Nazi Crimes And The Law

They span the postwar period up to contemporary U.S. legal efforts to deport Nazi criminals within its borders and libel suits brought by Holocaust deniers in British and Canadian courts, and they reveal new perspectives on the present and future implications of these trials."--BOOK JACKET.

While we often tend to think of the Third Reich as a zone of lawlessness, the Nazi dictatorship and its policies of persecution rested on a legal foundation set in place and maintained by judges, lawyers, and civil servants trained in the law. This volume offers a concise and compelling account of how these intelligent and welleducated legal professionals lent their skills and knowledge to a system of oppression and domination. The chapters address why German lawyers and jurists were attracted to Nazism; how their support of the regime resulted from a combination of ideological conviction, careerist opportunism, and legalistic selfdelusion; and whether they were held accountable for their Nazi-era actions after 1945. This book also examines the experiences of Jewish lawyers who fell victim to anti-Semitic measures. The volume will appeal to scholars, students, and other readers with an interest in Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, and the history of jurisprudence.

Human Rights after Hitler is a groundbreaking history about the forgotten work of the UN War Crimes Commission (UNWCC), which operated during and after World War II in response to Axis atrocities. He explains the commission's work, why its files were kept secret, and demonstrates how the lost precedents of the commission's indictments should introduce important new paradigms for prosecuting war crimes today. The UNWCC examined roughly 36,000 cases in Europe and Asia. Thousands of trials were carried out at the country-level, and hundreds of war criminals were convicted. This rewrites the history of human rights in the wake of World War II, which is too focused on the few trials at Nuremberg and Tokyo. Until a protracted lobbying effort by Plesch and colleagues, the UNWCC's files had been kept out of public view in the UN archives under pressure from the US government. The US initially wanted the files closed to smooth the way for post-war collaboration with Germany and Japan, and the few researchers who did gain permission to see the files were not permitted to even take notes until the files' recent release. Now revealed, the precedents set by these cases should have enormous practical utility for prosecuting war crimes today.

Since the nineteenth century, the development of international humanitarian law has been marked by complex entanglements of legal theory, historical trauma, criminal prosecution, historiography, and politics. All of these factors have played a role in changing views on the applicability of international law and human-rights ideas to state-organized violence, which in turn have been largely driven by transnational responses to German state crimes. Here, Annette Weinke gives a groundbreaking long-term history of the political, legal and academic debates concerning German state and mass violence in the First World War, during the National Socialist era and the Holocaust, and under the GDR.

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.

A distinguished group of scholars from Germany, Israel and right across the United States are brought together in Nazi Law to investigate the ways in which Hitler and the Nazis used the law as a weapon, mainly against the Jews, to establish and progress their master plan for German society. The book looks at how, after assuming power in 1933, the Nazi Party manipulated the legal system and the constitution in its crusade against Communists, Jews, homosexuals, as well as Jehovah's Witnesses and other religious and racial minorities, resulting in World War II and the Holocaust. It then goes on to analyse how the law was subsequently used by the opponents of Nazism in the wake of World War Two to punish them in the war crime trials at Nuremberg. This is a valuable edited collection of interest to all scholars and students interested in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.

“With this timely book in Hackett Publishing's Passages series, Michael Bryant presents a wide-ranging survey of the trials of Nazi war criminals in the wartime and immediate postwar period. Introduced by an extensive historical survey putting these proceedings into their international context, this volume makes the case, central to Hackett's collection for undergraduate courses, that these events constituted a 'key moment' that has influenced the course of history. Appended to Bryant's analysis is a substantial section of primary sources that should stimulate student discussion and raise questions that are pertinent to warfare and human rights abuses today.” —Michael R. Marrus, Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Professor Emeritus of Holocaust Studies at the University of Toronto

History is no longer the exclusive domain of historians, but is now often used as a tool for politics. It is not without reason that the term “state historical policy” has been coined, which must be a kind of aberration for those who believed that the role of history is to objectively determine the course of events. The fact is, however, that the distortion of historical facts, the concealment of crimes is now part of the “information war”. Therefore, new acts of public international law, EU law and national law are introduced in order to combat public condonation, denial or gross trivialisation of the core international crimes which are certain forms and expressions of racism and xenophobia. States have to determine for themselves how they understand “denial” or “gross trivialization”, which may lead to abuse. In many cases, when introducing criminal law provisions, States wish to decree historical truth, to establish once and for all the general facts and determine who was the victim, and who was the perpetrator. This does not have to be the result of bad will, but of a desire to exclude the possibility of nuance, which could turn into dangerous trivialisation. The aim of this publication is to specify the reasons for holding accountable for denial of international crimes, indicate legal obligations in this respect, look at the Polish case, both in terms of criminal provisions (partly repealed) and standards of a civil law nature, and compare the Polish regulation with the legal systems of other states, which were chosen because of the region (Central and Eastern Europe) or due to having current problems with denial of crimes or doubts about prosecution on this account.