Judgment at Tokyo
Judgment at Tokyo

Author: Timothy P. Maga

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 9780813128986

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In the years since the Japanese war crimes trials concluded, the proceedings have been colored by charges of racism, vengeance, and guilt. In this book, Tim Maga contends that in the trials good law was practiced and evil did not go unpunished. The defendants ranged from lowly Japanese Imperial Army privates to former prime ministers. Since they did not represent a government for which genocide was a policy pursuit, their cases were more difficult to prosecute than those of Nazi war criminals. In contrast to Nuremberg, the efforts in Tokyo, Guam, and other locations throughout the Pacific received little attention by the Western press. Once the Cold War began, America needed Pacific allies and the atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers throughout the 1930s and early 1940s were rarely mentioned. The trials were described as phony justice and "Japan bashing". Keenan and his compatriots adopted criminal court tactics and established precedents in the conduct of war crimes trials that still stand today. Maga reviews the context for the trials, recounts the proceedings, and concludes that they were, in fact, decent examples of American justice and fair play.

The Tokyo War Crimes Trial
The Tokyo War Crimes Trial

Author: Yuma Totani

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13:

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This book assesses the historical significance of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE)--commonly called the Tokyo trial--established as the eastern counterpart of the Nuremberg trial in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Through extensive research in Japanese, American, Australian, and Indian archives, Yuma Totani taps into a large body of previously underexamined sources to explore some of the central misunderstandings and historiographical distortions that have persisted to the present day. Foregrounding these voluminous records, Totani disputes the notion that the trial was an exercise in "victors' justice" in which the legal process was egregiously compromised for political and ideological reasons; rather, the author details the achievements of the Allied prosecution teams in documenting war crimes and establishing the responsibility of the accused parties to show how the IMTFE represented a sound application of the legal principles established at Nuremberg. This study deepens our knowledge of the historical intricacies surrounding the Tokyo trial and advances our understanding of the Japanese conduct of war and occupation during World War II, the range of postwar debates on war guilt, and the relevance of the IMTFE to the continuing development of international humanitarian law.

Australia's War Crimes Trials 1945-51
Australia's War Crimes Trials 1945-51

Author: Georgina Fitzpatrick

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2016-08-29

Total Pages: 911

ISBN-13: 9004292055

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This unique volume provides a detailed analysis of Australia’s 300 war crimes trials of principally Japanese accused conducted in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Part I contains contextual essays explaining why Australia established military courts to conduct these trials and thematic essays considering various legal issues in, and historical perspectives on, the trials. Part II offers a comprehensive collection of eight location essays, one each for the physical locations where the trials were held. In Part III post-trial issues are reviewed, such as the operation of compounds for war criminals; the repatriation of convicted Japanese war criminals to serve the remainder of their sentences; and reflections of some of those convicted on their experience of the trials. In the final essay, a contemporary reflection on the fairness of the trials is provided, not on the basis of a twenty-first century critique of contemporary minimum standards of fair trial expected in the prosecution of war crimes, but by reviewing approaches taken in the trials themselves as well as from reactions to the trials by those associated with them. The essays are supported by a large collection of unique historical photographs, maps and statistical materials. There has been no systematic and comprehensive analysis of these trials so far, which has meant that they are virtually precluded from consideration as judicial precedent. This volume fills that gap, and offers scholars and practitioners an important and groundbreaking resource.

The Trial of Henry Kissinger
The Trial of Henry Kissinger

Author: Christopher Hitchens

Publisher: Verso

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 9781859843987

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In this incendiary book, Hitchens takes the floor as prosecuting counsel and mounts a devastating indictment of Henry Kissinger, whose ambitions and ruthlessness have directly resulted in both individual murders and widespread, indiscriminate slaughter.

