Prelude to Nuremberg
Allied War Crimes Policy and the Question of Punishment
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- $29.99
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- $29.99
Publisher Description
Between November 1945 and October 1946, the International
Military Tribunal in Nuremberg tried some of the most notorious
political and military figures of Nazi Germany. The issue of
punishing war criminals was widely discussed by the leaders of
the Allied nations, however, well before the end of the war. As
Arieh Kochavi demonstrates, the policies finally adopted,
including the institution of the Nuremberg trials, represented
the culmination of a complicated process rooted in the domestic
and international politics of the war years.
Drawing on extensive research, Kochavi painstakingly
reconstructs the deliberations that went on in Washington and
London at a time when the Germans were perpetrating their worst
crimes. He also examines the roles of the Polish and Czech
governments-in-exile, the Soviets, and the United Nations War
Crimes Commission in the formulation of a joint policy on war
crimes, as well as the neutral governments' stand on the question
of asylum for war criminals. This compelling account thereby
sheds new light on one of the most important and least understood
aspects of World War II.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
As WWII is now indelibly associated with the Holocaust, it may be startling to recall just how little these atrocities figured in Allied thinking of the time. According to Kochavi, inter-departmental conflicts and maneuvering for dominance within and between the U.S. and British governments, fear of Nazi reprisals against Allied POWs and the political positioning of Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin blocked any unequivocal war crimes policy until after an Allied victory was deemed certain in 1945. The United Nations War Crimes Commission, conceived in 1943 by the British and the U.S. as a palliative to public opinion and governments in exile, was never intended by either government to have any decision-making power. Kochavi shows how persistent efforts, especially by U.S. UNWCC representative Herbert Pell, resulted in the powerful new concepts included in the idea of crimes against humanity. Prominent among these was the argument that the persecution of individuals for reasons of race, religion or personal beliefs is illegal--even when nationals are persecuted by their own government. Such decisions forced the incorporation of an entire new class of crimes into international law, for which the UNWCC then gathered invaluable evidence for postwar prosecution. Kochavi, a historian at the University of Haifa, has taken a complicated, nuanced subject and, through extensive research and forceful retelling, has shed light not only on WWII but also on the response to similar atrocities in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, in which, once again, political interests have outweighed moral considerations.
