Nazi War Crimes Research Articles

In Pursuit of Justice: Debating the Statute of Limitations for Nazi War Crimes in Britain and West Germany during the 1960s

Up until 1979, the ability of West German courts to prosecute Nazi war criminals was hampered by a Statute of Limitations for acts of manslaughter and murder. Throughout the 1960s, the issue generated considerable public discussion, both within the Federal Republic and among the international community. As prosecutors, politicians, journalists and Holocaust survivors (among many others) debated the need for continued war crimes trials, it was clear that there remained significant limits to Western understandings of the Nazi genocide. This essay analyses public responses to the Statute in both West Germany and Great Britain and argues that the whole affair has had a crucial impact on the development of international justice and today’s pursuit of war criminals.

History of Medicine Special Issue

In September 2013 the University of Saskatchewan hosted the bi-annual postgraduate conference for the Society for the Social History of Medicine in combination with the Manitoba-Ontario-Minnesota-Saskatchewan history of medicine meeting. This joint symposium was the first of its kind, and the only time the Social History of Medicine meeting has been held outside of Europe. We received financial support from the Saskatchewan Health Research Foundation, the University of Saskatchewan, the Society for the Social History of Medicine, and the Canada Research Chair in medical history to support a three-day long meeting involving thirty-two speakers, both historians and physicians, from five countries: Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Mexico. Topics ranged widely from early modern military nursing; to an analysis of advertisements for diet pills; to a study of victims of Nazi war crimes; accounts of life in asylums; and a panel on the historical and contemporary AIDS crises. Keynote addresses from Hannah Professor at Queen's University, Jacalyn Duffin, and Margaret Pelling, Professor of History at Oxford University, highlighted the intersections of medical education, medical humanities, and professionalization, with an overarching demonstration of the power of historical analysis to elucidate contemporary challenges in medicine. We are pleased the Canadian Journal of History agreed to showcase some of the excellent work that was presented at this meeting, and hope that CJH readers enjoy this special issue. The issue contains three articles of exceptional quality, which represent a small portion of the work that was on display at the meeting. In addition to the articles, we have eight book reviews of recent work in medical history, which help draw attention to the rich array of geographical, temporal, and methodological studies underway in this dynamic field. Duffin's keynote address, Historian as Activist: Tales from the Medical Trench, has been posted on ActiveHistory.ca, and can be viewed on their site at: http://activehistory.ca. Her article in this special issue is a separate examination of anti-Semitism and quotas within medical education at Queen's University. In her characteristically thorough exploration of archival evidence, Duffin looked at student records and administrative materials to expose the conflicts between stated quotas and more subtle elements of anti-Semitism that shaped the student body in the medical school at Queen's University. …

Losers, Winners, and Their Crimes in the Context of the Themes of Józef Mackiewicz’s Selected Works

Abstract The article gives an overview of Józef Mackiewicz’s outlook on the ambivalent status quo of World War II "winners" and "losers." The author of The Triumph of Provocation suggests that the only real winner in 1945 turned out to be communist ideology because after the war there were disproportions in perceptions of Nazi and communist war crimes. Mackiewicz, who was "a witness" to both German and Soviet murders (at Ponary and Katyń), also referred in his works to little known war facts about which it was "better not to talk aloud" and crimes and abuses of the Allies.

Opór wobec procesów w sprawie zbrodni wojennych: masakra w Malmédy, niemieckie Kościoły a kontrwywiad amerykański CIC

War crimes trials roused considerable resistance in Germany. Here the author analyzes opposition to the Malmédy Trial, conducted at Dachau in 1946, citing documents made available under the 1998 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act – in particular those of Roman Catholic auxiliary bishop of Munich Johannes Neuhäusler and regional Protestant bishop Theophil Wurm of Württemberg. These clergymen helped reduce sentences and obtain clemency for perpetrators. Munich lawyer and activist Rudolf Aschenauer, a close associate of Neuhäusler, coordinated a large network devoted to thwarting the convictions of the former Waffen-SS men. The author traces U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) monitoring of both Aschenauer and the bishops.

