What does history say about victors and justice?
After winning a war, the victors can usually do what they want with their defeated foes. In human history, trials are the exception and not the rule. In 1943, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin toasted to someday executing 50,000 to 100,000 Nazis. After the war, U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau told Roosevelt he thought the Allies should summarily shoot as many as 2,500 top Nazis. Churchill favored execution for Nazi leaders too. When he told Stalin this, the premier reportedly bragged, In the Soviet Union, we never execute anyone without a trial. Churchill agreed: Of course, of course. We should give them a trial first. In the end, the Allies devised something better than a Soviet style show trial, thanks in large part to Henry Stimson, the U.S. Secretary of War, who felt that victors should offer their enemies a procedure that embodied at least the rudimentary aspects of the Bill of Rights. The Nuremberg Trials that followed became an essential model for how to deal fairly with war
