Boss Out of Town wrote:Hmmm . . . some important differences between Hess and Sarine [...] Not that good an analogy, as the motivations and stakes involved are worlds apart.
Oh, the analogy isn't perfect, by any means, but it's a lot closer than I thought it was before doing some digging. Two main points. First, even after sixty years of study, there remains serious doubt as to exactly what was going on inside Hess' head. Maybe he was indeed an "emotionally unstable, brutal Nazi thug," as you say; there is a school of thought that contends that that's exactly what he was. However, there are also schools of thought that assert that much of the "emotionally unstable" part was due to him manipulating the psychiatrists studying him, more expertly than they were probing his own thoughts. Furthermore, some (by no means all) of those schools opine that his main excursion into mental instability was simply because he
did believe Germany, which one may reasonably assume he genuinely loved, was on the road to ruin -- which would destabilize even the strongest mind. After all, weren't we remarking
earlier on the way Sarine seemed to be losing it while she was confined in Tsuirakushiti?
Second, rhetoric aside, it's easy to forget that from the standpoint of western Europe, the USSR that Hess was trying to marshal allies against
really did pose a threat. We are talking here about a country that had gobbled up three and a half other European states (remember, they got half of Poland, and also extracted territorial concessions from Romania) in the few years before the war, undertaken an invasion of Finland that was at least as much of an outrage as what the Nazis did to Poland and more of one than the attack on France (who'd declared war on Germany, after all), killed more of its own citizens than the Nazis had, and actively supported insurgencies all over Europe. Ianilis as USSR to Sarine's Hess is an idea that has legs, even if neither the Tsuirakuans nor the elves have been behaving in a way as scurrilous as what the Nazis did -- and there's still the Errant War out there to parallel some of the German outrages.
I'm not trying to apologize here for the Nazis; what they did put them far beneath any possible apology. Hess, however... it would be good to know what was really going on there. Possibly additional light will be shed in 2017, when some British records of the Hess interrogations, etc., finally get declassified. Of course, we'll probably know what happened to Sarine, Ian, and so on, long before then.