Wars are often regrettable and are almost always a very nasty business, which often brings out the worst in people as well as their countries, although on the other hand there are those that display incredible courage, prescient vision, and bold gallantry that best defines a man that has risen and commended themselves well to the difficult tasks that occur when worlds collide. World War II was a war that cost millions upon millions of lives, to which not only were there a tremendous amount of soldiers that died, but also civilians, in particular defenseless citizens that were deliberately bombed without any real strategic purpose, dragged into concentration camps and/or murdered, and so forth.
Yet, in the end, one side was victorious, to which history tells us, that they were in the right, but to subsequently believe that all of the war crimes were committed by the Axis nations, and none were committed by the Allied nations, would be a grand disservice to mankind, and a form of propaganda that deliberately skewed the facts in such a way as to define, one group of nations as being evil, and another group of nations as being good, with no shades of gray in-between. The fact of the matter is that there were atrocities committed against humanity on both sides of the war, as well as tremendous acts of courage by representatives of each and every nation.
Since the Allied nations were victorious, and at a tremendous cost, they felt that the vanquished should have to face the music for what they had wrought. The tribunal at Nuremberg, however, was made of, and only of, representatives of France, Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Republic, and no other countries. This, In of itself, was deliberately prejudicial against the German defendants, as without any judges from their country on the tribunal, it mattered little how good or how bad their legal defense was, whether evidence was favorable or not, as the result was determined by the tribunal who would ruled over all, to which all of the tribunal members were members of the victor nations who had suffered greatly.
At the Nuremberg trial, the German defendants were essentially accused of war crimes, as well as crimes against humanity. The problem with these charges was that they were either essentially ex-post facto laws, or international laws, subject to interpretation, that were applied in this trial to only the defeated nation of Germany, as if by definition, the victorious nations were absolved of all, without question. While there isn't any doubt that certain Germans committed terrible atrocities, waged aggressive war of conquest, cheated, stole, tortured, abuse and killed civilians as well as prisoners, were inhumane, broke treaties and agreements; the trial itself was far less than a search for truth and justice, and far more of making sure that some would pay in blood.
This judgment at Nuremberg, which ostensibly was meant to demonstrate justice and fairness in jurisprudence, was neither. Instead, it merely took on that guise and was instead a corrupted form of retribution that resulted in the death and imprisonment for those that were conveniently found guilty, whereas those that had a scientific or other marketable value to any of the Allied nations, were often given a free pass; mirroring in a sick way, that those that have utility would live, and those that did not, would die.