Twilight of Impunity
Twilight of Impunity

Author: Judith Armatta

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2010-07-30

Total Pages: 578

ISBN-13: 0822391791

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An eyewitness account of the first major international war-crimes tribunal since the Nuremberg trials, Twilight of Impunity is a gripping guide to the prosecution of Slobodan Milosevic for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. The historic trial of the “Butcher of the Balkans” began in 2002 and ended abruptly with Milosevic’s death in 2006. Judith Armatta, a lawyer who spent three years in the former Yugoslavia during Milosevic’s reign, had a front-row seat at the trial. In Twilight of Impunity she brings the dramatic proceedings to life, explains complex legal issues, and assesses the trial’s implications for victims of the conflicts in the Balkans during the 1990s and international justice more broadly. Armatta acknowledges the trial’s flaws, particularly Milosevic’s grandstanding and attacks on the institutional legitimacy of the International Criminal Tribunal. Yet she argues that the trial provided an indispensable legal and historical narrative of events in the former Yugoslavia and a valuable forum where victims could tell their stories and seek justice. It addressed crucial legal issues, such as the responsibility of commanders for crimes committed by subordinates, and helped to create a framework for conceptualizing and organizing other large-scale international criminal tribunals. The prosecution of Slobodan Milosevic in The Hague was an important step toward ending impunity for leaders who perpetrate egregious crimes against humanity.

The Tokyo Trial and War Crimes in Asia
The Tokyo Trial and War Crimes in Asia

Author: Mei Ju-ao

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-01-12

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 9811598134

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The book examines the process and the impact of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), otherwise known as the Tokyo Trial, which was convened in 1946 to try the Japanese leaders accused of committing war crimes during World War II. Offering valuable research materials, it studies the lessons learned from the failed attempt after World War I, and the background and establishment of the IMTFE. It elaborates on the Charter, the Indictment, the Proceeding Records, and the Judgment of the IMTFE, with an emphasis on principles of international law and other legal questions, often with reference to the Nuremberg Trial. It also discusses the structure and different parts of the court organization, the selection and prosecution of Class-A war criminals, and the trial procedures especially those relating to evidence. The author’s personal experience and his criticism of certain aspects of the Tokyo Trial make it most insightful for the reader. From the perspective of a Chinese judge, this unique text brings in the dimensions of both international law and international relations, and allows us to measure the significance and legacy of the Tokyo Trial for contemporary international criminal justice. The author’s manuscript of this book was written in Chinese in the mid-1960s as part of a larger project, and was initially published in 1988. This is the first time that this book has been translated into English.

Atrocities on Trial
Atrocities on Trial

Author: Patricia Heberer

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2008-04-01

Total Pages: 358

ISBN-13: 0803210841

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These essays are organised into four sections, dealing with the history of war crime trials from Weimar Germany to just after World War II, the sometimes diverging Allied attempts to come to terms with the Nazi concentration camp system, the ability of postwar societies to confront war crimes of the past and the legacy of war crime trials.

Hitler's Generals on Trial
Hitler's Generals on Trial

Author: Valerie Geneviève Hébert

Publisher: University Press of Kansas

Published: 2021-02-12

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 0700632670

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By prosecuting war crimes, the Nuremberg trials sought to educate West Germans about their criminal past, provoke their total rejection of Nazism, and convert them to democracy. More than all of the other Nuremberg proceedings, the High Command Case against fourteen of Hitler's generals embraced these goals, since the charges-the murder of POWs, the terrorizing of civilians, the extermination of Jews-also implicated the 20 million ordinary Germans who had served in the military. This trial was the true test of Nuremberg's potential to inspire national reflection on Nazi crime. Its importance notwithstanding, the High Command Case has been largely neglected by historians. Valerie Hébert's study—the only book in English on the subject—draws extensively on the voluminous trial records to reconstruct these proceedings in full: prosecution and defense strategies; evidence for and against the defendants and the military in general; the intricacies of the judgment; and the complex legal issues raised, such as the defense of superior orders, military necessity, and command responsibility. Crucially, she also examines the West German reaction to the trial and the intense debate over its fairness and legitimacy, ignited by the sentencing of soldiers who were seen by the public as having honorably defended their country. Hébert argues that the High Command Trial was itself a success, producing eleven guilty verdicts along with an incontrovertible record of the German military's crimes. But, viewing the trial from beyond the courtroom, she also contends that it made no lasting imprint on the German public's consciousness. And because the United States was eager to secure West Germany as an ally in the Cold War, American officials eventually consented to parole and clemency programs for all of the convicted officers, so that by the late 1950s not one remained imprisoned. Superbly researched and impeccably told, Hitler's Generals on Trial addresses fundamental questions concerning the meaning of justice after atrocity and genocide, the moral imperative of punishment for these crimes, the link between justice and memory, and the relevance of the Nuremberg trials for transitional justice processes today. Inasmuch as these trials coined the vocabulary of modern international criminal law and set an agenda for transitional justice that remains in place today, Hébert's book marks a major contribution to military and legal history.

