Genocide On Trial

When the Allies decided to try German war criminals at the end of World War II they were attempting not only to punish the guilty but also to create a record of what had happened in Europe. This ground-breaking new study shows how Britain and the United States went about inscribing thehistory of Nazi Germany and the effect their trial and occupation policies had on both long and short term 'memory' in Germany and Britain. Donald Bloxham here examines the actions and trials of German soldiers and policemen, the use of legal evidence, the refractory functions of the courtroom, andAllied political and cultural preconceptions of both 'Germanism' and of German criminality. His evidence shows conclusively that the trials were a failure: the greatest of all 'crimes against humanity' - the 'final solution of the Jewish question' - was largely written out of history in thepost-war era and the trials failed to transmit the breadth of German criminality. Finally, with reference to the historiography of the Holocaust, Genocide on Trial illuminates the function of the trials in perpetuating misleading generalizations about the course of the Holocaust and the nature ofNazism.

In 1933, a proposal by Raphael Lemkin on the 'crime of barbarity' was brought before the Legal Council of the League of Nations, being the first formal attempt to create a law against genocide. In 1946, the United Nations adopted Resolution 96 confirming the crime of genocide, but it was not until 1948 that a definition of genocide came into being in the Genocide Convention. It has been through case law that the definition of genocide became more clear. In 2007, the European Court of Human Rights noted that the narrow view of 'intent to destroy' was the majority opinion among legal scholars. This narrow view included the necessity of biological-physical destruction of groups in order for the action to qualify as genocide. It concluded furthermore that both the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and the International Court of Justice agreed to the narrow interpretation. Laying the foundation for the punishment of the crime of genocide, the precise definition of the term remained a topic of debate among legal scholars. This book examines all case law on genocide from the start of the 20th century to the cases brought before the Tribunals in more recent times. Genocide on Trial should be mandatory reading for anyone interested in the history of war crimes trials, as well as scholars wanting a collection of case law related to genocide.

Turkey's bid to join the European Union has lent new urgency to the issue of the Armenian Genocide as differing interpretations of the genocide are proving to be a major reason for the delay of the its accession. This book provides vital background information and is a prime source of legal evidence and authentic Turkish eyewitness testimony of the intent and the crime of genocide against the Armenians. After a long and painstaking effort, the authors, one an Armenian, the other a Turk, generally recognized as the foremost experts on the Armenian Genocide, have prepared a new, authoritative translation and detailed analysis of the Takvim-i Vekâyi, the official Ottoman Government record of the Turkish Military Tribunals concerning the crimes committed against the Armenians during World War I. The authors have compiled the documentation of the trial proceedings for the first time in English and situated them within their historical and legal context. These documents show that Wartime Cabinet ministers, Young Turk party leaders, and a number of others inculpated in these crimes were court-martialed by the Turkish Military Tribunals in the years immediately following World War I. Most were found guilty and received sentences ranging from prison with hard labor to death. In remarkable contrast to Nuremberg, the Turkish Military Tribunals were conducted solely on the basis of existing Ottoman domestic penal codes. This substitution of a national for an international criminal court stands in history as a unique initiative of national self-condemnation. This compilation is significantly enhanced by an extensive analysis of the historical background, political nature and legal implications of the criminal prosecution of the twentieth century's first state-sponsored crime of genocide.

The Moral Witness is the first cultural history of the "witness to genocide" in the West. Carolyn J. Dean shows how the witness became a protagonist of twentieth-century moral culture by tracing the emergence of this figure in courtroom battles from the 1920s to the 1960s—covering the Armenian genocide, the Ukrainian pogroms, the Soviet Gulag, and the trial of Adolf Eichmann. In these trials, witness testimonies differentiated the crime of genocide from war crimes and began to form our understanding of modern political and cultural murder. By the turn of the twentieth century, the "witness to genocide" became a pervasive icon of suffering humanity and a symbol of western moral conscience. Dean sheds new light on the recent global focus on survivors' trauma. Only by placing the moral witness in a longer historical trajectory, she demonstrates, can we understand how the stories we tell about survivor testimony have shaped both our past and contemporary moral culture.

Based on first-hand observation of international war crimes tribunals and the English courts, this book examines the emergence of "cosmopolitan" criminal law - principles and institutions that aim to protect the human rights of all individuals, even when they are threatened by their own state.

The word "genocide" has been much criticised by etymologists, for reasons which may be regarded, even if not inaccurate, as being pedantic. Genocide as used in this context means, to quote from the Indictment in the Nuremberg trial, a systematic programme aimed at the destruction of foreign nations or ethnic groups (" foreign" that is from the Nazi point of view) in part by elimination or suppression of national characteristics. The effect of the word as used in this connection was also defined, in the judgment of the Nuremberg Military Tribunal (Subsequent Proceedings) included in this volume, as a programme concerned and implemented " for one primary purpose . . . which might be summed up in one phrase: the twofold objective of weakening and eventually destroying other nations (i.e., than Germany) while at the same time strengthening Germany, territorially and biologically at the expense of conquered nations."