So do you think that we ARE equipped to judge surviving Nazis and their collaborators? If you think so then what's the cut-off? If Isabella escapes moral censure because of something like a statute of limitations, then where do you draw the temporal line? If we should not judge acts more than x years old, what's x?

Interesting question, although I think the example doesn't do the question justice. In your example, we are talking about prosecuting people who are still alive for crimes committed, at least in part, against other people who are still alive.

On a more fundamental level, the question is really, "When does one human has the right to judge another's actions?" As humans, we develop societies with laws and codes of behavior, and expect individuals to live by those commonly agreed to laws or else pay the consequences. One example is the "crime" of murder. Almost every human society today holds this as generally wrong (excepting instances in which we condone it, like self-defense). But BIOLOGICALLY speaking, it isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Most of us have had this code of behavior so deeply ingrained that we can't fundamentally conceive of it being any different way, even if we understand it in a theoretical sense. And it wasn't just thousands of years ago that this was the case. A couple of centuries ago it wasn't morally wrong to kill a black person, unless they happened to be someone else's property -- and then it wasn't murder, it was destruction of property.

Can we say Og the Caveman was bad because he murdered another caveman to feed his children? Not really. He wasn't acting in a way that anyone at the time would have considered wrong, he was responding to his biological imperative. Within his social framework, Og was the good guy for protecting his progeny. But we CAN look back and judge his social framework as morally primitive compared to our own.

In the case of Hitler et al, we are talking about actions which were so repulsive to many others, that he was overthrown at the cost of many lives, even from those who weren't explicitly threatened by him, like the US. Hitler is an easy case -- we can judge him within his own social framework and he STILL he comes out as a bad guy.

So I don't think you can define the question in terms of x number years. Maybe it can be defined in terms of social evolution, but that's as slippery of a slope when it comes to the scale of right and wrong. And social evolution in what? Women's rights? Race relations? Concepts of justice?

When we look as Isabella, we see a woman whose actions did not necessarily always agree with what we think of today as right and wrong. But we see a woman who behaved in an exemplary fashion within her own cultural frameworked AND supported many radical ideas which were not common to her time, but (to our way of thinking) are more morally advanced. Like her stance against slavery, which was far ahead of her time.

People and the societies that mold them are both complex and sometimes contradictory creations.