1. Vanquished’s Justice: International Criminal Trials Post WWI

This is a translation of a lecture I gave at the Collège de France on 31 may 2019 as part of a series entitled The History and Future of International Criminal Justice. A video of the French-language original of this lecture is available online here.


Welcome

Members of the Collège de France, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, it is a great honour for me to be here today to begin this series of four lectures on the history of international criminal Law at the Collège de France. Although I am not a trained historian, I have worked in this field for the last twenty years, first as a war crimes prosecutor in Rwanda and the Hague, then as an academic for the vast majority of that period. As an academic, I have spent much time and energy researching the history of the field over the past years. I hope that this combination of practical experience, scholarly research and engagement with history will provide a series of lectures that offer something of an orientation around this field that informs your views of its potential and shortcomings.

Overview of this Series of Lectures

Before I begin with the first period I hoped to discuss, I thought it might be useful to provide a short overview of the series of lectures. As you will note from the poster advertising this series of four lectures over the coming month, I address each of the main stages in the history of international criminal justice, starting today with trials post World War I and culminating in the establishment of the permanent International Criminal Court in the Hague sixteen years ago.

There is an interesting and brilliant new literature in international criminal justice criticizing this type a linear history because of everything it leaves out between these four major steps and because of the ways it falsely promises an inevitable degree of progress in this field.[1] My purpose, however, is not to suggest that whatever progress we might discern from this history suggests a system without flaws that flourish eternally. On the contrary, I have four theses about this history that I will return to consistently over the next four lectures:

First, for over a century now, the end of each major global war has resulted in the championing of international criminal justice to pursue a wide range of objectives that are not coherently defined or prioritized.

Second, I argue that international criminal justice is constituted by a tension between the very intense moral sentiments about responsibility for atrocity and the politics that tend to instrumentalize those sentiments on the other.

Third, the history of international criminal justice is often a reactionary attempt to reconstitute the balance between these poles, morality and power, in light of the shortcomings of an earlier period.

Fourth, it is unlikely that moral sentiment or power will ever claim final victory over the other in our thinking about accountability for atrocities. Consequently, the history of international trials reveal something significant about the potential and limitations of international criminal justice in the current global legal order.

I will not say more about these thesis now, but I will return to them within the four lectures and at the end to explain how the various histories we explore support them.

In terms of form, I use five themes to explain the history of international criminal justice during each period, hoping that the framework I adopt helps identify the conclusions I mention. The five themes I use as a framework in all of my four lectures include the following.

First, I begin this and subsequent talks with a narrative introduction to the trials in question, namely, trials post WWI, the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials after WWII, the ad hoc tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda after the Cold War, and the permanent International Criminal Court thereafter.

Second, I will explore the objectivesof trials for aggression, war, crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity as articulated in the establishment of each of these criminal justice systems. Because objectives are numerous and poorly reconciled with one another, I will identify one or two per period that are especially germane.

Third, I will discuss the political dimensions of these trials, particularly the relationship between the trials and the distribution of power within the global legal order. I argue that a core tension in the field of international criminal justice is between the instrumentalization of trials by the powerful and moral demands for both accountability and equality.

Fourth, I will assess alternatives to criminal prosecutions in each of the historical periods I discuss. As we will see, those alternatives include everything from mass executions to military intervention and truth and reconciliation commissions. By plotting different alternatives for each period, I hope to isolate the contingencies of each moment, which should reveal something about the identity of the field.

Fifth, I will talk about law. Law is important to this history because it functions as an crucial, sometimes decisive, political consideration in these histories. None of the law I mention is a minor technicality. Also, the same legal problems resurface time and again in all these periods, with some actors adopting inverse positions from one to the next. These volte face are also revealing of the field’s identity.

Sixth, I intend to speak about the consequences of these trials. Any assessment of the consequences of war crimes trials will struggle with proof of causation and risk an unjustifiable degree of speculation, but I hope to speak about ways in which these trials likely met their objectives in certain circumstances, as well the sometimes very negative repercussions that seem to have flowed from them in others.

