After the War the British authorities wanted those responsible for the deaths of the two officers brought to trial for war crimes, but this never happened. The story in the family was that as time went on the British Government wished to improve relations with Germany and the war crimes trial was quietly dropped. I always wondered about this and eventually I found an article in Wikipedia that explained what happened,
Leipzig War Crimes Trials
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopaedia
Background
During the First World War the Allied leaders came up with a new concept, that once victory was achieved, defeated enemy leaders should face criminal charges for international law violations made during the war. On 25 January 1919, during the Paris Peace Conference, the Allied governments established the Commission of Responsibilities to make recommendations to that effect. As a result, articles 227–230 of the Treaty of Versailles stipulated the arrest and trial of German officials defined as war criminals by the Allied governments. Article 227 made provision for the establishment of a special tribunal, presided over by a judge from each one of the major Allied powers – Britain, France, Italy, United States and Japan. It identified the former Kaiser Wilhelm II as a war criminal, and demanded that an extradition request be addressed to the Dutch government, which had given him asylum in the Netherlands since his abdication in November 1918. Article 228 allowed the Allied governments to try German war criminals in their military tribunals, nothwithstanding any proceedings taken against the same persons in German courts. The German government was required to comply with any extradition order issued by the Allied powers to that effect.
Following the conclusion of the treaty, the Allied government began their legal and diplomatic efforts to arrest the former Kaiser. On 28 June 1919, the day the treaty was signed, the President of the Paris Peace Conference addressed a diplomatic note to the Dutch government requesting the extradition of the ex-Kaiser. On 7 July the Dutch replied that any extradition of the Kaiser would be a violation of Dutch neutrality. Eventually the issue of bringing the ex-Kaiser to trial was dropped, and he remained in the Netherlands until his death on 4 June 1941.
On 3 February 1920, the Allies submitted a further list of 900 names of individuals accused of committing alleged war crimes to the German government. However, the Germans refused to extradite any German citizens to Allied governments, and suggested instead trying them within the German justice system, i.e. at the Reichsgericht in Leipzig. This proposal was accepted by the Allied leaders, and in May 1920 they handed the German government a reduced list of 45 accused persons. Not all these people could be traced, and in other cases there was difficulty in finding credible evidence. In the end only twelve individuals were brought to trial.
Of those 12, only 7 were found guilty; they were sentenced to terms of imprisonment of between 6 months for mistreating POW’s and 4 years for sinking a hospital ship and machine gunning survivors in the lifeboats