Defeat, Due Process, and Denial: War Crimes Trials and Nationalist Revisionism in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

This chapter is concerned with the impact of war crimes trial on defeated polities. It focuses particularly on the aftermath of two cases of criminal warfare in the twentieth century, namely the Ottoman genocide of the Armenians in World War I and the Nazi genocides of World War II, and the war crimes trials conducted correspondingly in Istanbul and western Germany. It addresses the trials as manifestations of what is now fashionably termed ‘transitional justice’, and thus the way that they influenced the attitudes of implicated peoples to the crimes preceding defeat and ‘regime change’. Despite the fundamentally different attitudes displayed by the two states today, the chapter argues that there are interesting points of commonality in terms of their attitudes towards the trials at the time of their enactment. To illustrate and further substantiate some of its arguments, it also refers more briefly to the questions of trying German war criminals after World War I, Japanese war criminals from 1945, perpetrators of ethnic cleansing and related crimes during the post-Cold War break-up of the former Yugoslavia, and perpetrators of the 1994 Rwandan genocide.