The Dönitz Conundrum
One incongruity that "just war" theorists seem to miss is that while they claim an abstraction called "just war doctrine" has developed over millennia, examples of its practical application under law are few and far between. Using AI purely as a semi-omniscient reference librarian, I can come up with only a few "just war" tribunals before the post-World War II Nuremberg trials, such as the 1474 trial of Peter von Hagenbach for atrocities committed during the occupation of Breisach. After that, we have to wait almost 500 years to reach Article 227 of the Versailles treaty, which "publicly arraigned" Kaiser Wilhelm II for "a supreme offence against international morality." However, he was never brought to trial as the Netherlands refused to extradite him, and he lived there until his death in 1941. In other words, we baaically have only one solid example of applying "just war doctrine" in a quasi-jurisprudential environme...