Casual Slaughters and Accidental Judgements: Canadian War Crimes Prosecutions, 1944-1948

Christopher English is a professor of history at Memorial University of
Newfoundland.

Scholarship, legal analysis and judgment, a gripping narrative—all are
combined in this study of Canada’s attempts to bring to justice
members of the German and Japanese military for the torture and murder
of Canadian servicemen in World War II. It is bound to find a wide
audience among veterans and postwar generations who seek to know their
own past, in these times when questions of redress are being raised with
respect to the financial complicity of the Swiss in Hitler’s war and
the prosecution of war criminals in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.

Since these were prosecutions of military personnel by military
personnel for abuse of the laws of war, they were more modest in their
scope than the international war crimes trials that followed at
Nuremberg and Tokyo. And they avoided, for example, contentious charges
of crimes against humanity committed by Nazi officials against Jews, the
handicapped, and gypsies in peacetime. But issues of process, evidence,
jurisdiction, and the defendants’ representation before courts with
which they were entirely unfamiliar anticipated problems that would
confront the better-known later trials. These courts martial were
staffed by senior officers who were not legally trained and who seem not
to have understood the lawyers who prosecuted, defended, and,
separately, advised the court on the law. No reasons were given for
their often split decisions on the actions of men whom they had recently
faced on the battlefield—the situation in the best-known trial, that
of Brigade Fьhrer Kurt Meyer for having ordered the execution of
captured Canadian soldiers in Normandy in 1944. Of course, the times
were exceptional; witnesses and evidence were hard to trace, and
testimony was potentially unreliable. Nevertheless, the author finds the
trials justified, the procedures on the whole defensible, and the
verdicts, if sometimes bizarre in legal terms, understandable.

On the broader plane of public policy, the fact that the trials took
place at all was significant in light of the Liberal government’s
propensity for caution and deference toward our American and British
allies. In this respect, the trials marked another example of Canada
coming of age on the international scene. However, the whole process was
flawed. In several cases, the results were a travesty in either their
severity or their leniency. Neither prosecution nor judges understood
the mentality and values of the military culture that had produced the
accused. Most seriously, it is argued, the Canadian trials imposed
victor’s justice, for they failed to call to account our own officers
and servicemen who may have been guilty of the same offences. This study
offers cautions that should guide contemporary attempts to set up an
international court for war crimes.