An Age-Old Question: Optical (A)llusions, (In)Decency, and (In)Justice in the Trial of Japanese War Criminals

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
James Burnham Sedgwick
Keyword(s):  
Temporal Logic ◽  
War Crimes ◽  
International Justice ◽  
World War ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
War Criminals ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Aesthetic

Abstract Timing complicates all dimensions of post conflict redress. Moving too fast suggests prejudice. Going too slow delays accountability and closure. This paper challenges the temporal logic of international justice. The prosecution of aged defendants created aesthetical dilemmas for war crimes operations in post-World War ii Asia. The unsettling optical allusions of frail perpetrators in court — shadows of their former selves — left many observers conflicted: it looked indecent, it felt unjust and underwhelming. The unseemly punishment of weak defendants undercut prosecution attempts to brand perpetrators as monsters. Disappointed reporters and trial authorities fixated on the shabby dress, waning physique, and benign senescence of once-sinister villains. Few questioned the accused’s guilt. Many felt unnerved by the optics. Ultimately, this paper shows how the staging and performance of justice impacts a court’s effectiveness. Unrelenting accountability, bringing all war criminals to justice, feels right. Yet, the aesthetic complications of prosecuting aged accused may not be worth it.

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.

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.

scholarly journals A Case From Australia's War Crimes Trials: Lieutenant-General Nishimura, 1950

2013 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 337
Author(s):  
Lisa Lee
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
War Crimes ◽  
World War ◽  
War Criminals ◽  
War Crimes Trials ◽  
Admissible Evidence ◽  
The Impact ◽  
War Crimes Trial ◽  
Discretionary Powers

In the aftermath of World War II, Australia undertook domestic trials of suspected Japanese war criminals between 1945 and 1951. This article focuses on Australia’s war crimes trial of Lieutenant-General Nishimura as held at the Los Negros court in mid-June 1950, and the subsequent petitioning period and confirmation process. The Australian war crimes courts were military courts vested with broad discretionary powers that facilitated the expeditious trials of accused. The procedure of war crimes courts differed from that of field general courts-martial in two main areas: admissible evidence and sentencing range — and this article highlights concomitant problems arising during the trial and subsequent case on review. This article examines the prosecution of the case entirely on documentary evidence; the impact of low admissibility thresholds for evidence; issues regarding the voluntariness and reliability of witness evidence; and the option of capital punishment in the Nishimura trial.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fred L. Borch
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Legal History ◽  
War Crimes ◽  
World War ◽  
Post World War Ii ◽  
East Indies ◽  
War Criminals ◽  
Netherlands East Indies ◽  
War Crimes Trials

The post-World War II trials of war criminals in the Netherlands East Indies (NEI) are not well known, and the chief goal of this book is to change that forever, if only because these prosecutions were unique in legal history.Between September 1946 and December 1949, Dutch colonial authorities convicted 1,038 Japanese (and Koreans and Formosans) and a handful of Europeans, Eurasians, Chinese, and Indonesians for war-related offenses. NEI authorities convened nearly 450 “temporary courts-martial” in twelve locations in the archipelago known today as Indonesia; only U.S. authorities conducting war crimes trials in the Asiatic-Pacific Theater held more trials....

Military Trials of War Criminals in the Netherlands East Indies 1946-1949

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fred L. Borch
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
War Crimes ◽  
Prisoners Of War ◽  
Mass Murder ◽  
World War ◽  
East Indies ◽  
Guerrilla War ◽  
War Criminals ◽  
Netherlands East Indies

From 1946 to 1949, the Dutch prosecuted more than 1,000 Japanese soldiers and civilians for war crimes committed during the occupation of the Netherlands East Indies during World War II. They also prosecuted a small number of Dutch citizens for collaborating with their Japanese occupiers. The war crimes committed by the Japanese against military personnel and civilians in the East Indies included mass murder, murder, torture, mistreatment of prisoners of war and civilian internees, and forced prostitution. Beginning in 1946, the Dutch convened military tribunals in various locations in the East Indies to hear the evidence of these war crimes and imposed sentences ranging from months and years to death; some 25 percent of those convicted were executed for their crimes. The difficulty arising out of gathering evidence and conducting the trials was exacerbated by the ongoing guerrilla war between Dutch authorities and Indonesian revolutionaries and, in fact, the trials ended abruptly in 1949 when 300 years of Dutch colonial rule ended and Indonesia gained its independence.

