Victor's justice: Encyclopedia II - Victor's justice - Allegations of victor's justice

Victor's justice - Allegations of victor's justice

Claimed examples of victor's justice have included:

• the actions of the Communists after the October Revolution
• those of the Brazilian government after the Canudos insurrection around 1900

After World War II, there were calls for vengeance on Nazi Germany. The Western Allies made a self-conscious decision to carry out war crimes trials, and to set up the Marshall Plan (a program to finance economic restructuring of Europe by providing grants and loans), rather than to simply executing their enemies, and imposing reparations on the German people as it has been suggested by the so called Morgenthau plan.

For the U.S., the main economic beneficiary of WWI and WWII, establishing the Marshall plan was no real problem, was useful in encouraging good relations in Europe and in the end by no doubt they earned much more money than they could have ever obtained from Germany and Europe by conventional reparations.

The Soviet Union however followed a similar plan to the Treaty of Versailles of World War I in the areas of Germany that it occupied. Throughout East Germany, whole industrial plants were dismantled and shipped to the Soviet Union for later (unsuccessful) use. German prisoners of war and civilians were deported to the Soviet Union for use as forced labor, some never returning. To this day the former East Germany still has not recovered its former prosperity.

However, at the Nuremberg Criminal Court for war crimes and other subsidiary courts like the Dachau International Military Tribunal only Axis nationals or those who had collaborated with the Axis Powers were prosecuted, whereas what are viewed by some as war crimes by Allied troops were not. Allied war criminals were prosecuted under their own legal systems. For example American soldiers accused of carrying out the Biscari Massacre were court-martialed under U.S. military law. Numerous Germans and others consider this to be a betrayal of the principles of the Nuremberg Trials.

Examples of alleged Allied war crimes during and after World War II included:

• The Katyn Massacre, though technically the Soviet Union was not one of the Allies at the time. Soviet prosecutors at Nuremberg would later try to indict Germany for this atrocity.
• The Laconia Incident. German Admiral Karl Dönitz would later be prosecuted for war crimes for the resulting Laconia Order even though Allied submarines often refused to rescue survivors as well.
• the treatment of some alleged Nazi collaborators after World War II (see Pursuit of Nazi collaborators)
• the deaths of thousands of German POWs in transit camps such as the Rheinwiesenlager after World War II (although a German commission found that fatalites were 4,532)
• the systematic rape of German, Central European and Eastern European women by the Soviet Red Army
• World War II evacuation and expulsion as sanctioned by the Allies at the Potsdam Conference
• The Evacuation of East Prussia as agree at the Potsdam Conference
• Operation Keelhaul

None of these resulted in war crimes prosecutions.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Allegations of victor's justice", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki