ExecutedToday.com

It’s the big wheels in villainy one naturally thinks of when reckoning the Third Reich’s war criminals — the Reichsprotekotors and concentration camp commandants; the Adolf Eichmanns and the Beast of Belsens.

But it’s obvious that in a conflagration as enormous as the Second World War, war crimes would not consist only in great monsters committing great monstrosities.

While this mere blog dare not join that timeless historiographical fray, that of meting out the correct measure of blood guilt throughout the German populace, its competency does extend to noticing the problem (philosophical, political, logistical) the Allies faced of establishing a workable approach to “war crimes” as the war wrapped up.

On these two dates just months after Germany capitulated, British and American military tribunals addressed themselves to two cases of atrocities that rate as forgettable in the scheme of things, by perpetrators who were thereafter forgotten.

• Nov. 30: Heinz Wilhelm Eck, U-Boat Commander

• Dec. 1: Anton Dostler, gone commando

Also On This Date

• 1824: Henry Fauntleroy, choked on debt
• 1944: Lilo Gloeden, Erich Gloeden and Elisabeth Kuznitzky