The War Crime Trials

The War Crime Trials conducted by the Allies following their victory over Axis powers in World War Two were clear manifestations of ‘Victors’ Justice’, a situation whereby the victors detain the prerogative to determine where justice lies and prosecute crimes committed accordingly. In short, it is an imposition of the victors’ law on the vanquished. The Allied nations defined a war crime, on this basis drew up the list of Nazi criminals they deemed to have committed this crime and subsequently charged them. The reasoning behind the labelling of the trials as ‘victors’ justice’ owes much to the disputation regarding the legality of the charges against the defendants and the practice of retroactive law, the subsequent legitimacy of the International

Indeed, both documents were a contentious basis for the charges laid out at the Nuremberg Trials and this is an argument that carries significant historiographic weight in the debate regarding the legitimacy of the IMT, and is unequivocally corroborated by Michael R. Maurrus in “The Nuremberg War Crimes Trial 1945-46, A Documentary History”. There is no negating the argument that, as put by Maurrus, the League of Nations Charter remained “an expression of opinion, rather than a fully elective treaty”. Rather, the “perpetration and initiation of a war of aggression” was not a crime in positive international law at the time Hitler embarked on his irredentist military campaigns in 1939, at least not as defined in any statute. This illegitimacy from a judicial perspective, stemming from employing the League of Nations as a “legal linchpin” at the Nuremberg Trials, seems all the more evident when one considers the hypocritical nature of such Allied actions. It is important to note, as pointed out by Michael Biddiss (Victors’ Justice - The Nuremberg Tribunal, History Today, 1995, Volume: 45, Issue: 5, Page: 43),

Indeed, it is startlingly ironic that on the 8th of August 1945, the day when the set of ground-rules on which the London Agreement was based, was the same week as the American bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The fact that the USSR, one of the four Allied nations who assumed responsibility for conducting the post-World War Two trials, was equally guilty of waging a war of aggression and committing war crimes, has significantly supplemented the rethinking and questioning of the trials. This goes against the rudimentary legal principle of equality before the law, whereby the distribution of justice is even-handed in application and applicable to all parties involved. In this respect, Hermann Goering’s assertion that “the victors will always be the judges, and the vanquished the accused” (‘What Should We do With War Criminals’ by Anthony Ellis - page 97) seems to forecast the controversy regarding the practice of selective, and thus perhaps predisposed, justice at the trials. The decision to decide which powers should be scrutinised and held accountable for their wartime crimes was very much an active one on behalf of the Allies, as stated by