International aspects of sentencing war criminals after 1945

74 Summary Legal Aspects of International Punishment for Committing War Crimes after 1945 The Second World War was a global military conflict which involved majority of the world's nations and which became with more than 60 million victims the largest, deadliest and most devastating conflict in human history. The causes of the war were constituted by the consequences of the Treaty of Versailles, which enhanced the feeling of humiliation in defeated countries, especially in Germany, and economic crisis in the late twenties and thirties, commonly known as the Great Depression, which fundamentally undermined a large number of countries, thereby allowing the rise of the Nazis, led by Adolf Hitler, and other totalitarian regimes throughout Europe. The Second World War has been accompanied with unprecedented level of crimes against humanity, war crimes and inhumane treatment of prisoners of war. Unlike all previous conflicts the course of the fighting much more affected civilian population and led to huge rate of casualties. Victims among civilians account for two thirds of the estimated 60 million victims. Many civilians died because of disease, starvation, massacres, bombing and deliberate genocidal actions and other war crimes committed by German as well as Japanese forces on the Axis-occupied territories. The..