[tajen]

Is that a rhetorical question? Of course yes! More seriously, international tribunals always present a difficulty from the law standpoint. "Presidents" always arrange their country to not sign international treaties and dodge international penalties (e.g. Singapore has never signed treaties against torture). Of course Nuremberg and Tokyo trials could be viewed as a farce by exaggerating the doubts, but they're extremely widely legitimate. Legality without legitimacy also happens: The Hague tribunal is legal but its legitimacy is criticized because it only attacks African presidents. Being legal is the bonus that brings a mathematical proof to a decision, but being legitimate is even more important.

In a parallel fashion, WWII's Prisoners Of War (POWs) were renamed DEF by the US ("Disarmed Enemy Forces"), to dodge the Geneva convention about POWs, and some were badly treated (The Wikipedia page has a discussion on the numbers – see "Other Losses").

There is no such thing as black and white.

[turar]

Yes. My point was that if atrocities against civilians in Hiroshima or Dresden were not crimes by gizmo686's logic above, then neither were Nazi atrocities, and Nuremberg and Tokyo trials were nothing but a fancy lynching.

[int_19h]

Not quite. If the Allies prosecuted German pilots and their commanders for, say, strategic bombing of London - including civilian targets - then yes, it would have been a sham. But they weren't, precisely because the Allies did it too. So the atrocities people were prosecuted for at Nuremberg was stuff like shooting surrendered prisoners, or deliberately executing civilians in controlled areas.

[turar]

Yes. However, I was merely applying gizmo686's criterion of a crime, "it has to be a standard that was at force at the time of the attack", to Nazis in similar fashion as (s)he applied it to Allies.

And Nuremberg trials was famous for doing precisely what gizmo686 described -- charging defendants with "crimes" that were defined as crimes after the fact. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_trials#Criticism

[int_19h]

The way they did it was by claiming that the crimes didn't stem from any written law, but rather from an unwritten universal (for Europe, at least) custom. This is not actually all that far fetched - the notion of "customs of war" long predated any formal conventions etc.

[stuckagain]

That's ridiculous. The nazis eradicated a peaceful civilian population. The USA nuked cities where literally everyone was somehow engaged in a war against them, and who had started it in the first place.

[GordonS]

I think you need to check your facts a bit - a lot of Japanese civilians were killed by these bombs