WAR CRIMES: The Last Defendant

White-haired, ill and nearly blind, Field Marshal Fritz Erich von Manstein, who had fought for Germany in two world wars, sat calmly day after day in a Hamburg concert hall which had been turned into a courtroom, while British and German lawyers argued whether he was a criminal or just an officer who had done his duty.

Manstein was the last of the defendants in the war-crimes trials of World War II. When his British judges handed down their verdict this week, the Allies closed their case against the enemy leaders whom, in the name of all mankind, they had arraigned...