Are you saying you would have shot them without a trial? In that case the defendants found innocent would have been shot too.
Would you have shot other 'minor' defendants found guilty such as Eric Von Manstein so beloved of military strategists, and whose Russian prisoners preferred captivity under him than going back to their own side?
Isn't hanging a more appropriate for a war criminal. Goering requested to be shot and took poison when refused. Shooting gives the offence a sort of military authenticity but most of the crimes were non-military.
But their were military accusations that of waging or planning an aggressive war (an interesting term, what wars are not aggressive?) and how do the subsequent antics of the US and Britain compare with this?
The whole point of Nuremberg was to demonstrate to the world that war crimes had been committed and the defendants found guilty were to be punished for that reason, not because they were the losers. Allowing those found innocent to go free gives a degree of authenticity to this principle, and avoids subsequent generations seeing them all as martyrs to the ‘mistreatment’ of Germany by the allied powers.
Of course having the Russians in the same court and the subsequent behavior of Stalin as well as their, commanders and troops tends to make a mockery of it. Far less so Britain, France and America in my view, any atrocities they committed in recent history to Nuremberg (and they did) were mild in comparison.
Excellent question, Perseus. The creation of a balanced perspective is, however, going to require some time. I have collected a few good links that might help.
In general, the NT failed: "The Nuremberg trials did not, however, fulfill the grandest dreams of those who advocated them. They have not succeeded in ending wars of aggression. They have not put an end to genocide. Crimes against humanity are with us still".
Orwell's view:
AS I PLEASE, by George Orwell
Tribune, November 15, 1946
"...There is one question which at first sight looks both petty and disgusting but which I should like to see answered. It is this: In the innumerable hangings of war criminals which have taken place all over Europe during the past few years, which method has been followed — the old method of strangulation, or the modern, comparatively humane method which is supposed to break the victim's neck at one snap?
A hundred years ago or more, people were hanged by simply hauling them up and letting them kick and struggle until they died, which might take a quarter of an hour or so. Later the drop was introduced, theoretically making death instantaneous, though it does not always work very well.
In recent years, however, there seems to have been a tendency to revert to strangulation. I did not see the news film of the hanging of the German war criminals at Kharkov, but the descriptions in the British press appeared to show that the older method was used. So also with various executions in the Balkan countries.
The newspaper accounts of the Nuremberg hangings were ambiguous. There was talk of a drop, but there was also talk of the condemned men taking ten or twenty minutes to die. Perhaps, by a typically Anglo-Saxon piece of compromise, it was decided to use a drop but to make it too short to be effective.
It is not a good symptom that hanging should still be the accepted form of capital punishment in this country. Hanging is a barbarous, inefficient way of killing anybody, and at least one fact about it — quite widely known, I believe — is so obscene as to be almost unprintable.
Still, until recently we did feel rather uneasy on the subject, and we did have our hangings in private. Indeed, before the war, public execution was a thing of the past in nearly every civilized country. Now it seems to be returning, at least for political crimes, and though we ourselves have not actually reintroduced it as yet, we participate at second hand by watching the news films.
It is queer to look back and think that only a dozen years ago the abolition of the death penalty was one of those things that every enlightened person advocated as a matter of course, like divorce reform or the independence of India. Now, on the other hand, it is a mark of enlightenment not merely to approve of executions but to raise an outcry because there are not more of them.
Therefore it seems to me of some importance to know whether strangulation is now coming to be the normal practice. For if people are being taught to gloat not only over death but over a peculiarly horrible form of torture, it marks another turn on the downward spiral that we have been following ever since 1933...."
My Personal View: Some people bring up the fact that the international laws like those against waging a war of aggression did not exist in 1939. How could you then accuse the Nazi elite of breaking laws that did not exist? For the reasons outlined in other posts, I do not hold much merit in these arguments. I (and there are not many people in my camp) do not subscribe to the view that the Nazis planned and executed a war of aggression against either Britain, France or the United States (or Holland, Belgium, Denmark, etc.). I would not even argue that Japan waged a war of aggression against the United States. The Axis and Allies were responding to particular events from a particular perspective. That is all. War was an acceptable foreign policy tool. It still is. Think about the American invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq or even Vietnam.
In any case, I find any attempt at "judging" state behaviour in terms of morality a collosal absurdity. Stalin's judges helped convict the Germans after 1945. For what? Stalin instituted the world's greatest rearmament drive in the 1930s. Stalin and Hitler divided Poland between them in 1939. Stalin invaded Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Romania prior to summer 1941. Stalin's hacks also instituted murderous policies against virtually every occupied people...policies of ethnic cleansing that bordered on genocide.
I do not want to concentrate too heavily on comparitive "politics". A large number of Hitler's henchmen committed extensive atrocities that had nothing to do with military action. These were "normal" crimes of murder. In my opinion, these men should have been tried according to German law, found inevitably guilty, and punished accordingly. These crimes against humanity were crimes...pure and simple.
Documents:
http://deoxy.org/wc/wc-nurem.htm
http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/imt/imt.htm
http://nuremberg.law.harvard.edu/php/docs_swi.php?DI=1&text=overview
http://library.law.columbia.edu/ttp/body.html
Secondary:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Trials
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,200-2371452,00.html
http://www.fpp.co.uk/books/Nuremberg/
http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/trials12.htm
[The text by Irving, despite the repugnant views he holds, is not as bad as orthodoxy makes out. And it's free].