“The Limits of Human Jurisdiction”: Protestantism, War Crimes Trials, and Human Rights in Occupied Germany

Abstract

In the years after 1945, German Protestant church leaders and lay intellectuals emerged as ubiquitous critics of the war crimes trials conducted by the Allied occupation governments. Marshaling the financial resources and international connections of the newly formed Protestant Church in Germany, a network of church administrators, theologians, and jurists petitioned occupation authorities for the release of hundreds of convicted Nazi perpetrators. While a generation of critical scholarship has linked the campaign against war crimes trials to the persistence of Protestant nationalism in Allied-occupied Germany, this article argues that the campaign also marked an inflection point in postwar German politics. Protestant church leaders and jurists not only echoed popular attacks on Allied “victors’ justice” but also developed a novel language of human rights that would shape their later interventions in West German politics. Rejecting the dominant contemporary discourses of human rights, rooted in Catholic natural law or American exceptionalism, Protestant trial opponents recentered human rights around a theology of human fallibility in order to criticize the alleged excesses of political justice. Yet even as they promoted tendentious accounts of the Nazi past, Protestant leaders contributed to institutionalizing human rights in West German politics. By the 1950s, veterans of the postwar amnesty campaigns would defend the rights of conscientious objectors and recognition of Germany’s territorial losses. The Protestant campaign against war crimes trials demonstrates how human rights gained power in postwar Germany as a political language that bridged nationalist and internationalist commitments, with ambiguous consequences for the consolidation of democracy.