicted of aggression if the same standards that were applied to Raeder applied to them.

The French High Commissioner in Germany André François-Poncet replied that the admiral seemed ill-informed about history and the law, stating that North Korea had attacked South Korea, and that UN forces in Korea were fighting in response to South Korean appeals for help and under the authority of the UN Security Council, which did not correspond at all to the situation with Norway in 1940.

In Britain, the campaign to free Raeder was headed by the historian Captain Basil Liddell Hart and Lord Hankey, both of whom repeatedly charged that the attack on Norway was a " preventive war " forced on Germany, and as such, not only was Raeder innocent, but that Winston Churchill should have been convicted of conspiracy to commit aggression against Norway in place of Raeder.

Hankey used his seat in the House of Lords to express his support for Raeder while Liddell Hart in a series of widely publicised interviews claimed that Raeder was an innocent man.

A good part of Hankey's 1950 book Politics, Trials, and Errors, in which Hankey argued for the innocence of all the German and Japanese war criminals convicted by Allied courts and strenuously attacked the legitimacy of war crimes trials was taken up with a defence of Raeder.

More recently, the American journalist Patrick Buchanan in his 2008 book Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War defended Raeder, arguing that the real aggressor against Norway was Churchill, and Raeder should never been convicted at Nuremberg.

The American historian Norman Goda wrote that Raeder's champions usually spoke if aggression against Norway was the only thing that Raeder had been convicted of, and that campaign to free Raeder rested upon "... a quasi-legal argument mixed with moral equivalency and wilful ignorance ".

Goda charged that Erika Raeder and her friends had grossly quoted out of context certain passages from Churchill's 1948 book The Gathering Storm to support their claim that the invasion of Norway was a " preventive war " forced on the Third Reich while ignoring the evidence that had convicted Raeder at Nuremberg.

Starting in 1950, the government of Konrad Adenauer started a quiet diplomatic offensive aimed at freeing Raeder and the rest of the men in Spandau.

An American diplomat Richard Lynch reported back to Washington in 1954 that public opinion in West Germany was all for freeing Raeder and the rest of the men convicted in Nuremberg, and until the admirals in Spandau were freed, " the feelings does exist and ... until some way can be found to overcome it, a future German Navy will not have the support of its former officers ".

The retired Admiral Gerhard Wagner had told Lynch that many Kriegsmarine officers would liked to join the new Bundesmarine in order to fight the Soviets should World War Three break out, but refused to do so as long as Raeder and Dönitz were still prisoners.

It was the position of the United States government in the 1950s that Raeder should be freed, ostensibly for reasons of health, but in fact because of the demands of the Cold War and the need to integrate West Germany into NATO.