War Crimes by Enemy Nationals Administering Justice in Occupied Territory

1947 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 579-610 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alwyn V. Freeman
Keyword(s):  
Death Penalty ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Criminal Responsibility ◽  
War Crimes ◽  
International Justice ◽  
Second Phase ◽  
Illegal Activity ◽  
Medical Experimentation ◽  
Occupied Territory ◽  
War Criminals

Shortly after termination of the now historic Nuremberg trial of Nazi Germany’s arch war criminals, formal proceedings were instituted against several other classes of major offenders against the laws of war in Western Europe. This second phase of the program included war crimes committed in S.S. laboratories, in the name of medical experimentation, and the socalled “economic” war crimes. Simultaneously with these proceedings preparations were made for still a third class of offenders to be brought to international justice, and it is this group which has recently been indicted. Here the charges are predicated upon illegal activity of enemy nationals engaged in administering justice in territories under military occupation, frequently involving the execution of inhabitants after a summary hearing, or after no trial at all. For the international lawyer this third category of war crimes contains many stimulating and significant elements. It raises highly challenging questions as to the extent to which criminal responsibility may be held to exist in cases where enemy nationals performing functions of a judicial or a quasi-judicial character have participated in the pronouncement and execution of sentences, including the death penalty, against nationals of the occupied areas.

Hannibal Lecter as Avenging War Orphan in Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Rising

2020 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-146
Author(s):  
Korine Powers
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
War Crimes ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Western World ◽  
World War ◽  
War Criminals ◽  
Psychological Expertise ◽  
Second World

Beginning with Red Dragon (1981), horror icon Hannibal Lecter thrilled audiences as the ultimate unreadable reader, consuming minds and bodies behind the polished veneer of aristocratic taste and psychological expertise. Yet by the end of the twentieth century, Lecter had shifted from monster to hero. This article argues that Thomas Harris’s prequel novel, Hannibal Rising (2006), makes Lecter more palatable by portraying his serial murders as an act of vengeance against a postwar society that allowed war criminals to rejoin the consumer milieu. Hannibal Rising uses graphic depictions of the atrocities of the Second World War—including freezing, starvation, immolation, and enslavement—to mitigate Lecter’s cannibalistic classism and restore his humanity. Lecter is rendered mute by the trauma of consuming his sister, the patrician Lecter Castle becomes a Soviet orphanage, and Lecter’s eventual victims are war criminals who have reintegrated into society across the Western world. In return, Hannibal Rising’s readers are asked to project the specter of Lecter’s trauma and these war criminals’ violence onto all of Lecter’s victims. No act of cannibalism, Hannibal Rising suggests, is more monstrous than the war crimes and subsequent Allied apathy that Hannibal fights and bites against.

scholarly journals Dekret Prezydenta Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej o odpowiedzialności karnej za zbrodnie wojenne z dnia 30 marca 1943 roku

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 79-123
Author(s):  
Dominika Uczkiewicz
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Law ◽  
Criminal Liability ◽  
War Crimes ◽  
Second World War ◽  
International Criminal Law ◽  
World War ◽  
Retroactive Effect ◽  
War Criminals ◽  
Polish Government ◽  
Second World

On 30 March 1943 the Decree of the President of the Polish Republic on Criminal Liability for War Crimes, the first normative act setting down the legal basis for persecution of war criminals issued by one of the Allies during the Second World War, was proclaimed. The promulgation of the decree can be considered as the turning point in the Polish government-in-exile’s policy towards the problem of the prosecution and punishment of Nazi criminals, which started in autumn 1939. After the announcement of the draft decree, developed by the Polish minister of justice, professor of state law, Wacław Komarnicki and by an international lawyer, professor of criminal law, Stefan Glaser in the spring of 1942, a fierce discussion on the legal act’s concept broke out in the Polish government and lasted until November 1942. Although all Polish politicians agreed on the need to define the principles of individual criminal liability for war crimes, the proposal to promulgate criminal legislation with retroactive effect aroused much controversy. However, as the course of these debates shows, the critical point was not the mere fact of violating the lex retro non agit principle. The scepticism of some Polish politicians towards this idea resulted from purely pragmatic reasons and was caused by lack of support from the American and British governments for the proposal to define legal frames for the future trials of war criminals this attitude changed only in spring 1945. This article presents the genesis and provisions of the Decree of the President of the Polish Republic on Criminal Liability for War Crimes of 30 March 1943 in the context of international debates on international criminal law and individual liability for war crimes. It argues that the legislative works on the decree and its proclamation in March 1943 mark an important point in the process of shaping the concept of prosecution and punishment of war criminals during the Second World War.

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