A Summary of the History of Nazi War Crime Trials in Australia / Eine Zusammenfassung der Geschichte der Nazi-Kriegsverbrecherprozesse in Australien (original) (raw)
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Central European History, 2012
interesting, insightful contribution, and several chapters stand out as particularly original and illuminating. Frank Biess's methodological chapter on the potential of the history of emotions, already mentioned above, is one such contribution. Another is Paul Betts's comparative reading of East and West German etiquette books as windows on competing attempts to rebuild civil society in Cold-War Germany. Lisa Kirschenbaum offers a fascinating analysis of the commemoration of the siege of Leningrad in the Soviet Union, in which she stresses the mutually reinforcing interaction of public and private memories, thereby challenging oftrepeated claims about the inherent conflict between deliberately distorted official memories and authentic private memories. Katherine Lebow, in turn, analyzes postwar reconstruction efforts in Poland, identifying the war and its immense destructiveness as a catalyst that helped to pave the way for the emergence of new definitions of moral economy and citizenship under post-1945 socialist rule. The list of outstanding contributions could go on, but space does not allow an exhaustive discussion here. A single volume obviously cannot do full justice to such a vast topic as the legacies of World War II in Europe, and Histories of the Aftermath is deliberately selective in its coverage. It does not address the experiences of countries that remained neutral during the war, for example, and its primary geographical emphasis on Germany and the Soviet Union-although useful in maintaining a tight analytical focus-means that other regions receive little or no attention. The different contributions also vary in just how transnational and comparative they are; while some chapters make a very serious attempt to provide broader comparative insights, others remain focused on particular national contexts. All in all, however, this is an ambitious, clearly conceived and ultimately highly useful volume that I hope will inspire further fruitful research into the European postwar. PERTTI AHONEN UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH
The Nuremberg Trials: International Criminal Law Since 1945 / Die Nürnberger Prozesse: Völkerstrafrecht seit 1945, 2006
Although this conference has already shown us that both East and West Germany made attempts to deal with the Nazi past through the law, it is surprising to many to discover that in West-Germany an enormous number of Nazi defendants were brought to trial-over 6000, in fact. A great many moreabout 100,000-were investigated but never tried. They sat in court accused not of crimes against humanity, but regular murder, as defined by the German penal code in 1871. In this paper I would like to shed light on these trials, and particularly on the extraordinary difficulty prosecutors had in bringing former Nazis to trial, in getting them convicted, and then finally, in ensuring they served their time. Focusing on the period between 1960 and 1980, I will argue that there was a massive divide between the young and eager prosecutors and the older, more conservative, largely former Nazi judiciary. There is no clear cut picture of complicit jurists; in nearly every state in West-Germany there was evidence of a young, committed, and probing prosecution. But they had to work within a system that was defined by the generation of jurists who came before them and who still wielded extraordinary influence over the West German judicial system; in some states, 100% of Nazi judges had maintained or returned to their former posts. These judges sent a message to the public-through their interpretation of the laws-that the Nazi past was being dealt with properly. They developed the notion of the middleman as neutral, and therefore innocent; this representation of Nazi crime, reinforced time and again by trial verdicts, created a society in which there was no public will to deal with the Nazi past through the law, to punish Nazism fully. This is what Joachim Perels has called a normalization of the NS system from the elites. We have discussed here the legacy of Nuremberg, and I would like to explore the legacy of West German trials of Nazi perpetrators. Through an examination of the legal reforms in the 1960s, and by giving examples from 3 major investigations-The Auschwitz Trial, the RSHA investigation, and the Majdanek trial-I will show that changes to the law made it easier and easier for those who had the most power in the Nazi regime-the desktop murderers-to go free or escape trial, and in the end really only the most sadistic-and exceptional-of Nazi criminals, usually camp guards, were tried and convicted of murder. On the one hand, there were thousands of trials. On the other, the continuities in the jurist's personnel made the sentences and interpretation of the laws extremely favourable to the defendants. In the past decade there has been an explosion of historical research about West German confrontation with the past; in their work, most historians point to an undeniable presence of former Nazis in all parts of public life: in the civil service, the government, academia, the press, and most especially, in the judiciary. According to Ingo Miiller, despite the best efforts of the Allies to purge the judicial system of its Nazi members, this proved to be virtually impossible as it would have left the justice system without any functionaries. Therefore, during the reconstruction period of 1945-49, the Allies made more and more exceptions to their initial rule that anyone who had even nominally participated in the Hitler regime should lose their jobs. First, all those who had retired or been fired in 1933 were called back; next, anyone who joined the party after 1937 was given a clean slate; then, for every judge with a clean record, a tainted judge could be hired; and finally, all judges who had gone through the flimsy denazification process could be brought back. This meant that by 1949, for example, 93% of court officers in Westphalia had been affiliated with the Nazi party, in Schweinfurt 100%, and in the enormous state of Bavaria, 81% of judges were former Nazis.' Astonishingly, as Joachim Perels has pointed out, historians have not been willing to make the connection between the jurists and the laws that they generated, arguing that the new laws of the Federal Republic were basically purged of any antidemocratic tendencies from the Nazi period. However, upon examination, it becomes clear that legal theorists actively introduced road blocks to the