HISTORIA ROZWOJU TŁUMACZENIA USTNEGO W JAPONII NA PRZYKŁADZIE TRYBUNAŁU TOKIJSKIEGO

The International Military Tribunal for the Far East, the so called Tokyo Trial is the international trial of the war criminals who led the Japanese government and military during the Second World War. The trial began on 3rd of May 1946 and closed on 11th of November 1984. Around the same time in Europe the Nuremberg Trial of Nazi war crimes was conducted. In both trials the role of the interpreter was essential, for example, in the Nuremberg Tribunal the simultaneous interpreting in English, German, French and Russian was applied. On the other hand in the Tokyo Trial, though the Japanese, the English and other languages as the Chinese were used during the trial, the position of the interpreters was not emphasized enough. The aim of this paper is to analyze the basic theory of interpreting in comparison with the interpreters’ role in both trials.

The Irish Banning of Elie Aron Cohen’s Human Behaviour in the Concentration Camp (1954)

The Irish Banning of Elie Aron Cohen’s Human Behaviour in the Concentration Camp (1954) W. J. Mc Cormack (bio) Two historical phenomena that might appear to have a logical connection—anti-Semitism and political sympathy with Nazi Germany—do not in the Irish instance harmonize so predictably. Several reasons could be advanced, including the very small number of Jews living in Ireland in the 1920s and 1930s. A second reason—the persistence of anti-British feeling after the Irish Free State was established in 1922—all too easily morphed into the pseudoequation of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend.” There were, of course, moments when the two phenomena lined up neatly, but these rarely occurred within a framework of any cultural significance. In August 1954 the London firm of Cassell published The Scourge of the Swastika: A Short History of Nazi War Crimes by Lord Russell of Liverpool, who had been involved as a lawyer in the Nuremberg trials. Despite connections with the legal and military establishment, the author had been subject to considerable pressure from the British government to desist from publication. Instead, he chose to resign from his post as assistant judge advocate general. Whatever Russell’s motives in writing may have been, the clumsy effort at suppression gave the book added publicity, not least because it indicated the lengths Britain might go to in reshaping history for Cold War purposes. At stake, in the government’s view, was German rearmament. Two months later, the Irish Censorship Board banned a book on a related theme. This was Elie Cohen’s Human Behaviour in the Concentration Camp, originally published in Dutch and then in English translation. The two books differ in several ways. Russell had been an official legal adviser in the British zone of defeated Germany; Cohen had been an inmate of Auschwitz and other camps. Russell was mainly concerned with the responsibility of Wehrmacht personnel for war crimes, Cohen with the treatment of prisoners by their SS captors. Though the lawyer enshrined a sensationalist element in the title of his book (and some readers thought the photos [End Page 318] voyeuristic), in contrast Elie Cohen’s almost technical representation of his subject matter accurately matched the scientific and objective nature of his inquiry, despite his own agonizing involvement in the sufferings recorded. Cohen was Jewish (needless to say) and, at the time of his arrest, a medical doctor, a general practitioner. After the war, he sought to understand both the victims and perpetrators of concentration-camp behavior through Freudian psychology. The book first appeared as a Ph.D. dissertation from the University of Utrecht. In keeping with continental practice, Het Duitse Concentratiekamp; een Medishe en Psychologische Studie was published in 1952 as a small, commercially available edition by the Amsterdam house of H. J. Paris. When translated by M. H. Braaksma for publication first in 1953 by W. W. Norton of New York, and then in 1954 by Jonathan Cape of London, the title dropped whatever emotive shimmer the term “Duitse” (German) had in the original, emphasizing instead the universal human dimension. Given these qualities, the question necessarily arises: why did the Irish state choose to prohibit its citizens from reading the book? Some recapitulation of Irish censorship history is unavoidable.1 First, it should be noted that the legislation made no allowance for piecemeal censorship of books—requiring a paragraph to be removed here, or an epithet modified there—but provided only for a total exclusion of a publication in its entirety from sale or distribution in the state.2 In practice, the vast majority of the examined books originated outside the republic (usually in England) and were thus beyond Irish intervention in the business of preparation by publisher or printer. Therefore the board implemented a simple Yes/No judgment in each case. In turn, a phrase, sentence, or clutch of pages could be cited as evidence justifying total prohibition of a lengthy book, however atypical the excerpt might be in the work as a whole. Unlike its somewhat less ugly sister, the Irish Film Censor’s Office, it dealt in absolutes of a minuscule quality.3 The board that banned Cohen’s book...

