scholarly journals War Crimes Trials, ‘Victor’s Justice’ and Australian Military Justice in the Aftermath of the Second World War

2013 ◽  
pp. 327-347 ◽  
Author(s):  
Georgina Fitzpatrick
Keyword(s):  
War Crimes ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Military Justice ◽  
War Crimes Trials ◽  
Second World

The First Wave of International War Crimes Trials: Istanbul and Leipzig

2006 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 441-455 ◽  
Author(s):  
ALAN KRAMER
Keyword(s):  
War Crimes ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Crimes Against Humanity ◽  
World War ◽  
The First World War ◽  
War Crimes Trials ◽  
International War ◽  
Second World ◽  
First World ◽  
Foundation Stone

The Nuremberg tribunal following the Second World War is universally considered as the foundation stone of international law with regard to war crimes and crimes against humanity. It may come as a surprise, however, to learn that the first international attempts to prosecute war crimes and crimes against humanity came at the end of the First World War, with trials held at Allied prompting in Turkey and Germany.

Making Killers: Hate Training and the US Army’s War in Europe, 1942-5

2020 ◽  
pp. 002200942091108
Author(s):  
Benjamin M. Schneider
Keyword(s):  
War Crimes ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Us Army ◽  
Military Justice ◽  
German Army ◽  
War Criminals ◽  
The Us ◽  
Marginal Effectiveness ◽  
Second World

During the Second World War, the US Army was faced with the problem of turning average civilians into soldiers capable of destroying the German army. To ease their adjustment to their new duties and overcome what US officers saw as the unsuitability of Americans for soldiering, the Army Ground Forces adopted a training regimen designed to produce an ‘induced urge to hate the enemy’. This training would make soldiers into enthusiastic killers by portraying the enemy as brutal and ruthless and warfare as a fundamentally lawless activity. As the war went on, hate training increasingly emphasized German atrocities, breaking down the distinctions between soldier and civilian and painting all Germans as potential threats. This antinomian approach achieved only marginal effectiveness in getting US troops to kill, but had dire results for military justice. Blurring the lines between lawful killing and murder, the army’s hate training program crippled its ability to police its soldiers. As violence against German civilians and POWs mounted, many officers felt these war crimes were the natural and inevitable result of the army’s training regimen. Unwilling to hold soldiers responsible, confessed war criminals were only lightly punished, explicitly because the Army believed they had only acted on their training.

The contribution of the Emperor Asoka Maurya to the development of the humanitarian ideal in warfare

1995 ◽  
Vol 35 (305) ◽  
pp. 192-206 ◽  
Author(s):  
G.I.A.D. Draper
Keyword(s):  
War Crimes ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Red Cross ◽  
Humanitarian Law ◽  
World War ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
War Crimes Trials ◽  
The University ◽  
Legal Staff ◽  
Second World

Gerald Draper (1914–1989) was the foremost specialist in humanitarian law of his generation in the United Kingdom, and was well-respected in the law of war community worldwide. He was a Military Prosecutor in the war crimes trials in Germany after the Second World War, and following his retirement from the Army Legal Staff became a distinguished academic, finishing as Professor of Law at the University of Sussex. Draper was a delegate to many International Conferences of the Red Cross as well as to the Diplomatic Conference which drafted the Additional Protocols of 1977.

Why were there no war crimes trials for the Korean War?

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Sandra Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Korean War ◽  
War Crimes ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
The West ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
War Crimes Trials ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
National Leaders ◽  
Second World

Abstract In the Korean War of 1950-53, U.S. authorities were determined to pursue atrocities perpetrated by North Korean and Communist Chinese forces through legal channels, in keeping with the standards they believed they had set after the Second World War. Yet, their plans foundered in Korea, despite extensive groundwork for prosecutions. Four factors were responsible. First, it was difficult to find reliable evidence and to identify and apprehend suspects. Second, U.S. officials rapidly lost confidence in the idea of prosecuting national leaders. Third, the lack of clear-cut victory in the conflict necessitated a diplomatic solution, which was incompatible with war crimes trials. Fourth, the moral standing of the West, and hence its authority to run trials, was undermined by the large number of atrocities committed by the United Nations side. Thus, the U.S. plan for war crimes trials was dropped without fanfare, to be replaced by an anti-Communist propaganda campaign.