Holocaust Studies, 2014
Up until 1979, the ability of West German courts to prosecute Nazi war criminals was hampered by a Statute of Limitations for acts of manslaughter and murder. Throughout the 1960s, the issue generated considerable public discussion, both within the Federal Republic and among the international community. As prosecutors, politicians, journalists and Holocaust survivors (among many others) debated the need for continued war crimes trials, it was clear that there remained significant limits to western understandings of the Nazi genocide. This article analyses public responses to the Statute in both West Germany and Great Britain and argues that the whole affair has had a crucial impact on the development of international justice and today's pursuit of war criminals. In spring 2013, it was announced that 50 former Auschwitz guards would stand trial in Germany for their role in the Holocaust. 1 In July that same year, the Simon Wiesenthal Institute launched a poster campaign with the slogan, 'late, but not too late', appealing for the public's help in identifying and tracing any remaining Nazi war criminals. 2 In each case the message was the same: that the passage of time has not diminished the guilt of these perpetrators, and that old age should not be a barrier to their prosecution. However, the very fact that such trials can still take place at all is highly significant. Indeed, up until 1979, the ability of (West) German courts to prosecute former Nazi perpetrators remained in considerable doubt, hindered by a Statute of Limitations that imposed a strict time limit for investigating cases of murder and manslaughter. This Statute has received relatively little scholarly attention. Works that have been produced focus predominantly on pertinent legal issues such as post facto legislation, rather than exploring the Statute's broader historical significance. 3 Notable exceptions to this trend include recent studies by Frank Buscher and Marc von Miquel, although here the emphasis has, quite legitimately, rested upon the political discussions at the heart of the controversy. 4 This approach, combined with intricate contemporary accounts published by the likes of Rolf Vogel and Karl Jaspers, means that the parliamentary debates on this issue have now been well-documented; their reception elsewhere in society, considerably less so. 5
60th Anniversary International Conference / Internationale Konferenz zum 60. Jahrestag, 2006
Scholars of war crimes trials have often focused on the question of whether the trials were fair and just. More recently, the research has shifted to whether war crimes trials are an effective tool for educating civilians about the crimes of a previous regime. Mark J. Osiel in his book Mass Atrocity argues that war crimes trials should be designed as monumental spectacles to maximize their educational impact, affording the affected society a forum for exploring its past and reshaping its collective memory. 1 Lawrence Douglas in The Memory of Judgment supports this argument by suggesting that war crimes trials may be an imperative "born of the scars left on an outraged collective consciousness," and that such trials can contribute to the historical understanding of a traumatic past. 2 But Martha Minow in Between Vengeance and Forgiveness warns that varying prosecution strategies and the self-serving interests of the defendants may distort the historical record presented at trial. 3 Because of such inherent dangers, Michael Marrus argues that the historical narrative presented at trials should be viewed critically. 4 Hannah Arendt goes further in Eichmann in Jerusalem to suggest that creating a historical record in war crimes trials could only distract from the law's main purpose: to "render justice, and nothing else." 5 This tension between the law and history, as it manifested in the U.S. Army war crimes trials in Germany, is the focus of this paper. Between 1945 and 1947 the U.S. Army prosecuted 1,676 lesser war criminals, defined as perpetrators "other than those who held high political, civil, or military positions," in 462 trials conducted in the American zone of occupation in Germany. 6 The accused included concentration camp personnel, Nazi military and state officials, as well as ordinary German civilians accused of violations of the laws of war. The Dachau trials-as they later became known for the location where most of them took place-were meant to serve both punitive and educational purposes. By punishing the perpetrators the army hoped to establish individual responsibility for violations of the laws of war. At the same time, by presenting evidence of Nazi criminality in open court, the army also sought to educate the Germans about the crimes of their past regime. Through an overview of the Dachau trials, this paper will demonstrate how the law shaped the historical record prosecutors could present and how it influenced the army's ability to achieve the didactic goals it set for the trials.