Resisting a War Crimes Trial: The Malmedy Massacre, the German Churches, and the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps

War crimes trials roused considerable resistance in Germany. Here the author analyzes opposition to the Malmedy Trial, conducted at Dachau in 1946, citing documents made available under the 1998 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act—in particular those of Roman Catholic auxiliary bishop of Munich Johannes Neuhausler and regional Protestant bishop Theophil Wurm of Wurttemberg. These clergymen helped reduce sentences and obtain clemency for perpetrators. Munich lawyer and activist Rudolf Aschenauer, a close associate of Neuhausler, coordinated a large network devoted to thwarting the convictions of the former Waffen-SS men. The author traces U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) monitoring of both Aschenauer and the bishops.

Reluctant Accomplice: A Wehrmacht Soldier's Letters from the Eastern Front Konrad H. Jarausch, ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), xviii + 392 pp., cloth $35.00

Konrad Jarausch, the distinguished historian who edited this book, is the son of Konrad Jarausch, the German soldier whose letters compose most of it. The two never saw each other in person, as the father had to return to his unit three days before the son's birth and died in the occupied Soviet Union five months later. For many years, out of a mixture of resentment of his father's absence and rejection of his worldview, the younger Jarausch avoided close examination of the hundreds of surviving letters written from his father's postings in Germany, Poland, France, and the Soviet Union between the time of his call-up in September 1939 and his demise in January 1942. After his retirement as Director of the Center for Contemporary Historical Studies at the University of Potsdam in 2006 freed up his time and the lingering controversy in Germany over the extent to which Wehrmacht troops had participated in Nazi war crimes provided motivation, the younger Jarausch did an about-face and embarked on “a curious voyage of discovery that tested [his] loyalties as a son and [his] professionalism as a historian” (pp. vii–viii). The initial result, “Das stille Sterben …”: Feldpostbriefe von Konrad Jarausch aus Polen und Russland 1939–42, appeared in 2008. The English-language offshoot differs from its predecessor in two important respects: it contains about half as many letters, and its title and the editor's introductory essay, “In Search of a Father,” grapple more directly with the issue of the father's complicity.

Traces of the Atlantikwall or The Ruins that were Built to Last…

The Atlantikwall, a defence-line comprising 12,000 bunkers, was constructed along the Western European coastline (1941–1945) to protect ‘Greater Germany’ from an impending allied invasion. Designed by military architects and engineers and erected by slave labourers, the Atlantikwall can be regarded as an embodiment of nationalistic ideology, and as built evidence of Nazi war crimes. Postwar years were marked by the desire to forget, and recovery was equated with erasing the traces left behind. Nevertheless, a slow shift in appreciation towards the bunkers is taking place, as the stories that lay dormant are gradually uncovered. In recent years these ruins have begun to fascinate artists, who, while searching for the ‘forgotten’ and the ‘mystical’, encounter remnants of an abandoned buried history. The bunkers that were built in haste for a short-lived war may ironically prove to be Hitler's lasting legacy, representing the essence of the twentieth century – its barbarity.

German–American Intelligence Relations, 1945–1956: New Evidence on the Origins of the BND

Under the 1998 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) released a certain amount of documents relating to a German–American intelligence co-operation that began almost immediately after the German surrender of May 1945; it lasted until 1956 when the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) was founded, today's German foreign and military intelligence service. The Americans assembled, supervised, and largely financed what is often referred to as the “Gehlen organisation,” named after its leader, former Wehrmacht general, Reinhard Gehlen, who was chief of the BND until his retirement in 1968. Whilst the existence of this co-operation had been known since the 1940s, largely due to Soviet subversion and propaganda, very little reliable information and virtually no original source material was available before the release of this, somewhat redacted, material in 2002 and 2007. This article provides a sketch of how former Wehrmacht officers, and even a number with an ominous SS past, who might well have been war criminals, came to work, first for United States military intelligence and, from 1949, for the CIA. It looks at some of their operations during those turbulent post-war years, which include the Berlin airlift and German rearmament in response to the Korean War. The potential of those newly declassified documents, unfortunately, cannot be corroborated from other sources as long as German and Russian archives remain closed. Despite its manifold limitations, this material provides an exciting window into transatlantic intelligence history.

