When Hermann Goering, the most senior of the National Socialist politicians captured by the Allies at the end of World War Two, was handed a copy of the statement indicting him of war crimes and crimes against humanity, he scribbled on the margins: 'The victor will always be the judge and the vanquished the accused'.
The guilt of such individuals ... is so black that they fall outside ... any judicial process.
He was not the only person to express this thought. The idea that the war crimes trials at the end of World War Two were expressions of a legally dubious 'victors' justice' was not confined only to those who were its victims. Even on the Allied side there were senior legal experts who doubted the legality of the whole process. The four victorious Allies themselves argued for months over the vexed question of who to put on trial and on what charges.
The origin of these arguments lay much earlier in the war years, when the western Allies first began to think about the treatment to be meted out to Adolf Hitler and the rest of the German leadership if the Allies won the war. The inclination of the British government and of the prime minister, Winston Churchill, in particular, was simply to shoot Axis leaders out-of-hand, as outlaws, once they were caught.
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