A.         An Introduction to Trials After WWI

Let me start then, with trials post WWI. To my mind, the history of international criminal justice during and after WWI is best understood as involving at least three interconnected parts: first, unsuccessful attempts on the part of the victorious Entente governments to try the German Kaiser Wilhelm II before an international tribunal; second, a set of approximately 1,600 trials of Germany military in absentia (par contumace) in France and Belgium very soon after the war; and third, a largely farcical set of cases in the District Court of Leipzig that the Entente reluctantly agreed to after Germany refused to extradite its nationals to victorious nations.

To get you to the end before we begin with the details, the Kaiser lived out his days merrily in a Dutch castle without ever being tried anywhere; and the combination of the trials in absentia in France and Belgium on the one hand and in person by the courts of the defeated power in Leipzig on the other amounted to little more than a continuation of the war through litigation. Of the 1,600 individuals tried in absentia, it is unclear that any were ever apprehended. And at Leipzig, 861 out of 901 allegations were disposed of by a public declaration by the prosecutor that there was no case to answer, often in terms that deliberately defied contrary reasoning from a French or Belgian court.

B.         Objectives of the Trials

Having provided you with something of an overview, let me move to my first theme, the objectives of these post war trials. Many scholars have pointed out that the objectives of international criminal justice are multiple, largely implicit, and often contradictory.[2] I here introduce some of the objectives apparent from a reading of the WWI literature, leaving others for my subsequent lectures.

The first motivating factor for trials post WWI is retribution based on moral outrage. Europe had lost a large portion of the male population, leaving widows, orphans and scars. Thus, evidence of moral outrage and the retributive desires it produces are not difficult to find. Italy’s Prime Minister, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando,  for example, reported “a state of anger and grudge that exploded immediately after the armistice.”[3] Similarly, French and Belgian witnesses who testified at Leipzig apparently “breathed hatred.”[4] Retribution transformed part of this strong sentiment into prosecutions. French President Clemenenceau, for example, called the proposed trial of the Kaiser “an act of international justice, of world retribution”.[5]

To be sure, a good part of the moral outrage after WWI was politically constructed through the use of Atrocity Propaganda.[6] Moreover, that rage was highly selective, very local, and harnessed for very particular political ends. Nonetheless, moral outrage was and remains omnipresent in all aspects of this field’s history. Moreover, while some scholars like Gerry Simpson view international criminal trials as “human rights with a vengeance,”[7] there is much philosophical literature defending retribution as an appropriate, proportional response to wrongdoing.[8] Regardless, as I will show, moral outrage has provided a major impetus for international trials.

One aspect of this moral outrage has proved to be especially successful in the history of the field, namely, public expressions of moral absurdity at the lack of accountability for atrocity. For instance, William Schabas’ excellent new history of attempts to try the Kaiser reveals a conversation between an American Colonel Luke Lea and the English Duke who was related to Wilhelm II. Arguing that Wilhelm should be tried, Lea argued as follows:

“Why should those not responsible for the war and against whom we had waged war— the German people— be killed, wounded and imprisoned, and the only person against who we had really waged war, the Kaiser, escape punishment, not ever being brought to trial but permitted to live in luxurious pomp and glory with all of his fabulous fortune untouched?”[9]

Similarly, the British Prime Minister Lloyd George shared his own moral absurdity in the following way. He said:

“Suppose that in peacetime, the Kaiser, acting alone had crossed the Belgian border with a rifle and had fired on the inhabitants. The first Belgian policemen on the spot would have had the right to arrest him and to have him hanged. Should he go unpunished because instead of doing this himself, he sent a million men into Belgium?”[10]

I will return to these types of arguments regularly throughout these lectures because they are common features of the field. 

The arguments about moral absurdity are especially important in the ways they attempt to transform the global legal order. The major structural shift after the Peace of Westaphalia, following the thirty year war, was a system of global governance that made states sovereign and formally equal within the global legal order. After the Great War, many saw international criminal justice as a means of addressing moral absurdities within this global legal order.

For instance, referring to the public expectations these trials would produce, Clemenceau proclaimed that “justice will in future be done in the case of Kaisers and Kings just as much as in the case of common men. If this could be achieved,” calling international criminal law “a magnificent advance and a moral revolution.”[11] Likewise, Professor Larnaude observed triumphantly that “a new law of nations has been born,”[12] while Professor Hersch Lauterpacht described the prospect of criminal responsibility after WWI as a “solemn warning to any future aggressor.”[13]

Ideas like these conceived of this new justice as a tool to transform the global legal order after a colossal social upheaval, not merely as a mechanism for delegitimazing a vanquished enemy.

