This reprint of the 1983 book by the Canadian investigative reporter Sol Littman is a fascinating and disturbing account that is composed of two intriguing parts. First, Littman describes life within and the final "liquidation" of the Kovno ghetto (Kaunas, Lithuania) during World War II, giving the reader a vivid description of what it must have been like to try to survive that horrendous environment. Then he describes the search, hunt and extradition proceedings of Helmut Rauca, one of the main Nazi perpetrators in the murders of the Jews of the Kovno ghetto. Littman raised difficult questions about the role played by the Canadian Government in allowing Rauca and other suspected war criminals to find safe havens within its borders. This book is well worth reading.
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.
This 15-volume series summarizes the course of the more important proceedings taken against individuals accused of war crimes during World War II, excluding the major war criminals tried by the Nuremberg and Tokyo International Military Tribunals. These representative trials of war criminals were selected for this series based on the major points of municipal and international law that were raised and settled during the trials as well as the potential for the greatest legal interest. For example, Volume 4 includes the trial of General Tomoyuki Yamashita (PDF). Each volume begins with a unique introduction by the Right Honorable Lord Wright of Durley, Chairman of the United Nations War Crimes Commission. At the end of World War I, as everybody knows, there were admirable declarations that war crimes would be punished, and lists of criminals were prepared by a fact-finding committee, but nothing practical was effected towards identifying, tracing and apprehending accused individuals or puttingthem on trial, though an excellent report, with lists of war crimes, was prepared by the Commission on Responsibilities already referred to. The whole thing was abandoned after a few unsatisfactory trials, though at least one useful judgment was produced by the Leipzig Court in the Llandovery Castle case, and though the Leipzig cases (as they have been called) showedhow hopeless it was to expect justice in these circumstances from the courts of the Reich. Hence it came about that the victorious Allies after WorldWar II decided to try war criminals themselves, adopting either the system of the military courts or that of the national courts. They refused to think that Allied courts could not be impartial. Their decision has been amply justified by the trials that have been held. The International MilitaryTribunals, held one at Nuremberg and the other at Tokyo, stand as convincing proofs that impartial justice can in this way be administered. Thishas also been shown by the military and the national courts which have held hundreds of trials, a selection from which is contained in these volumes.The presence of neutral judges has been shown to be not essential to maintain a high standard of impartiality and this was in fact fortunate under thecircumstances, because neutral judges were in fact not available. Nor had the accused any legal right to object to being tried by such courts; all the accused were entitled to was a fair trial and that they got. Also, as I have stated, the types of courts employed were those traditionally recognised by International Law as competent for war crime trials.
These Reports have in the present production arrived at Volume XII. This volume will contain a Report of only one trial, which has been described as the High Command Trial; because it deals with the responsibility of high-ranking officers of the German army for War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity. The proceedings and evidence are very voluminous, as may be inferred from the fact that the length of the Judgment was 330 pages. The work of digesting the evidence has been performed by Mr. Aars Rynning, the Norwegian member of the Commission's staff. I am satisfied that the work has been admirably done. ·The Notes on the Case, which, together with the arrangement of those parts of the Judgment in which legal matters are discussed, are Mr. Brand's contribution to the present report, examine various questions on which the Judgment is of particular value. As Editor of these Reports he has also supplied the necessary cross-references and comparisons with earlier judgments of the same series, that is the series of the Subsequent Proceedings at Nuremberg, conducted under General Telford Taylor. In the Foreword to Volume VI, I included some general remarks on these proceedings which I do not desire to repeat. The judgment in the present case is of great interest and· importance. Though all these proceedings were held under Control Council Law No. 10 and Military Ordinance No.7, and thus are under a separate jurisdiction from that of the International Military Tribunal, which is conveniently referred to as LM.T., there is a substantial uniformity in the Basic Laws and Procedure, and the judgment in the present case is in substance based on the principles enumerated by the LM.T. But it does illustrate the development which has necessarily arisen by reason of the various complications of fact and of issues which were not present in the LM.T. trial. The Tribunal which decided the present case has been compelled to do much work 'of analysis and differentiation and has performed the task in such a way as to add greatly to the development of this branch of law. The same may indeed be said of all the other judgments in the Subsequent Proceedings. No student ofthis branch of the International Law of war can dispense with a careful study of these Subsequent Proceedings, which have carried the ideas of the LM.T. forward into problems of fact and law which were not present, and indeed could not have been present, to the minds of the earlier Tribunal. Perhaps I may here be permitted to express a humble tribute to the Judges who have left their homes in the United States and sojourned for many months in Nuremberg for the purpose of conducting these trials and performing the arduous task of preparing the judgments. Their efforts will be now and hereafter unanimously applauded.
This volume contains two very important trials which have been held under the" Subsequent Proceedings" at Nuremberg. One is the Krupp case, in which the defendants were the directors and managers of that worldfamous organisation, and the other concerns the great chemical combine, I.G. Farben. In both cases the operations of the respective concerns were not limited specifically to war production, but that did form a great part of their output and held a foremost rOle in the trials. Both cases involved the fundamental questions of the nature of crimes against peace and the nature of crimes of economic spoliation. Crimes against peace will be more fully examined and dealt with in Volumes XIII-XV of this series in which it will be sought to determine the essential character of these crimes as conceived in the international law of war. Crimes concerning property, however, have been more fully dealt with in the Note prepared by Mr. Brand, which appears on pages 159-66. He has sought to achieve in summary form an epitome of the main ideas which underlie this concept of war crimes, having regard to what happened in the last war. The summary is n·ot limited to the two reports in this volume, but covers cases in the earlier Volume IX in which this topic and its various ramifications were dealt with and explored.It is well known that the German war system depended essentially on exploitation by the Germans of tbe industrial resources and the production of the occupied countries. Closely associated with that was the use of what has been called slave labour, that is either the labour of deportees from occupied countries or the labour of the inhabitants themselves in those countries. Without the command and the ability to employ all . these enormous resources of material and manpower it is, I think, clear that the German war effort could not have been continued as it was. In the same way the Germans were to a large extent fed by the agricultural products taken from the occupied countries. In a sense this economic exploitation as a system may appear to have been something novel in the history of war, and it therefore has called for special treatment in these volumes which seek to explain the various trials which have been held in respect of that particular crime.