"Josef K von 1963...": Orson Welles' ‘Americanized’ Version of The Trial and the changing functions of the Kafkaesque in Postwar West Germany

This article investigates the reception of the American auteur and actor Orson Welles' adaptation of Franz Kafka's The Trial in West Germany in 1963. It argues that the film’s ambivalent reception by German critics was closely tied to the process of “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” (coming to terms with the past) that had developed in Germany during the mid-1950s with the widespread circulation and publication of visual images of Nazi war crimes, and that was in the process of a more politicized transformation in the early sixties. Through the figure of Welles, this essay also explores the ways U.S. culture could influence this process. Welles’ reading of Kafka as a “prophet of fascism”, whose Josef K. actively resists his oppressors—even if to no apparent avail—set off a timely discussion among commentators about the meaning and function of Kafka’s works in post-war West Germany. In 1963, in the midst of spectacular court cases and “trials” that began to highlight the widespread complicity of Germans in National Socialist war crimes, the theme of “active resistance” to tyranny that Welles’ version of The Trial offered did not fit the picture. It was, as one critic suggested, a distorted, “Americanized” fantasy. Others, however, appreciated the didactic value of Welles’ international co-production, which coincided with the beginnings of the New German Cinema movement, a confrontational effort to engage with questions of the past through film.

Judicial Free Speech versus Judicial Neutrality in Mid-Twentieth Century England: The Last Hurrah for the Ancien Regime?

In mid-1950s Britain two significant events occurred in respect of the doctrine of judicial neutrality in that country. In the first, the Lord Chancellor of the day, Lord Simonds, had refused permission for the experienced and well-known senior judge advocate, Lord Russell of Liverpool, to publish his sensational history of Nazi war crimes,The Scourge of the Swastika, so long as he (Russell) continued to hold judicial office. For Simonds was insistent that the judiciary must keep their counsel on virtuallyanymatter outside the courtroom, a view shared both by his immediate Labour government predecessor, Lord Jowitt, and by his Conservative government successor, Lord Kilmuir. After a public standoff when neither side would give way, the deadlock was broken when Russell, rather than risk being sacked for disobedience, chose to resign his judicial office to a fanfare of publicity in the press and duly published his book shortly thereafter. Moreover, what lent the Russell confrontation an added edge was not just Simonds's complaint that the book could be perceived as anti-German and, therefore, as political. It was that publication at that time could have a damaging effect upon Britain's policy of rehabilitating West Germany within the Western alliance.

The Holocaust and medical ethics: the voices of the victims

Fifty-nine years ago, Dr Leo Alexander published his now famous report on medicine under the Nazis. In his report he describes the two major crimes of German physicians. The participation...

Book Review

Book reviewed in this issue: NAZI WAR CRIMES, US INTELLIGENCE AND SELECTIVE PROSECUTION AT NUREMBERG: CONTROVERSIES REGARDING THE ROLE OF THE OFFICE OF STRATEGIC SERVICES by MICHAEL SALTER

Heuristics, Hypocrisy, and History without Lessons: Nuremberg, War Crimes, and “Shock and Awe”

On the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials for Nazi war crimes, this essay explores the present-day significance of the tribunal in light of the current geopolitical situation and the policies of the Bush administration. The discussion highlights the historical, political, and moral dimensions of the ongoing controversies about “the war on terrorism” and American foreign policy since the occupation of Iraq. Just as was the case at Nuremberg, a key theme at issue in today's debates is the hypocrisies of nations, especially their questionable moral legitimacy to impose equitable judgment on a defeated nation. My aspiration is to draw attention to the complexities involved in attempts to achieve international justice and to call for an engaged, moral response to those chauvinistic blinders that preclude fairness.

Debunking the myth of the saubere Wehrmacht

This paper will draw on key notions from several of Roland Barthes's texts to examine how the Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung1 (HIS) used word and photographic image to contest a widely held belief in post-Second World War Germany that Wehrmacht2 soldiers were not directly involved in committing Nazi war crimes. The first exhibition, ‘Vernichtungskrieg: Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941 bis 1944‘,3 ran from 1995 through to 1999 and was seen by roughly 860 000 visitors in 33 cities in Germany and Austria.4The second show, ‘Verbrechen der Wehrmacht: Dimensionen des Vernichtungskrieges’,5 was seen by approximately 420000 visitors in 13 cities in Germany, Austria and Luxemburg.6

U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis, Richard Breitman, Norman Goda, Timothy Naftali, and Robert Wolfe (Washington, DC: National Archives Trust Fund for the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group, 2004), 488 pp., $24.95.

