I was browsing thru some book reviews an amazon.com and after a while I got fed up. It seems that vast majority of people writing there (and perhaps elsewhere) don´t know the fact that war itself was NOT illegal during WW Two and starting a war was neither, provided proper formalities were followed. Virtualy every reviewers idea seemed to be that sinced Germany started the war, any war crime against them is not an issue.
If one studies the conventions relating to the rules of war in effect during the WW Two, one will immediately note that basically all "war crimes" Germans perpetrated would have been possible to prosecute under existing international laws (e.g. all executions of PoWs, mistreatment of civilians). Then why were the retroactive laws used in Nuremberg. Well, the explanation is obvious and simple, yet apparently too ugly for many to consider: the existing laws made no distinction who committed the crime. And that was a no-no for the winners, especially Americans and the Soviets who obviously knew that they had violated those laws over and over again. Therefore they came up with the clever, yet totally immoral, ploy that "let´s shift the blame from the actual deed to who perpetrated it" and especially shift the blame to "who started it". This way it was easy to shift all the blame on Germand and nicely sweep winners´ crimes under the carpet.
If one studies the conventions relating to the rules of war in effect during the WW Two, one will immediately note that basically all "war crimes" Germans perpetrated would have been possible to prosecute under existing international laws (e.g. all executions of PoWs, mistreatment of civilians). Then why were the retroactive laws used in Nuremberg. Well, the explanation is obvious and simple, yet apparently too ugly for many to consider: the existing laws made no distinction who committed the crime. And that was a no-no for the winners, especially Americans and the Soviets who obviously knew that they had violated those laws over and over again. Therefore they came up with the clever, yet totally immoral, ploy that "let´s shift the blame from the actual deed to who perpetrated it" and especially shift the blame to "who started it". This way it was easy to shift all the blame on Germand and nicely sweep winners´ crimes under the carpet.