This 15-volume series summarizes more important proceedings taken against individuals accused of war crimes during World War II, excluding the major war criminals tried by the Nuremberg and Tokyo International Military Tribunals. These representative were selected for this series based on the major points of municipal and international law that were raised and settled during the trials as well as the potential for the greatest legal interest. For example, Volume 4 includes the trial of General Tomoyuki Yamashita (PDF). Each volume begins with a unique introduction by the Right Honorable Lord Wright of Durley, Chairman of the United Nations War Crimes Commission. I have been asked to contribute a Foreword to the first volume of Law Reports on Trials of War Crimes which are being selected and prepared by the United Nations War Crimes Commission, of which I am Chairman. The Commission in producing and publishing these law reports is fulfilling the duty assigned to it. The Commission is primarily concerned with criminals who fall within the first category under the Moscow Declaration of October 30th, 1943. This category may generally be defined to be that embracing particular individuals who have committed offences against the laws of war and whose offences can be ascribed to a particular location. These are sometimes called "minor war criminals," but that is a misleading term because of the enormity and scope of the crimes committed, which really include all war crimes except those that were charged at the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials and are described as crimes which have no particular geographical location. The Declaration distinguished these two categories for the purpose of providing how they were to be punished. The latter, the" major war criminals," were to be punished by joint decision of the governments of the Allies and the joint decision has resulted in the Nuremberg trial and the Tokyo trial. The former category were dealt with in the Moscow Declaration by providing that Germans who took part in the various atrocities referred' to were to be brought back to the scene of their crimes and tried on the spot by the peoples whom they have outraged. The Commission has not been concerned directly, though it has been concerned indirectly, in the crimes which were charged in the proceedings at Nuremberg and Tokyo, but it has had very close relations with the cases of what have been called the" minor criminals." The trials of that class of offenders constitute the subject of these reports. In the present volume, which was sent to press before the judgment of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg was promulgated, there are reports of six cases tried by British Military Courts and three cases tried by United States Military Commissions. I shall not attempt to deal with the details of these cases, which included offences against prisoners of war, slaughter of mariners attempting to escape from a torpedoed ship, poison gas used on inmates of concentration camps, killing on a large scale by poison administered by medical personnel in a sanatorium, and similar crimes. It will be observed that in all these cases prosecutions were brought and conducted by the military authorities. The courts were constituted from serving officers of the two armies respectively with the exception of two instances, the Peleus and the Almelo cases, where the military courts were mixed in their composition. In the Peleus case the tribunal included Greek as well as British officers, and in the Almelo case Dutch as well as British officers. Most of these cases are dealing with offences committed against members of the military forces of the respective nation. In later volumes it is hoped to include reports of the trials of Germans accused of crimes in concentration camps. It was not found possible for technical reason to include in the present volume reports of French cases, but that defect will, it is hoped, be remedied in the following volumes.
Focused on 'The Holocaust in an Age of Genocide', Remembering for the Future brings together the work of nearly 200 scholars from more than 30 countries and features cutting-edge scholarship across a range of disciplines, amounting to the most extensive and powerful reassessment of the Holocaust ever undertaken. In addition to its international scope, the project emphasizes that varied disciplinary perspectives are needed to analyze and to check the genocidal forces that have made the Twentieth century so deadly. Historians and ethicists, psychologists and literary scholars, political scientists and theologians, sociologists and philosophers - all of these, and more, bring their expertise to bear on the Holocaust and genocide. Their contributions show the new discoveries that are being made and the distinctive approaches that are being developed in the study of genocide, focusing both on archival and oral evidence, and on the religious and cultural representation of the Holocaust.
This 15-volume series summarizes the course of the more important proceedings taken against individuals accused of war crimes during World War II, excluding the major war criminals tried by the Nuremberg and Tokyo International Military Tribunals. These representative trials of war criminals were selected for this series based on the major points of municipal and international law that were raised and settled during the trials as well as the potential for the greatest legal interest. For example, Volume 4 includes the trial of General Tomoyuki Yamashita (PDF). Each volume begins with a unique introduction by the Right Honorable Lord Wright of Durley, Chairman of the United Nations War Crimes Commission. This third volume includes reports of ten cases. They are drawn from widely distant parts of the globe; the trial courts are diverse in character. consisting of National Courts and Military Courts acting under different warrants or commissions: The charges were diversified in character. 'Perhaps the most important case from the standpoint of international law is that which stands first in the volume. The prisoner was a German named Klinge. He was indicted before a Norwegian Court for torturing Norwegian civilians, and in one case so as to cause the victim's death., The ,trial court sentenced him to death under Articles of the Civil Criminal Code as modified by a Provisional Decree of 1945, which gave new and special powers to the Court in the 'case of war crimes, including the power to impose the death sentence where under the-relevant articles of the Civil Criminal Code imprisonment was the severest penalty.
