Its got nothing to do with race or even the individuals when it comes to determining if the Axis were guilty of crimes against humanity and waging unlawful aggressive wars. We are not passing judgement on the people as a whole, which kinda neatly explains why only the Nazi ringleaders (or what was considefred the ringleaders) were ever put on trial after the war (there were other resons as well, like the political fallout arising from the question of unrestrictedwere submarine warfare, or the vexing question of Soviet collaboration pre-June 1941).
Nope, essentially everyone in German political or economical life prosecuted after the war by the Allies, regardless of being a 'nazi ringleader' or no. The Krupp trials were the most infamous, and quite typical. Many though not all were simply showcase trials in Soviet fashion. They were sentenced to long imprisonment after the war, and released very soon after things went sour with the Soviets. Former 'nazi' industrialists went back to business and former 'nazi' officiers went back to command NATO troops (and I am not saying all, because quite a number of those guys sentenced truely deserved to hang).
This is the deal. The difference between the allied nations and the Germans (and Japanese) is that the allies did not systematize racial or military abuse (well, provided you dont includde a few misdemeanours like incarceration without trial of ethnic Japanese Americans).
Well unless you consider the systematic murder of apprx. 1 million German and Japanese civilians (and many more wounded) by aerial bombings of course a bit more than some sort misdemeanors....
There were numerous examples of allied attrocities, but inherently therse were criminal acts. If you were caught shooting a prisoner, or raping a civilian, you were, at least in theory, guilty of a crime, and should, in theory face the courts martial that your military system entailed.
In theory yes, but practice Allies just tended to look the other way when PoWs were shot or civillians were raped. There were several high profile cases, apart from the regular rapes and pillage that came with any army. Unfortunately, if you implement a system only in theory and do not enforce it in practice to prevent soldiers running amok is not a very good defense and may be very well a basis of criminal neglect for those responsible making the soldiers behave more or less in civilized manner.
There were some pretty close exceptions to that, such as the Russian Army's behaviour immediately after the war, but even here there was a system in place to theoretically prevent that....what attrocities that did occur were officially denied by the Red Army 9of course they lied a lot i know).
The Russian Army raped and pillaged millions. It would be unfair to say that even the Red Army completely tolerated these, but as a routine they tolerated it to some extent. Order was sooner or later restored after a while (sometimes rather brutally).
But contrasting to this was the outrightly criminal behaviour of the Germans and the Japanese. There was no statutory crime in killing a Russian POW, or an Allied prisoner in Changi Gaol. Thats the difference in the criminality of the Axis on one hand, and the individual actts of bastardry by the allies on the other.
Unfortunately for your thesis, this is incorrect. The German army at least had military tribunals who have sentenced a lot of their own soldiers to imprisonment or death for war crimes. I can't comment on the Japanese Armies code of conduct except that it doesn't strike me in particular that US forces in the PTO were particularly bound by humatarian considerations gainst the enemy which American propaganda and indeed much of the US considered similarly sub-human as the Germans considered the "bolsheviks". Their habit of collecting Japanese solider's heads as souvenirs tells me that there may have been other issues with humanitarian conduct of war on both sides in the PTO...
And this has nothing to do with whether the axis were worse or better in their military and strategic operations. It is merely a question of which nation was acting criminally, and which nations were operating within the parameters of the law.
None operated within the parameters of the law, period.
and before we even go there, bombing of civilan enemy targets despite all the hype, was not a crime against humanity in 1945.
Given that most Axis war criminals were sentenced by Allied courts based on crimes which weren't even a crime before 1945, applying a very controversial legal practice of creating a crime
after someone has committed it, I am not sure how much that that arguement would help Harris and other Allied war criminals. None of them were ever even tried, of course.