War Reprisals in the War Crimes Trials and in the Geneva Conventions of 1949

1953 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 590-614 ◽  
Author(s):  
A . R. Albrecht
Keyword(s):  
War Crimes ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Practical Significance ◽  
World War ◽  
Geneva Conventions ◽  
War Crimes Trials ◽  
Occupied Territories ◽  
Theory Of War ◽  
The One ◽  
Second World

The war crimes trials following the second World War and the Geneva Conventions of 1949 have posed a question about war reprisals which is likely to be important in any future war and which has immediate practical significance in the current wars in Asia. On the one hand, the trials have transformed the previously sketchy rules on reprisals into a more comprehensive and elaborate system of control. On the other hand, the Geneva Conventions have provided for almost the complete abolition of reprisals in the very area for which the rules of control were formulated. Moreover, the conventions remain unratified by many of the major Powers, of which at least one has already demonstrated its inability to observe the abolition of reprisals. The core of the problem concerns reprisals against civilian persons in occupied territories, for this was by far the most significant point in the trials on reprisals and was the subject of the most outstanding innovation introduced by the Geneva Conventions. Nevertheless, the issues raised by the contradiction between the trials and the conventions cannot properly be discussed without reference to the general theory of war reprisals.

scholarly journals Culture and understanding in the Singapore war crimes trials (1946–1948): interpreting arguments of the defence

2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (01) ◽  
pp. 87-109
Author(s):  
W.L. Cheah
Keyword(s):  
War Crimes ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
British Military ◽  
War Crimes Trials ◽  
Defence Counsel ◽  
Culturally Influenced ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Second World

Abstract After the Second World War, the British military organised 131 war crimes trials in Singapore, which served as the base for British war crimes investigations in Asia. These trials brought together diverse participants-judges and counsel from the UK, India, and other Allied countries; accused persons from Japan, Korea, and Taiwan; defence counsel from Japan; and witnesses from all over Asia. The majority of defendants in these trials did not deny their involvement in the war crimes concerned; instead, these defendants argued that their conduct was consistent with Japanese norms, beliefs and practices. This article explores trial participants' varied and contested interpretations of the culturally influenced arguments put forward by the defence.

Building a Case against the War Criminals

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dean Aszkielowicz
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
War Crimes ◽  
International Agreements ◽  
Second World War ◽  
International Humanitarian Law ◽  
Humanitarian Law ◽  
World War ◽  
War Criminals ◽  
Post War ◽  
Second World

Long before the Second World War ended, the Allies were planning to prosecute Axis war criminals, including both those in positions of leadership and the perpetrators of individual crimes. There was no standing war crimes court at the end of the Second World War, however, and the post-war trials were a watershed in international law. For the trials at Nuremberg and Tokyo, Allied planners drew on the development of international humanitarian law and international agreements signed by the combatants over the decades preceding the war. The vast majority of war criminals who were prosecuted did not face the court at Nuremberg or Tokyo: they appeared before national military tribunals which were conducted according to each prosecuting country’s war crimes law. The Australian War Crimes Act passed through the parliament in October 1945, shortly before trials began.

Betraying their Motherland: Soviet Military Tribunals of Izmenniki Rodiny in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, 1941–1953

2014 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire P. Kaiser
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
War Crimes ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Crimes Against Humanity ◽  
World War ◽  
International Military Tribunal ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Military Tribunal ◽  
Second World

The immediate aftermath of the Second World War saw a transnational effort to identify and prosecute those individuals who committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in such fora as the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. However, parallel national processes were carried out across Europe to punish those citizens who, by a range of definitions, allegedly collaborated with enemy occupiers and committed treason. In the Soviet Union, suspected collaborators were tried as counterrevolutionaries in both the areas where crimes were committed and also those distant from regions of German or Romanian occupation. By examining tribunals in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in this article, I argue for the importance of identifying and prosecuting alleged collaborators to the Soviet postwar project – a project which was far from limited to areas in the western parts of the country and which remained intimately linked to prewar, Stalinist understandings of justice and revolution.

scholarly journals A Spanish Genocide? Reflections on the Francoist Repression after the Spanish Civil War

2005 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-191 ◽  
Author(s):  
JULIUS RUIZ
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Franco Regime ◽  
Military Justice ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Relative Decline ◽  
Post War ◽  
Second World

This article considers whether the Franco regime pursued a genocidal policy against Republicans after the formal ending of hostilities on 1 April 1939. In post-war Spain, the primary mechanism for punishing Republicans was military tribunals. Francoist military justice was based on the assumption that responsibility for the civil war lay with the Republic: defendants were tried for the crime of ‘military rebellion’. This was, as Ramón Serrano Suñer admitted his memoirs, ‘turning justice on its head’. But although it was extremely harsh, post-war military justice was never exterminatory. The article stresses that the institutionalisation of military justice from 1937, following the arbitrary murders of 1936, contributed to a relative decline in executions. Although the regime's determination to punish Republicans for ‘military rebellion’ inevitably led to the initiation of tens of thousands of post-war military investigations, only a minority of cases ended in execution. This was especially the case from January 1940, when the higher military authorities ended the autonomy of military tribunals over sentencing. This reassertion of central control in January 1940 was part of a wider policy to ease the self-inflicted problem of prison overcrowding; successive parole decrees led to a substantial and permanent decrease in the number of inmates by 1945. Allied victory in the Second World War did not mark the beginning but the end of the process of bringing to a close mass military justice.

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