Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth arrives for a briefing in the U.S. Capitol last month.

In January 1944, a German U-boat sent two torpedoes into the starboard side of a British-chartered Greek steamer called the Peleus, which sank under the South Atlantic in less than five minutes. A dozen survived to clamber into a life raft or cling to floating debris. After a brief interrogation, the U-boat’s captain, Heinz Eck, ordered several of his crewmen to use machine guns and grenades to kill the survivors. The German craft’s senior engineer, who had conducted the questioning of the survivors in limited English, told the captain his order was illegal. The engineer was overruled.

Incredibly, four members of the Peleus' crew survived the barrage by playing dead. That is how Herr Eck and two of his officers found themselves arrested, placed on trial and — 80 years ago almost to the day, on Nov. 30, 1945 — facing a firing squad. You can read a full account of the case on the website of the U.S. Naval Institute or in Vol. 1 of the United Nations War Crimes Commission’s “Law Reports of Trials of........

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