Re: War Crimes Trials

The Treaty of Versailles stipulated that the post-war republican government in Germany ("The Weimar Republic") should bring to justice those guilty of various war crimes, mostly committed in 1914 during the German invasion of Belgium.

In the interwar years, these atrocities were widely ridiculed in Britain, America, and of course Germany as the fantasies of English propagandists. But research of German army archives by German (and other) historians in the past ten or twenty years show without a doubt that such atrocities took place, for example, the destruction of several Belgian towns along with mass executions of civilians.

The German courts set up to try the accused had little interest in condemning German officers for crimes against "enemy" civilians in wartime. Virtually all the defendants (there were dozens of them) were acquitted.

The Allies in World War II determined that Nazi war criminals would not get off so easily.

Some of the accused Nazis, by the way, were actually acquitted. So much for the idea that the trials were just "for show."