Quote:
Originally Posted by 95th Rifleman
What crimes?
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Others may have a lot more knowledge than me on this, but I do know that the Catholic church, or at least some very highly placed members of it, were absolutely instrumental in smuggling wanted and highly placed Nazi's out of Europe in the 40's, 50's and even 60's. Huge sums of money were paid to the church as bribes during this time.
In my opinion, a war crime can be (simply) classified as any action which causes unnecessary and prolonged pain and suffering on a person or group of persons. By this definition, bombing of civilians could avoid the war crime tag if they were involved in production of war material. Shooting of escaping prisoners would also be "legal", while recapturing, and subjecting them to torture and/or drawn out execution (even being informed of impending execution without any option for appeal - aka mental torture) would not.
Obviously the true definition is MUCH more complex, but boiled down to it's basics, I think that probably sums it up fairly well.