60 years ago last year

[ewx]

Churchill wanted Hitler executed. I don't think this is really news - Overy mentions in Interrogations that Churchill's view was that any senior Nazis captured should be taken out and shot as soon as a positive identification was made. It was Stalin's enthusiasm for show trials, trumped by a wish for a proper legal process in Washington, that led to the Nuremberberg trials instead of summary execution. (And this makes the complaints about “victor's justice” hollow in my view - the Soviet and British alternatives would have been much worse in that respect.)

Comments

[hsenag.livejournal.com]

Just because the alternative would have been worse doesn't mean the Nuremberg trials weren't "victor's justice"...

The wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Trials#The_validity_of_the_court) has a good summary of the arguments.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

I think the people in question got a much better deal than any balanced analysis of the sitation could have led them to expect.

[hsenag.livejournal.com]

True, but it was still not entirely even-handed.

[jalbobble.livejournal.com]

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[ewx.livejournal.com]

Sure!

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

The piece in The Times suggested that Winston would have requested an Act of Attainder in order to do so. Given that, according to Wikipedia, they had been abolished in 1870 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_of_attainder) in the UK, that might have been quite a change.