War Crime Trials + Prosecutions

“I thought at the time and still think that the Nuremberg trials were unprincipled. Law was created ex post facto to suit the passion and clamor of the time. The concept of ex post facto law is not congenial to the Anglo-American viewpoint on law. Before criminal penalties can be imposed there must be fair warning that the conduct which one undertook was criminal.”—William O. Douglas, LL.D. (Associate Justice, Supreme Court of the U.S., 1939-1975)

We used to have these trials listed under postwar crimes, but since most visitors don't expect them there, hence had a hard time finding it, we moved it up one notch. If you wonder why we put it there in the first place: because the Allied tribunals and all the trials that followed in their wake were a crass violation of international law and thus a crime by definition. Here are papers bringing that message home.

How Postwar German Authorities Orchestrated Witness Statements in Nazi Crime Cases

One of the most important standards of justice when interviewing or interrogating witnesses in a criminal case is not to ask leading questions and not to feed the witness with information about the case before he/she is interviewed/interrogated. Either technique can and will lead to witnesses adjusting their statements to what they think is expected….

Demjanjuk Innocent!

The highest Israeli court finds there is not enough evidence to prove that he is Ivan the Terrible. On TV, Demjanjuk looks fine. A working class male. Your typical yuppie Playboy peruser never would have made it. I'm happy for Demjanjuk and for his family. I've always feared that he would never get out of…

Harvard Heroism

John Demjanjuk, railroaded to Israel on bogus charges of murdering upwards of a million Jews in gas chambers at Treblinka, though now seen almost universally as innocent of that ludicrous charge, may still be strung up by our allies who run the only democracy in the Middle East. How has such a scenario come to…

The Guilt of Oskar Gröning and the Innocence of Jewish Sonderkommandos

The much-ballyhooed trial in Lüneburg, Germany of a 93-year-old former SS man who served at Auschwitz over 70 years ago adds nothing to the extant case for the Holo and subtracts nothing from the revisionist case against it. Its chief interest is its insistence on the enhanced culpability of the defendant, Oskar Gröning. Nearly all…

Aspects of the Tesch Trial

“I do not feel guilty. I did my duty working from morning ’til night for my country, just as the English would work for their country.” —Bruno Tesch, interrogation of September 26, 1945 “It is an official duty of humanity to exterminate vermin.” —Bruno Tesch, interrogation of September 26, 1945 In March 1946, Bruno Tesch,…

Defending the Defenseless

Despite the Germanophobia that was drummed up even prior to the USA’s 1941 entry into the war against Germany, the immediate aftermath saw a significant reaction of Americans to war crimes and post-war genocidal policies that were being inflicted on Germany. Several salient factors for this include: (1) the large component of the American population…

Remembering the Russian Crime at Katyn

By Richard A. Widmann- This week, Russian lawmakers passed a bill that would make Holocaust revisionism illegal.  The bill introduces criminal charges for “denying facts” established by the Nuremberg tribunal regarding the crimes of the Axis powers, as well as “disseminating false information about Soviet actions” during the war.  Punishment for such violations would range…

West of Memphis

Sony Pictures Classics, 2012, 147 mins. West of Memphis is about the discovery in 1993 of the bodies of three local boys about eight years old, hog-tied, beaten and lacerated, in a marsh in Arkansas about 24 hours after they were last seen alive. The incident has become famous in the aftermath of the trial…

The Injustice of the Admissibility of Hearsay in War Crimes Trials

General Discussion of the Problem of Hearsay A best-selling English writer, Jennifer Worth, recently cited a Jewish psychiatrist, Dr. Elisabeth Kübler Ross, who claimed that her father and brother both “witnessed” German soldiers machine-gunning Jewish refugees attempting to swim across a river into Switzerland. (Exact quote: “Her father and brother later witnessed Nazi machine gunners…

The Injustice of Conspiracy Accusations in War Crimes Trials

In war crimes trials, “conspiracy”, “design”, and “plan”, are used sometimes synonymously, and sometimes not. The doctrine of conspiracy was borrowed from American state and lower Federal Court decisions, particularly Marino v. US, 91 Fed. 2d. 691, Circuit Court of Appeals. The rest of the world, of course, was not placed on notice to obey…

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