War Crimes Trial
Ruckteschell was the subject of one of the first war crimes investigations undertaken by the British Admiralty. It was alleged that on several occasions the warships commanded by Ruckteschell had continued firing on merchant vessels after they had surrendered. Since such behavior contravened the laws of naval warfare, the Admiralty requested that Ruckteschell and his crew members be detained for interrogation.
At the end of World War II Ruckteschell was on the staff of the German naval attaché in Japan and he was eventually located in an internment camp near Kobe from where he was brought back to Germany for trial.
According to the British charges submitted to the United Nations War Crimes Commission, the evidence revealed "at least one clear case of mass murder and several equally clear cases of the sinking of vessels whose crew were on the vessels when they were fired on, and were not picked up subsequently when on boats, rafts and in the water."
Read more about this topic: Helmuth Von Ruckteschell
Famous quotes containing the words war, crimes and/or trial:
“War and culture, those are the two poles of Europe, her heaven and hell, her glory and shame, and they cannot be separated from one another. When one comes to an end, the other will end also and one cannot end without the other. The fact that no war has broken out in Europe for fifty years is connected in some mysterious way with the fact that for fifty years no new Picasso has appeared either.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“As you from crimes would pardoned be,
Let your indulgence set me free.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Every political system is an accumulation of habits, customs, prejudices, and principles that have survived a long process of trial and error and of ceaseless response to changing circumstances. If the system works well on the whole, it is a lucky accident—the luckiest, indeed, that can befall a society.”
—Edward C. Banfield (b. 1916)