(A question like this has probably been already asked on the Straight Dope, and if it has, I apologise for bringing it up again.)
If Adolph Hitler would have lived to face a trial for war crimes, how would it have been handled? Would it have been handled like Pol Pot’s or Saddam Hussein’s?
They wouldn’t still treat him like a head of state would they, even though his nation of Nazi Germany no longer existed?
If Hitler hadn’t offed himself I wonder if he would have survived to make it to trial. The Soviets would likely have been the ones to capture him and they really did not like him. If they did manage to get him back to base without a bullet in his head I then wonder if Uncle Joe would have handed him over for a Western style trial or dragged him back to Russia. Once in Russia who knows? Probably a quick show trial and execution. I doubt the Soviets would have cared much for legal niceties at that point.
The Soviets must have grabbed some other German bigwigs. Does anyone know if they handed anybody over to be tried at Nuremberg, or did they try their suspected war criminals themselves.
I read that Churchill thought Hitler should be executed without a trial, as any such would end up being a farce with the outcome predetermined.
Of course, no one cared much for legal niceties at that point, since those legal niceties would have prevented them from holding trials, or from conducting a fair trial that would find the accused guilty. From a contemporary legal standpoint, I’m not aware of any source of legitimacy for the Nuremburg Trials. I believe that’s why Churchill was in favor of execution without trial.
I’m not sure what would have happened if the Soviets had captured Hitler. On the one hand, it was the Soviets who had pushed for trials in the first place (though they expected more of a show trial than what happened); on the other, I can see Stalin wanting to have Hitler all to himself.
The Soviets in general went along with the Allies trial process. Primarily because some of the biggest of the big Nazi war criminals had fallen (many of them intentionally) into American and British hands instead of Soviet hands. If the Soviets wanted to be a part of taking down the big wigs like Goering they had to play ball with their Western allies.
Now, if the Soviets had captured Hitler that would have altered the situation fundamentally I would think, as he would have been seen as more important than all the other Nazi goons combined.
A quick show trial, and a slow execution, the smart money says.
Wasn’t the trial of Captain Wirz, the commander of the Confederate prison camp at Andersonville, cited as a precedent or justification for Nuremburg?
Stalin loved a big show trial. He staged hundreds of them.
I don’t know. If so, there are a couple of an obvious and glaring flaws in such an argument (the allies had recognized Nazi Germany as a soverign nation and never claimed that they themselves were the rightful soverigns over its territory; the United States never recognized the Confederacy and considered its territory to be part of the US).
Not that anyone was really following the rules; but there were international standards that Germany was a signatore on that would have made many actions ‘war crimes’ (as they came to be known). I’m not aware of any legal issue to holding trials (military tribunals really) for warcrimes and there is some support for such things under the international accords of the time
I know what you mean about the “legality” of holding those trials, but when you’re talking about the Big Five Nazis (Hitler, Himmler, Goerring, Goebbels, Heydrich), I think you’re entering the stage of “I don’t care what the precendents are, this is what they deserve, and actually holding a trial IS playing fair.” It’s certainly more “fair” than nasty greedy defeated despots got in the rest of human history.
Quite so, Cardinal. Worth a read:
http://lawofnations.blogspot.com/2005/11/sixty-years-ago-today-robert-jackson.html
Wow, thanks. I bookmarked the whole text. I’ll have to read that.