WAR CRIMES TRIALS

WAR CRIMES TRIALS. From November 1945 to October 1946, at Nuremberg, Germany, the surviving leaders of the Nazi regime were tried before an international tribunal (the United States, Great Britain, Russia, and France) as war criminals. They were charged with violations of international law, with having waged aggressive warfare, and in general with "crimes against humanity." Of twenty-two high officials brought to trial, nineteen were found guilty. Twelve, including Hermann Göring, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and Artur von Seyss-Inquart, were sentenced to death. Eight were eventually hanged. In addition a number of lesser officials were tried, most of whom were convicted.

Comparable trials of Japanese leaders were held at Tokyo, from May 1946 to November 1948, with similar results, although on a much larger scale. The Allies executed not only Hideki Tojo, the military dictator of Japan, and many of his top lieutenants, but also several hundred lower-ranking Japanese officers who were convicted of torturing and murdering Allied prisoners-of-war.

The trial of war criminals rested on the assumption that aggressive warfare was a crime, and on the still broader assumption that the principles of jurisprudence as developed in England and the United States applied to international relations as well. Yet many people objected that these principles were themselves disregarded in the trials. Thus it was charged that to try men for committing acts that were only later designated as crimes was to pass judgment ex post facto. The only answer to this was that the crimes of the Nazi leaders—the full magnitude of which became apparent only as the trials unfolded—were so horrible as to deserve, if not to demand, such punishment.

During the Cold War stand-off between the United States and Soviet Union, war crimes trials receded from the international scene. After the demise of the Cold War, however, an international consensus built in favor of resurrecting war crimes tribunals, particularly for perpetrators of genocide. In the first years of the twenty-first century, under the auspices of the United Nations, war crimes trials were held to prosecute those accused of committing "crimes against humanity" during the Balkans' Wars of the 1990s, including Slobodan Milosevic, former dictator of Yugoslavia. The United Nations expected to hold similar tribunals to prosecute the perpetrators of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. During a 1998 United Nations conference in Rome, representatives of over 50 countries agreed to establish a permanent International Criminal Court for the prosecution of war crimes.

WAR CRIMES TRIALS

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