They still are.

The punishment for them was death.

Maybe it should still be.

Torturing people, regardless of how bad they might be, is the one crime for which I might be convinced to support, or at least waver and not oppose, the death penalty.

What does that say? Is my sentence above an indication, in some way, of why and how torture can occur? That someone like me can see such demonic traits in torturers that I would relent on the death penalty? Somehow I doubt I'm alone in that.

Retired Command Sergeant Major Eric Haney: a founding member of Delta Force, the military's elite covert counter-terrorist unit:

The only reason anyone tortures is because they like to do it. It's about vengeance, it's about revenge, or it's about cover-up. You don't gain intelligence that way. Everyone in the world knows that. It's worse than small-minded, and look what it does. This administration has been masters of diverting attention away from real issues and debating the silly. Debating what constitutes torture: Mistreatment of helpless people in your power is torture, period. And (I'm saying this as) a man who has been involved in the most pointed of our activities. I know it, and all of my mates know it. You don't do it. It's an act of cowardice. I hear apologists for torture say, "Well, they do it to us." Which is a ludicrous argument.
...
The Saddam Husseins of the world are not our teachers. Christ almighty, we wrote a Constitution saying what's legal and what we believed in.

As you can see from the Gestapo memo, moreover, the Nazis were adamant that their 'enhanced interrogation techniques' would be carefully restricted and controlled, monitored by an elite professional staff ... Also: the use of hypothermia, authorized by Bush and Rumsfeld, was initially forbidden. 'Waterboarding" was forbidden too, unlike that authorized by Bush.

The victims, by the way, were not in uniform. And the Nazis tried to argue, just as John Yoo did, that this made torturing them legit.