scholarly journals Crimean Conference and Nuremberg Trials: Lessons from History

Author(s):  
Aleksey ALEKSANDROV

The issues of the post-war world order discussed at the Crimean Conference in February 1945 included the qualification of crimes against humanity committed by the Nazi regime. Along with the idea of full trial, which was defended by the Soviets, other options were considered in Yalta – from "truncated" legal proceedings to extrajudicial execution of high-ranking Nazi officials, proposed by W. Churchill, but rejected by both I. Stalin and F. Roosevelt. The Yalta meeting of three world leaders can be rightfully considered a kind of prologue to the Nuremberg trials on Nazi war criminals (and Nazi ideology itself), which proceeded in accordance with the highest world standards of jurisprudence.

1998 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 543-565 ◽  
Author(s):  
PRISCILLA DALE JONES

This article addresses one aspect of the legal proceedings known collectively as the ‘Nuremberg trials’: British policy towards, and trials of, Nazi war criminals in the British zone of occupied Germany. The killing of fifty allied airmen after their escape from Stalag Luft III illustrates how atrocities against British POWs affected British war crimes policy. The article examines one part of that policy: the efforts to expedite trials and the decision to end them. It examines the ambivalence that characterized British attitudes towards war crimes trials, and also discusses British hopes for an expeditious trial programme and political and legal objections to delays in prosecutions. Finally, it shows that concerns about the Stalag Luft III case led to extensions in the trial programme, but that eventually the programme was subordinated to Britain's broader policy of reintegrating Germany into the western fold.


Author(s):  
Gabrielle Marshall

Following the trials of Nazi war criminals and collaborators that transpired immediately after World War II, decades passed before the trials of Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie and French collaborators Rene Bousquet and Maurice Papon. While the reason for the delayed trials differed in cause, the relevance of the trials is connected in their allowance for the resurrected testimony of survivors of German occupation and the subsequent holocaust. While the trials of Barbie, Bousquet, and Papon occurred long after the initial wave of post war convictions, their significance is compounded by the emergence of occupation and holocaust survivors that create a legal and historical record of the horrors of the Nazi regime and the function of French collaboration in its execution. 


Lex Russica ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 146-158
Author(s):  
A. P. Grakhotskiy

In the first post-war decades in Germany the problem of crimes of the Nazi regime was hushed up. Information about the flagrant crimes of the Nazis in the concentration camps was perceived by the Germans as “propaganda of the winners”. The Frankfurt process of 1963-1965 was an event that contributed to the understanding of the criminal past of its country by the German society. Before the court in Frankfurt there appeared 22 Nazi war criminals who were accused of murder and complicity in the killing of prisoners of concentration camps and death camps of Auschwitz. During the trial, horrific facts of mass destruction of people and unprecedented cases of humiliation of human dignity were revealed. The position of the prosecution was that the defendants voluntarily served in Auschwitz, realizing that the main purpose of the operation of the camp is the mass destruction of Jews, purposefully participating in the implementation of a common criminal plan. The defense adhered to the strategy that the defendants were only weak-willed executors of the orders of the highest Nazi leadership and were forced to commit crimes at the risk of their own lives. None of the accused pleaded guilty, and in their closing speeches they expressed neither regret nor remorse to the victims and their relatives. The verdict of the jury was soft: only 6 accused were sentenced to life imprisonment, the rest received various (from 3 to 14 years) terms of imprisonment, three were acquitted. However, the significance of the Frankfurt trial exceeds the purpose of the criminal punishment of the Nazi criminals. The process became a milestone in the course of overcoming by the Germans of their recent past, the awareness of the responsibility of German society for the crimes of national socialism.


Author(s):  
Donald Bloxham ◽  
Devin O. Pendas

This article is divided into three roughly chronological sections, each dealing with an important stage in the chequered history of the legalist paradigm. Despite the real innovations of the nineteenth century, people take the Nuremberg trials as starting point because the legal developments of the immediate post-war period served as the crucible for most subsequent developments in international legalism. Criminal trials are intended to punish crime. Such punishment has classically been justified in one of three ways, as retribution, as a means for preventing the perpetrator from committing similar crimes again in future, and as a way of deterring other potential offenders from engaging in similar crimes themselves. In addition, trials for genocide and crimes against humanity have often been justified as forms of political and moral pedagogy. In the end, though, none of these justifications make much sense when applied to genocide.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 52-79
Author(s):  
V. T. Yungblud

