PH, most of them were guilty. But they still deserved a fair trial. And although I agree that it was nearly impossible to charge Stalin, Harris or Churchill for their crimes, it is still a point to crtizise.
I don't think I'd like to have seen half of them escape on a technicality, or because no such law existe to try them under. Involvement in some events are so obviously deserving of for want of a better term punishment that you sometimes have to change or adapt the law to ensure it.
In such a regime it is hard to stay as clean as you said. Where do you want to make the end? You can not punish the whole population. You can punish the leaders, the men who committed the crimes. But, if I understood you right, you also want to punish the men selling the "Stürmer" magazine in their shops, too. They would be in severe trouble if they did not sell it.
You haven't understood me right. It is absolutely pointless taking down small change of the regime such as individual soldiers, street sellers of hate-filled newspapers and so on. You go after those responsible for writing and publishing the hate literature, the high ranking party officials and politicians who gave the orders, the generals who in many cases carried them out almost without question, the officers in the military who by their own choice carried out cold blooded crimes. Nothing is achieved by charging every single person who is loosely involved with the regime.
An aggression war in your opinion is a war to eradicate a whole nation with their inhabitants. Correct? But here you mix two things. At first there is the war and then there are the crimes. The first one has to be seperated from the second as being two different things. Even in a war there are laws to keep. Not to do this is another crime as starting the war.
No its not my opinion. I do not think what Nazi Germany planned and carried out in Barbarossa for example could be called a war of agression because it simply does not convey either the stated or underlying intention of the war, and it doesn't divide such a war from previous wars of agression. Agression to me is merely seeking to annex some territory, or force an enemy into concessions. Napoleon's invasion of Russia was a war of agression in a sense. Hitler's invasion was a war to anhialate the Russian people or at the very least a signifcant section of it, including all the communist party elements. This intention was not especially hidden from the senior officers.
Also if I am guilty of mixing the crimes and the war then it is only because Hitler himself did so on the eve of Barbarossa. Between the Commisar order, the instructions on how to deal with partizans (along with the mixing of the term partizan and Jew), the Jurisdiction order and the use of terms like "battle between two opposing world views" and "battle of anhialation" Hitler made his intentions perfectly clear. You can't divide the war from its criminal intentions any more than I can pretend Bomber Harris acted without the permission or knowledge of his superiors.
To me you don't simply go along with the planning and exection of a war like that and then afterwards turn around and claim that you did nothing worse than invade a country.
Oh and if you want to talk about laws in wartime the Jurisdiction order deprived the Russian civilians of the right to appeal, effectively giving carte-blanche to anything a German soldier wanted to do to them. Or perhaps we should talk about the commissar order instead?
