Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by turar 3449 days ago
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

1 comments

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.