Evening star., 1943-08-26
Letters to the Editor
Trial Of War Criminals
Discussed rs Military Proceeding.


Discussed rs Military Proceeding.
To the Editor of The Star:
In the editorial on war crime trials
which appeared in The Star of August %,
you stated that the United States must
assume a large measure of blame for
the failure after World War I to pun
ish Germans responsible for the shock
ing crimes of that war. You base this
statement upon the dissent of the Amer
lean delegates to certain parts of the
report of the Commission on Response
bilities which dealt with this question
after World War I. The American dele
gates were Robert Lansing, then Secre-
tary Of State, who accompanied Presi-
dent Wilson to Paris as one of the Amer
lean negotiators and James Brown Scott,
who was legal adviser to the American
commission Both Mr.. Lansing and DR..
Scott are now dead. The undersigned
was an assistant legal adviser to the
American Commission to Negotiate
Peace in Paris and was assigned to work
on this problem. The reports referred
to in your editorial are now before me.
Far from aiding war criminals to es-
cape punishment, Mr.. Lansing and DR..
Scott, as practical international lawyers,
opposed certain of the recommendations
of the commission which they regarded
as legal rigmarole serviceable as loop
holes through which the accused enemies
might escape punishment. Their views
were overruled in part and accepted in
part by the Peace Conference. They OBJ
jected to the establishment of special
international tribunal to try the Kaiser
for starting the war, and other war
criminals. They contended that the
charges against the Kaiser were political
and not legal and that he should there
fore be treated as political offender.
The treatment meted out to Napoleon
Bonaparte comes readily to mind. Not
withstanding this dissent of the Ameri-
can delegates, the peace treaty provided
for special international tribunal to
try the Kaiser for a supreme offense
against international morality and the
sanctity of treaties" The flasco which
followed is a matter of history. When
the Allies resorted to the legal process of
extradition to obtain the surrender of
the Kaiser from Holland, to which coun-
try he had fled, the Dutch government
refused the request on the ground that:
Holland has always been regarded as a
refuge for the vanquished in interna-
tional conflicts" The Kaiser lived out
his natural life, including marriage to a
second wife, in the country which gave
him refuge.
If our present leaders are serious in
their demands for the punishment of
Hitler ct al, and they must be presumed
to be serious, they should not provide
them with the means Of escape through
the forms of legal processes which lack
legal substance. They should be willing
to exercise their political responsibility
by providing proper punishment and
not seek to shift their responsibility to
the shoulders of others through sham
legalities.
The Peace Conference of 1919 adopted
the views of the American delegates
concerning the trial of enemy persons
accused of violations of the laws and Gus
toms of war by providing that they
should be brought before military tri-
bunals and not before a specially consti-
tuted international tribunal. The Amer
lean delegates were not accountable for
the failure of the Allied governments to
insist upon the enforcement of this pro-
vision or for their later acquiescence in
the German request that the accused be
tried before German courts, which re-