U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis, Richard Breitman, Norman Goda, Timothy Naftali, and Robert Wolfe (Washington, DC: National Archives Trust Fund for the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group, 2004), 488 pp., $24.95.

Streaming Media Trail

Streaming Media Trail [1] (Fig. 2), Part I of the 3-part hyper-epic Revelations of Secret Surveillance, is a fictional examination of the impact of intelligenceagency stalking of artists, writers and musicians. A web-based metaphoric narrative that begins with U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) surveillance of German artists and writers who came to this country to escape the Nazis in the World War II era, Streaming Media Trail uses a combination of fictional juxtapositions and extensive documentation to examine how a climate of government persecution of the arts has been created. It also brings questions of reality interference into the present by presenting both fictional interpretation and background documentation of the existence and impact of global electronic communications surveillance systems such as ECHELON [2,3] and brain scanning technologies that read and interfere with people’s thoughts [4–9]. In a sense, Streaming Media Trail is an unfolding mystery that in its first screen states, “The surveillance devices observing this scene are not visible. The people responsible for their presence have not been revealed.” As the work unfolds, no one solution to the mystery is offered. Rather, the reader accompanies the writer through a harrowing process of understanding that moves from a poem by an exiled German poet to a conversation with a reporter who is investigating covert eugenic-based manipulation and on to a performance artist’s metaphoric juxtaposition of interference—in his own life and in the lives of musicians—with a chain of events that begins with Operation Paperclip, in which U.S. intelligence services hid evidence of Nazi war crimes when they brought some 1,000 Nazi scientists to this country in the aftermath of World War II [10]. When I began to write this work, I started with the idea of using a fictional approach to examine the climate for artists and the arts in the United States that has been created by such government interference as the House UnAmerican Activities Committee’s role With some modifications, Streaming Media Trail uses Narrabase IV, the interface I designed for Dorothy Abrona McCrae [17]. Housing a narrative that can be approached either as a diffuse hyperfictional experience or, for those who prefer it, as a more sequential page-through experience in which the unfolding of the story is of primary importance—Narrabase IV is designed to create a seamless reading experience in the contemporary Web environment, where art and literature exist side by side with commercial and informational “pages.” In this interface, as in much of my work, the emphasis is on the lexias—short, screen-based units of text that in my implementation can either stand alone or be read in combination with other lexias to create a larger whole. Narrabase IV does not utilize canned applications, but rather is an original interface, created with the basic elements of HTML.

History and Justice: Paradigms of the Prosecution of Nazi Crimes

The confluence of two distinct disciplines—history and justice—in the investigation and prosecution of Nazi war crimes and crimes against humanity has been the subject of controversy since the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal. Particularly controversial, and often poorly understood, is the role of historians in the trials of National Socialist perpetrators of genocide. Addressing this issue in its philosophical, methodological and practical dimensions, this article details the interaction of history and justice in Nazi crimes prosecutions at Nuremberg and in the Ludwigsburg-initiated West-German proceedings. Although the objectives and modi operandi of the two disciplines are dissimilar, a comparative analysis demonstrates that both law and justice benefited from this interaction. Jurists could not do without history and, in the service of justice, historians fashioned and refashioned the historiography of the Holocaust.

Intelligence Agencies and War Crimes Prosecution: Allen Dulles's Involvement in Witness Testimony at Nuremberg

Legal responses to international crimes can be shaped by complex and contradictory factors. The present case study of the contribution of former-CIA director Alan Dulles to the Nuremberg process reveals that a series of geo-political, interpersonal and institutional factors shaped the selective deployment of evidence and other expertise on Nazi war crimes, provided by a number of his former intelligence agents and informants, particularly Hans Gisevius. Amongst these factors was the `fall out` from the failed plea-bargain arrangement for defendants Schacht and Goring, brokered by the then head of US intelligence, General W.J. Donovan. Ultimately, Gisevius`s testimony was admitted as part of an ambush of the defence counsel, which, although largely successful, particularly with respect to Goring, raised some embarrassing geo-political issues for the Anglo-Americans. It also lent powerful support to one of Dulles`s wartime informants, the defendant, Hjalmar Schacht, who was subsequently acquitted.