ATL war crimes trials

Melvin Loh

Could anybody design feasible PODs for the war crimes trials of any of the following mass murderers and war criminals of recent hist who OTL went or have gone unpunished:
Pol Pot
Alfredo Stroessner
Idi Amin
Jean Bedel Bokassa
Joseph Mobutu
Charles Taylor
Foday Sankoh

Also, I remember reading 1 time while writing my thesis that speculated in the context of Nuremberg, had the Nazis won WWII, then they would've put the Allied leaders on trial and facilitated 'Victor's Justice' in the same manner as occurred thru the IMT, in prosecuting and executing Allied 'war criminals' for the strategic terror bombing of German cities such as the Dresden firestorm (Feb 1945). Anybody care to speculate on how such a Nazi war crimes trial would've gone ?
 

carlton_bach

I could see Idi Amin, if he hasd been a bit crazier and gone off to lead his troops against the invaders himself (and got caught). The Tansanians would have given him a fair trial, I'm sure, if only because there'd be ZERO chance of anything short of a death sentence.

Bokassa? How could the French be pressured into extradition? I don't think so, but who knows.

Pol Pot, yes. The Vietnamese just needed to get lucky once and he'd have had a show trial in the best circus tradition. Though Hanoi might have decided it was more convenient to have him 'shot while attempting escape' or rather, 'killed in action'. I'm pretty sure he'd prefer that himself, too.

As to the Nazi show trial, did you ever see the footage of the Stauffenberg-conpiracy trial? Sheeesh. Nobody could take that seriously. I mean, they didn't even show it in the German newsreels because it was such a farce. Poor Harris...
 
Anthony Appleyard

Anthony Appleyard

During the recent Bosnian etc war crimes trials, while my mind was on the Balkans I wondered what would happen if the commission could raise the dead or travel in time and prosecute Kolokotronis.

If Kolokotronis had not arisen, I wonder what proportion Muslims would be in Greece now.
 

MerryPrankster

A "Victorious Nazis Putting Allied Leaders on Trial" scenario needs to have a definite victory scenario. If the Nazis win very early (crush the forces @ Dunkirk before they can evac, then invade Britain), Churchill hasn't ordered anything nasty to be done yet and they'd probably just shoot him w/out a show trial.

Now, if the Nazis captured Stalin, I'd bet they'd turn it into a colossal circus. The purges, the Ukrainian/North Caucasus/Central Asian terror-famines, transfer of various ethnic groups (incl. over 1 million Baltic peoples and a lot of Caucasian Muslims), the Katyn Massacre, etc.

The fact that the Nazis planned much of the same thing for their Eastern "lebensraum" won't matter.

Dresden happened so late in the war I'm wondering how exactly the Nazis would be able to win and get their hands on Churchill and FDR.
 

Tetsu

Matt Quinn said:
Dresden happened so late in the war I'm wondering how exactly the Nazis would be able to win and get their hands on Churchill and FDR.
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That`s what I was thinking. How could the Nazis have pulled a victory when they were only two and a half months away from defeat? By then, the Thousand Year Reich consisted of pretty much just Berlin. Maybe some trees just outside the city.

I don`t think that the Nazis would have had much reason to put the Allied leaders on trial if they won the war. They had already killed six million Jews, what`s two or three American or British leaders? Not much. After all, they probably would`ve just killed off Einstein and the others; who could possibly have won them the war. I don`t see that trial happening.
 

MerryPrankster

"Also, I remember reading 1 time while writing my thesis that speculated in the context of Nuremberg, had the Nazis won WWII, then they would've put the Allied leaders on trial and facilitated 'Victor's Justice' in the same manner as occurred thru the IMT, in prosecuting and executing Allied 'war criminals' for the strategic terror bombing of German cities such as the Dresden firestorm (Feb 1945). Anybody care to speculate on how such a Nazi war crimes trial would've gone ?"

I think the point of Melvin's thesis is that the Allies, in some respects, behaved in a manner no better than the Nazis. Dresden, for example, had no military value whatsoever; one person in my Western Civ class said that the goal of bombing Dresden was to destroy the cultural sites so that Germany's culture could be "remade." How is that morally different from the Nazis killing all the Polish priests, lawyers, etc. as part of their plan to wreck Polish culture?

There's also the wholesale expulsion of 15 million East European Germans to consider. That's not much different from the Nazis expelling all the Poles from the western Polish regions that were incorporated directly into Germany.
 
Grey Wolf

Grey Wolf

Donor
Its hard to imagine that the Nazis would ever be in a position to run war crimes trials, even if by a miracle they made Sealion work and installed a puppet regime in London. Churchill and the rest aren't simply going to hang around and hope the Nazis don't do anything nasty to them. The initial plan was to retreat the government to Harrogate (lot of nice hotels, spa town, easy to set up as makeshift ministries), then one assumes Scotland and after that Canada. Whatever remained in Britain would always be a puppet government, and the main characters that the Nazis would want to try would be sitting somewhere else running the continuing opposition to them

Grey Wolf
 

Aedh Rua

Matt Quinn said:
I think the point of Melvin's thesis is that the Allies, in some respects, behaved in a manner no better than the Nazis. Dresden, for example, had no military value whatsoever; one person in my Western Civ class said that the goal of bombing Dresden was to destroy the cultural sites so that Germany's culture could be "remade." How is that morally different from the Nazis killing all the Polish priests, lawyers, etc. as part of their plan to wreck Polish culture?

There's also the wholesale expulsion of 15 million East European Germans to consider. That's not much different from the Nazis expelling all the Poles from the western Polish regions that were incorporated directly into Germany.
Click to expand...

I think one could indeed make a case for Allied war crimes. Dresden is certainly a case in point. One could also argue that Bomber Harris deserved to go on trial, and do some time, for the wholesale bombing of civilians. Now, the Allied answer to this is that these methods shortened the War, or were actual military necessities. In the case of Dresden and mass ethnic cleansing, I have my doubts, but I suspect that Bomber Harris could make a pretty strong case for military necessity. However, as the understanding of war crimes has evolved, this is not an excuse for committing atrocities against civilians.

No doubt about it, any modern leader who did as Bomber Harris did, and carpet bombed cities at night, would be up before the Hague tribunal as soon as they could their hands on him.

This does not mean I'm equating the Allies and the Axis. The crimes of the Nazis were much greater than those of the Allies, or at least, of the Western Allies. And even Stalin's crimes, while comparable to what Hitler managed to do in 12 years, were nothing compared to what Hitler _planned_ to do, had he won.

But being the good side does not exempt one from being able to commit war crimes. Many atrocities have been committed in good causes.
 

Derek Jackson

I suspect it requires ASB's to imagine a relatively impartial War crimes Tribunal operating from early in the 20th Century.

Britain's behaviour in the Boer war would certainly be raised. So too might the Blockade of the Central Powers which did cause starvation.

(This is not to forget War Crimes in Belguium by Germans in WW1, bombardment of Civiliains and sinking of Civilisina ships without warning by the Kaiser's regime- oh and Armenian genocide...
 
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