The unprecedented crimes of World War Two, especially those committed by the Nazi state, unleashed an equally unprecedented effort to hold perpetrators accountable and secure justice for millions of victims. This effort encompassed hundreds of trials of thousands of individuals in the immediate postwar period and continues to the present day. Traditionally, questions of guilt and responsibility after World War II have been examined through the lens of the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg, in which the four Allied powers tried twenty-two of the major war criminals. The IMT, however, focused on only a fraction of Nazi perpetrators, and only the most high-ranking ones. Thousands of other perpetrators intimately involved in carrying out criminal activities were tried under separate war crimes programs conducted by each of the four powers that occupied Germany, including some one thousand individuals tried by the British Army between 1945 and 1949. This dissertation explores the British war crimes program under the Royal Warrant. Dissenting from the conventional view that dismisses the British legal proceedings in occupied Germany as half-hearted, ineffective, and blind to the particular crimes targeting Europe’s Jews (what became known as the Holocaust), I argue that the British war crimes investigations and prosecutions did recognize and prosecute Holocaust-specific crimes, and did so by using established legal tools. Through an examination of trials involving three types of Holocaust-specific crime–the operation of concentration camps, the exploitation of forced labor, and the production of Zyklon B as an instrument of murder–I show how the British prosecution of Nazi war criminals utilized longstanding legal approaches to address new and unprecedented categories of crime. The British postwar war crimes trials rested upon a different set of legal principles than the Nuremberg Charter. Exclusively focused on war crimes—rather than the newer category of “crimes against humanity”—and grounded in pre-existing international law, the British trials took a more conservative legal approach than the more explicitly didactic and legally inventive Charter. Although the British legal proceedings have often been dismissed as half-hearted, ineffective, and blind to what would come to be known as the Holocaust, I argue to the contrary that the British not only recognized Holocaust-specific crimes, but also effectively prosecuted such crimes using an established legal tool. Emerging in the context of an occupation regime that had limited resources, the British trials demonstrate that longstanding legal approaches could address new and unprecedented categories of crime. The British incorporated the persecution of Jews into their understanding of Nazi crime, but were reluctant to make the Jews a central focus of criminal cases. While British prosecutors repeatedly argued that Nazis targeted Jews for extermination solely because of their Jewishness, in violation of international criminal law, the argument relied on existing law to avoid setting potentially unwelcome precedents. In following this course, the British inadvertently created a more effective precedent for war crimes prosecution than Nuremberg. The law the British used, drawn from the Hague and Geneva Conventions, was more durable than the Nuremberg Charter. Precepts from the British trials have been upheld by the International Criminal Tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and some of the precedents set have been invoked in contemporary cases, particularly the principle that individuals can be held personally liable for war crimes and human rights violations, regardless of the individual’s relationship to the state.

Last modified

• 01/30/2019

Creator

• Beth A. Healey

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/N2JX8T

Subject

• History

Keyword

• Holocaust
• Nazis
• War Crimes Trials
• British Occupation
• Royal Warrant
• World War Two

Date created

• 2017-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright