With my understanding of the way laws are supposed to work, you cannot charge someone with commiting a crime that was legal. Now while what occurred durring WWII was inhumaine and destestible, they were tried for violations of the Geniva Convention, which didn’t happen until after WWII. Prior to that there was no such thing as a war crime. What was the legal basis for convicting them?
Well, there are a lot of books written on the Nuremberg Trials. I’m sure you can find a lot of theories about the legal underpinnings of the trial.
I’m not an expert on international law, but I’ve been lead to believe that if you win a war, it’s not that hard to punish the losers.
There was more than one Geneva Convention, including the 1929 Geneva Convention on the treatment of POWs. Germany was signatory to this, and also to the Hague Regulations. See
http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/resources/books/annual5/chap11.html
I believe that some of the defendants were also tried for violating German law, rather than international law, on the theory that the Allied government of occupation had sort of inherited the responsibility for enforcing German laws until democracy was re-established. Many of the acts of the Nazis and their co-conspirators were blatantly illegal under German law, or had been legalized by methods not in line with the Weimar Constitution.
The United States Constitution prevents Congress from passing ex post facto laws. There was no corresponding charter governing international law, as such, when the Allied powers convened to declare certain Nazi activities “crimes against humanity”. IIRC, Nazi war criminals attempted to use ex post facto as a defense, but the US, UK, France and USSR simply ignored the arguments, whatever merit they may or may not have had. The atrocities committed were considered so heinous, no one had any desire to provoke public outrage by dimissing any charges on this basis, although I seriously doubt that Truman, Churchill, De Gaul and Stalin gave one iota of consideration to do this anyway.
The Geneva accords predated WWII, anyway (1926 ,IIRC).
The real legal basis for Nuremburg was “To the victor the spoils”.
It’s true that the last Geneva Convention was in 1949, but there were previous conventions (going back to 1864) that had codified those rules it was determined that the Nazis had broken.
See this article in the online Encyclopedia Britannica for more info.
The Neuremberg Trials were a matter of justice, not law. Those creatures needed to be destroyed, and were. Legalities are irrelevant.
On one hand I agree with you, They did deserve their punishment, BUT to say that “legahlities are irrelevant” is a dangerous concept.
True. Bear in mind, though, that this was no normal criminal case. If the prosecutors had not found some laws to use against the Nazis, they would have written some.
Yeah right. Do you know what happened at the Japanese war crimes trials?
History is written by the victors
To the victors go the spoils
Good point, The Japanese committed some horrendous acts as well, but little is ever said about them. Probably because they were so far removed from Europe.
Oddly enough, I was reading about this a bit today before I saw this thread. This page says the following:
I don’t consider the site an authoritative source, so I’ve looked around a little bit to try and find out if Germany actually did repudiate the treaties, but without luck. Technically, if they did, any actions outlawed by the treaties after the repudiation would not have been illegal, as I understand it, unless the repudiations themselves were not legal. I skimmed over the link you provided, but if repudations occured, it isn’t mentioned there. Though I did find this interesting passage:
It may be, therefore, that mistreatement of Soviet POWs was not illegal, as treaties are only binding between signing parties. Though I don’t suppose the judges at Nuremberg lacked for cases of the mistreatement of US, British, French et al POWS to examine.
I believe that, to a certain extent, was done. As far as I know (and I’m sure someone will correct me, if I’m wrong) the charge of “crimes against peace” that certain officals were charged with was an entirely new crime that was more or less invented by the Allies and applied ex post facto. The other charge of “crimes against humanity” (which is along the lines of genocide and oppression of civilian populations) has a stronger standing. This site, for instance, says:
But even then, the “international humanitarian law of war” only applied to citizens of occupied or invaded countries, not to the citizens of one’s own country. The massacre of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire wasn’t considered illegal at the end of WWI, even though the Ottomans lost that war. So, Nazis who were prosecuted for violence against citizens of Germany were being tried under a new law (or a new application of an existing law).
I can appreciate that line of thought, and I suspect that the Allies thought fairly similarly (though I don’t know for sure). However, if that was the case, then I wish they had simply said something along the lines of “We won, they lost, and we found the way they fought morally repugnant so we’re putting them to the sword, for vengence and as an example for others” rather than creating new crimes, charging people with them, and then going through the process of trials. I realize this is getting quite GDish, but the former approach seems more honest to me than the latter. Especially since one of the countries involved in the trials was guilty of commiting comparable crimes during the same time frame (that being the Soviet Union).
The Tokyo War trials just don’t have the same historical resonance because they weren’t the subject of a popular movie I imagine.
Um… no.
The Tokyo Trials came far after Nuremburg, and people were already sick of the endless war trials, they didn’t get nearly the press that Nuremburg die. But that wasn’t really what screwed things up.
There was much more international involvement in the Tokyo tribunal, and the legal issues (and mistakes) of Nuremburg were a lot clearer. Some factions (primarily the Dutch, IIRC) had moral objections to the whole process and let off a higher proportion of defendants. But mostly, the Allied occupation forces decided that it was necessary to keep highly placed but not 1st-rank war criminals in place, in order to keep the country organized against Socialism. Some of these war criminals are still in high positions of power today. For example, one notorious doctor, who was basically the Japanese equivalent of Dr. Mengele was in charge of a medical products company until about 2 years ago, when he was convicted of deliberately allowing AIDS-contaminated blood products into Japan, just to make an extra buck.