The thread on “crimes against humanity” reminded me of the similar concept of war crimes. I’ve always wondered why the Allies just didn’t try the Axis members on murder charges. There were definately cases of Allied soldiers murdered brutally, such as Russian POW’s and the Bataan Death March. Was there a reason murder prosecutions wouldn’t work? And have war crimes charges ever been seriously prosecuted against regimes still in power?
To answer just a small part of what you’re asking, your basic “murder” isn’t part of international law. The idea is that national laws are adequate to cover that kind of thing, while international laws fill in the gaps (the “high seas,” away from national jurisdictions, etc.).
Because they didn’t want to just hold individual Nazis accountable for civil crimes; they specifically wanted to condemn the whole Nazi government. It was political. And henious as the Nazis’ deeds were, a lot of conservatives had qualms about what amounted to winners’ justice.
I don’t know the precise rationale for creating the Nuremberg tribunals, but I can think of a few reasons why ordinary criminal trials would have been problematic:
-
Most of the crimes in question took place outside the U.S., U.K., and the Soviet Union, the nations prosecuting Nazi leaders, which would raise questions as to whether those countries’ national laws applied. German law, on the other hand, would (I’m guessing) have been favorable to the Nazis, since the Nazis got to write it.
-
Even if the national laws of one of the postwar powers were deemed applicable, trying Nazis under those laws would presumably mean transporting the Nazis back to the country in question for trial. I suspect that none of the three postwar powers wanted to cede control of the process to one of the others. Also, the Moscow Declaration apparently stated that Nazi war criminals should be brought to justice where their crimes were committed.
-
In an ordinary criminal trial for, say, murder, the prosecution attempts to tie the defendant to a specific killing: the defendant killed Joe Smith, or the defendant ordered Alan Accomplice to kill Joe Smith. It would, I presume, have been difficult to tie senior Nazi leaders to specific deaths in that way, considering the circumstances of war, and the state of evidence after the war is over (many German soliders now dead, missing, or AWOL, documents destroyed, etc.). Moreover, that’s not really what the prosecutors were going for – the Nazis were on trial for larger crimes than individual deaths, and those crimes don’t really fit into normal criminal statutes.