The Yalta-Potsdam system of international relations, established by culmination of World War II, was created to maintain the security and cooperation of states in the post-war world. Leaders of the Big Three, who ensured the Victory over the fascist-militarist bloc in 1945, made decisive contribution to its creation. This system cemented the world order during the Cold War years until the collapse of the USSR in 1991 and the destruction of the bipolar structure of the organization of international relations. Post-Cold War changes stimulated the search for new structures of the international order. Article purpose is to characterize circumstances of foundations formation of postwar world and to show how the historical decisions made by the leaders of the anti-Hitler coalition powers in 1945 are projected onto modern political processes. Study focuses on interrelated questions: what was the post-war world order and how integral it was? How did the political decisions of 1945 affect the origins of the Cold War? Does the American-centrist international order, that prevailed at the end of the 20th century, genetically linked to the Atlantic Charter and the goals of the anti- Hitler coalition in the war, have a future?Many elements of the Yalta-Potsdam system of international relations in the 1990s survived and proved their viability. The end of the Cold War and globalization created conditions for widespread democracy in the world. The liberal system of international relations, which expanded in the late XX - early XXI century, is currently experiencing a crisis. It will be necessary to strengthen existing international institutions that ensure stability and security, primarily to create barriers to the spread of national egoism, radicalism and international terrorism, for have a chance to continue the liberal principles based world order (not necessarily within a unipolar system). Prerequisite for promoting idea of a liberal system of international relations is the adjustment of liberalism as such, refusal to unilaterally impose its principles on peoples with a different set of values. This will also require that all main participants in modern in-ternational life be able to develop a unilateral agenda for common problems and interstate relations, interact in a dialogue mode, delving into the arguments of opponents and taking into account their vital interests.


2017 ◽  
Vol 80 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-155
Author(s):  
Eleanor F. Moseman

Abstract The Surrealist artist Richard Oelze’s postwar enterprise was one of inner reflection and personal questioning linked to the broader project of coming to terms with the past. The essay takes a critical view of his artworks and his automatist Wortskizzen to assess the manner and extent to which Oelze utilizes his artistic practice as a mode of working through his, and Germany’s, complicity with the Nazi regime. Analysis of the Wortskizzen exposes how verbal probing informs Oelze’s visual expression of inner turmoil, while implied gaps and voids in paintings and drawings puncture space as well as time, illuminating memory and blending the past with the present. Oelze’s serious play with word and image in turn invites his viewers to release repressed memories through reflective contemplation.


2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
William Skiles

This article examines the nature and frequency of comments about Jews and Judaism in sermons delivered by Confessing Church pastors in the Nazi dictatorship.  The approach of most historians has focused on the history of antisemitism in the German Protestant tradition—in the works, pronouncements, and policies of the German churches and its leading figures.  Yet historians have left unexamined the most elemental task of the pastor—that is, preaching from the pulpit to the German people.  What would the average German congregant have heard from his pastor about the Jews and Judaism on any given Sunday?  I searched German archives, libraries, and used book stores, and analyzed 910 sermon manuscripts that were produced and disseminated in the Nazi regime.  I argue that these sermons provide mixed messages about Jews and Judaism.  While on the one hand, the sermons express admiration for Judaism as a foundation for Christianity, an insistence on the usage of the Hebrew Bible in the German churches, and the conviction that the Jews are spiritual cousins of Christians.  On the other hand, the sermons express religious prejudice in the form of anti-Judaic tropes that corroborated the Nazi ideology that portrayed Jews and Judaism as inferior: for instance, that Judaism is an antiquated religion of works rather than grace; that the Jews killed Christ and have been punished throughout history as a consequence.  Furthermore, I demonstrate that Confessing Church pastors commonly expressed anti-Judaic statements in the process of criticizing the Nazi regime, its leadership, and its policies.


2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 372-390 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susanne Karstedt

The reentry of sentenced perpetrators of atrocity crimes is part and parcel of the pursuit of international and transitional justice. As men and women sentenced for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the other tribunals return from prisons into society and communities questions arise as to the impact their reentry has on deeply divided postconflict societies, in particular on victim groups. Contemporary international tribunals and courts mostly do not have penal or correctional policies of their own, and the legacy of early release, commuting of sentences and amnesties that Nuremberg and other post-World War II tribunals have left, is a particularly problematic one. Germany’s historical experience provides an analytic blueprint for understanding in which ways contemporary perpetrators return into changed and still fragile societies. This comparative analysis between Nuremberg and the ICTY is based on two data sets including information on returning war criminals sentenced in both tribunals. The comparative analysis focuses on four themes: politics of reentry, admission of guilt and justification, memoirs, and political activism.


2008 ◽  
Vol 36 (105) ◽  
pp. 52-81
Author(s):  
Mikkel Bolt

Nazism’s Fight against the Art of Decay:The article presents a reading of the exhibition »Entartete Kunst« that took place in Munich in 1937. The exhibition was staged by the Nazi regime as an attempt to prove the dangerous nature of modern art. According to Nazi ideology, modern art was not just a reflection of unhealthy interests or degenerate racial mixings but was in itself a threat to the purity of the soul of the German people. Therefore modern art had to be excluded in order to make room for the appearance of the German people and its eternal art. Contrary to the idea of Nazism as being somehow not modern, the article stresses the modernist aspects of the Nazi ideology through a detailed account of Nazism’s racist ideology.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document