Victor's justice is alleged to have occurred throughout history. A well-known ancient example is the
Siege of Plataea in 429–427 BC, during the
Peloponnesian War. The town of Plataea, a staunch ally of Athens, steadfastly endured a prolonged siege by the Spartans and their allies, finally surrendering to the Spartans when all supplies they had were exhausted and no hope of relief remained. They had trusted the Spartans to a fair trial, as the Spartans had promised to "judge them all fairly", and that "only the guilty should be punished" if they yielded. Yet, when the Plataean prisoners were brought before the judges, no trial was held and they could offer no real defense. The Spartans simply asked each of the prisoners if they had done the Spartans and allies any service in the war, to which the prisoners ultimately had no choice but to answer "no". It was well known to anybody involved that during the entire war the Plataeans had fought on the Athenian side, against the Spartans, that being the duly declared policy of their city-state. Upon the Plataeans giving that negative answer, they were put to death one by one – over 200 of them.
Thucydides clearly considered this an unfair judicial procedure. Documented allegations of victor's justice became especially prevalent since the 19th century. in 1865 after the
American Civil War. James Madison Page, a veteran of the
Union army during the
American Civil War, presented a stark and detailed example of victor's justice in his 1908 book
The True Story of Andersonville Prison, subtitled "A Defense of Major Henry Wirz". After describing his months as a
prisoner of war of the
Confederacy, Page recounts the imprisonment and trial of Captain
Henry Wirz, the only commandant of
Camp Sumter prisoner of war camp near
Andersonville,
Georgia. The Confederacy held approximately 45,000 Union prisoners at Camp Sumter from February 1864 to April 1865, during which nearly 13,000 died due to the prison's horrific conditions. Wirz became known as "The Demon of Andersonville" in the victorious
Union, and was one of only two Confederates convicted of
war crimes for their actions during the American Civil War. Wirz was found guilty by a
war crimes tribunal and publicly executed in Washington, D.C., on November 10, 1865. Some have questioned the charges against Wirz, his personal responsibility for the conditions at Camp Sumter, and the
fairness of his post-war trial. In 1980, historian
Morgan D. Peoples referred to Wirz as a "
scapegoat" and his conviction remains controversial. The war crimes trials following
World War II were later observed to feature many of the phenomena and issues seen in Page's account of Wirz's trial, conviction, sentencing, and execution. The
Nuremberg Criminal Court for war crimes (and subsidiary courts like the
Dachau International Military Tribunal) prosecuted only
Axis nationals or collaborators for war crimes and did not prosecute
Allied war crimes. lieutenant-colonel
Otto Skorzeny's defence at the
Dachau trials argued his alleged violations of the
laws of war during the
Battle of the Bulge were permitted by the military code of his opponent, the
United States Army. By the mid-twentieth century, the armed forces of developed nations commonly issued their soldiers detailed written guidance on the customs and international treaty obligations that comprise the laws of war. For example, at the trial of
SS-
Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny, his defense was based in part on the
Field Manual published by the
War Department of the
United States Army in 1940, as well as on the ''American Soldiers' Handbook''. Prosecution for war crimes therefore normally falls under the jurisdiction of the
courts-martial of an offender's own military. When members of the Allied armed forces
broke their military codes, they could face charges, as for example the
Dachau massacre or the
Biscari massacre trials. The
unconditional surrender of the Axis powers was unusual and led directly to the formation of the international tribunals. International wars usually end conditionally, and the treatment of suspected war criminals makes up part of the peace treaty. In most cases those who are not prisoners of war are tried under their own judicial systems if they are suspected of committing war crimes, as happened at the end of
WWII in Finland, when the
Allied Control Commission provided a list of occurrences of war crimes and
crimes against peace, and the investigation and judgment of these cases were left to
Finnish courts according to Finnish law. However, an
ex post facto law had to be instated for those cases, as the Finnish Criminal Act did not cover responsibility for politics resulting in a war. In restricting the international tribunal to trying suspected Axis war crimes, the Allies were acting within normal international law. The
Reunification of Germany in October 1990 saw the
German Democratic Republic (East Germany) absorbed into the
Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) to form the modern unified country of Germany. Reunification saw numerous East German officials charged with crimes by German courts that were direct continuations of West German courts, which some considered to be victor's justice. Many low-ranking members of the
Border Troops of the German Democratic Republic were charged with crimes related to , with an estimated 300 to 400 deaths at the
Berlin Wall and
Inner German border. These border guards, known as ("death shooters"), were often convicted despite arguing they were following ("order to fire") from superiors which instructed guards to shoot escapees that ignored two warnings to stop. The German courts argued East German border laws were so fundamentally in conflict with the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which East Germany had signed and ratified, that they were not law at all but formalized injustice, and thus the soldiers ought to have disobeyed their commanding officers. == Attempts to ensure the fairness of war crimes prosecutions ==