http://www.time.com/time/world/article/ ... 99,00.html
Here is more on the traditional German judicial practice of sippenhaft:
Sippenhaft or Sippenhaftung was a form of collective punishment practiced in Nazi Germany towards the end of the Second World War. It was a legalized practice in which relatives of persons accused of crimes against the state were held to share the responsibility for those crimes and subject to arrest and sometimes execution. Many people who had committed no crimes were arrested and punished under Sippenhaft laws introduced after the failed July 20 plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler in July 1944. A law of February 1945 also threatened death to the relatives of military commanders who showed what Hitler regarded as cowardice or defeatism in the face of the enemy.
After the failure of the July 20 plot, the SS chief Heinrich Himmler told a meeting of Gauleiters in Posen that he would "introduce absolute responsibility of kin ... a very old custom practiced among our forefathers." According to Himmler, this practice had existed among the ancient Teutons. "When they placed a family under the ban and declared it outlawed or when there was a blood feud in the family, they were utterly consistent ... This man has committed treason; his blood is bad; there is traitor's blood in him; that must be wiped out. And in the blood feud the entire clan was wiped out down to the last member. And so, too, will Count Stauffenberg's family be wiped out down to the last member."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sippenhaft