The Malmedy Massacre
The Malmedy Massacre

Author: Steven P. Remy

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2017-03-14

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 067497722X

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During the Battle of the Bulge, Waffen SS soldiers shot 84 American prisoners near the Belgian town of Malmedy—the deadliest mass execution of U.S. soldiers during World War II. The bloody deeds of December 17, 1944, produced the most controversial war crimes trial in American history. Drawing on newly declassified documents, Steven Remy revisits the massacre—and the decade-long controversy that followed—to set the record straight. After the war, the U.S. Army tracked down 74 of the SS men involved in the massacre and other atrocities and put them on trial at Dachau. All the defendants were convicted and sentenced to death or life imprisonment. Over the following decade, however, a network of Germans and sympathetic Americans succeeded in discrediting the trial. They claimed that interrogators—some of them Jewish émigrés—had coerced false confessions and that heat of battle conditions, rather than superiors’ orders, had led to the shooting. They insisted that vengeance, not justice, was the prosecution’s true objective. The controversy generated by these accusations, leveled just as the United States was anxious to placate its West German ally, resulted in the release of all the convicted men by 1957. The Malmedy Massacre shows that the torture accusations were untrue, and the massacre was no accident but was typical of the Waffen SS’s brutal fighting style. Remy reveals in unprecedented depth how German and American amnesty advocates warped our understanding of one of the war’s most infamous crimes through a systematic campaign of fabrications and distortions.

Beyond Victor's Justice? The Tokyo War Crimes Trial Revisited
Beyond Victor's Justice? The Tokyo War Crimes Trial Revisited

Author: Yuki Tanaka

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2011-06-09

Total Pages: 436

ISBN-13: 9004215913

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The aim of this new collection of essays is to engage in analysis beyond the familiar victor’s justice critiques. The editors have drawn on authors from across the world — including Australia, Japan, China, France, Korea, New Zealand and the United Kingdom — with expertise in the fields of international humanitarian law, international criminal law, Japanese studies, modern Japanese history, and the use of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. The diverse backgrounds of the individual authors allow the editors to present essays which provide detailed and original analyses of the Tokyo Trial from legal, philosophical and historical perspectives. Several of the essays in the collection are based on the authors’ extensive archival research in Japan, Australia, the United States and New Zealand, providing rich insights into Japanese societal attitudes towards the Trial, biological experimentation by the Japanese Army in China, as well as the trial of Korean prison guards and prosecutions for rape and sexual assault in the post-war period. Some of the essays deal with particular participants in the Trial, examining the role of individual judges, and the selection of defendants and the decision not to prosecute the Emperor. Other essays analyse the Trial from a legal perspective, and address its impact on concepts such as command responsibility, conspiracy and war crimes. The majority of the essays seek to identify and address some of the ‘forgotten crimes’ in the Tokyo Trial. These include crimes committed in China and Korea (particularly the activities of the infamous Unit 731), crimes committed against comfort women, and crimes associated with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the conventional firebombing of other Japanese cities and the illicit drug trade in China. Finally, the collection includes a number of essays which consider the importance of studying the Tokyo Trial and its contemporary relevance. These issues include an examination of the way in which academics have ‘written’ the Trial over the last 60 years, and an analysis of some of the lessons that can be drawn for international trials in the future.