Would you say that only the losers trend to be charged of war crimes. And probably some low-ranking war Victors.
I think generally it’s more akin to your average legal proceedings. The plebs who commit war crimes will face the full extent of the law, but when wealthy entities or nations do it they will often get away with it.
When it comes to charging the losers, even with the Nazis and the Nuremburg trials there was a significant amount of opposition from people within the Allied nations against prosecuting them. Actually, in an article about Ben Ferencz (the guy who worked hardest to make the Nuremburg trials happen) I read about a Nazi tried in the UK, Winston Churchill personally donated towards this Nazi’s defense and then had his execution commuted down to life, then later only ~20 years. By the end of the war Churchill was vehemently against the Soviets and chomping at the bit to invade them, I think this gave him sympathy towards Nazis who had been fighting Soviets. I’ve since been unable to find the guy’s name, though.
I didn’t know that about Churchill. Thanks for the TIL. But yes, you are correct there’s a class divide when meting out justice. Though I do not fully understand that thing about not prosecuting leaders of the losing party in a war. is this maybe because the victors somehow feels some form of connection to the other side’s leaders simply because they consider themselves as “sparring partners” during the course of the war? And of course, they were not in the field themselves fighting for their lives and somehow they just view all of these as a sort of boardgame or like a D&D campaign with maps and miniature figures of tanks and army battalions. Obviously, these are just guesses of mine and I confess that I do not have a great knowledge of politics during wartime.
I’ll just repeat the disclaimer again, I haven’t been able to confirm that Winston supported a Nazi’s defense since I first read it. I started on a long Ben Ferencz article, then found a wiki page for the Nazi with sources that seemed legit on a cursory glance. However, I can’t remember the Nazi’s name, nor find his article (which Wiki may have removed as articles about individual people are often removed per their rules) nor even the Ferencz article now.
However Churchill’s post-war anti-Soviet rhetoric is widely known, and he has been quoted as saying the Soviets were worse than the Nazis.
As for the exact motives, we can only really guess. There’s possibly the respect for an opponent, but prosecuting the losers could also turn them into martyrs and stoke further conflict. In particular, WW2 started in part because of the position Germany was in after WW1.