Of course, deterrence was also a major ambition. Paralleling wartime warnings the Allies issued from London during WWII, the French government declared on 5 October 1918 that “acts so contrary to International law, and to the very principles of human civilization, should not go unpunished.”[14] Presumably, the desire was to deter further crimes. This deterrence was also important to a British committee appointed to consider the the criminalization of international law. The commission concluded that an International Tribunal would “provide a deterrent and warning to highly placed officials.”[15]

Finally, incapacitation was a key rationale for trials post-WWI. The importance of incapacitation became especially apparent in the oftentimes heated debates between the Entente powers and the neutral Dutch government, which refused to violate principles governing neutrality by handing the Kaiser over for trial. After it was clear that the Dutch would not agree to a trial before an international tribunal, the Entente worked hard to have the Kaiser exiled, à la Napolean as they said, to a distant colony where he could not recommence war.[16]

When the Dutch disagreed to this also, Lloyd George wrote a strong letter arguing that, “What would have happened supposing Napoleon, instead of being captured and interned overseas, had managed to escape to Switzerland?”[17] Clearly, incapacitation was also a primary concern.

C. Political Dimensions of Trials Post-WWI

So what about the political dimensions of these trials? After WWI, the one-sidedness of the enforcement of international criminal law was apparent on many levels. For one, the copious evidence of German offending outside Europe was documented but ignored. The South African scholar Christopher Gevers has written an excellent article showing how the German Genocide of the Herero and Namaqua people in modern day Namibia was documented by the Entente, largely as a basis for stripping Germany of her colonies, but that this episode never featured in their thinking about international criminal justice after the war.[18] Likewise, historian Mark Lewis shows how both the Armenian Genocide and crimes by Bulgarian forces against its Balkan neighbours were largely overlooked in the very selective moral outrage that called for trials after WWI.[19]

But the way the Entente presumed that only enemy soldiers could be tried was the most striking aspect of this political one-sidedness. This one-sidedness was made very clear in negotiations with German officials about the “war guilt” provisions of the Treaty of Versailles when a German official promised that his country would submit its citizens to be tried before an international court that was populated by judges from neutral countries who had the power to indict military and political leaders from Entente powers as well as Germans. That this suggestion was quickly discarded raises the concern that these were “show trials.”[20]

Importantly, Germany was able to resist the Entente’s imposition of “victor’s justice” to an important degree. When Germany accepted the Treaty of Versailles, its major reservation was the “war guilt” provisions, which it flatly refused to comply with. Remarkably, the German government was prepared to risk everything. As Horne and Kramer observe:

“it is remarkable that a democratic government of the Republic [of Germany], which was prepared to accept a treaty that imposed severe territorial and economic restrictions, limited the army to 100,000 men, and banned conscription, should run the risk of collapse of the peace and invasion over accusations of criminal acts against the old regime.”[21]

But this is what transpired. As a consequence, Germany was able to negotiate what I call vanquished’s justice, where the country responsible for the atrocities agrees to try its own nationals for international crimes. WWI is the paradigm for problems this approach poses.

Overall, the post WWI trials are a story of power and resistance, all in the shadows of an intense but selective moral outrage.

D. Alternatives to Prosecutions

This brings us to the fourth major theme, the alternatives to prosecutions. I focus on this theme here and throughout this series of lectures because it helps isolate the historical contingency of international criminal justice. Here again, I do not intend to be comprehensive in my treatment of the alternatives to prosecutions for international crimes. Instead, I will highlight what I perceive as an especially significant alternative in each epoch.

After WWI, a simple summary execution was the most obvious alternative to prosecution, but I raise it here only briefly because much more can be said about this in my next lecture on international criminal justice after WWII. Nevertheless, it is important for our later lectures to note discussions about subjecting the Kaiser to summary execution. After all, it is a point of great historical interest how the idea of a criminal trial emerged at all when “Hang the Kaiser” was a popular political slogan in Britain and likely throughout much of Europe at the time.[22] Certainly there was no shortage of precedent for the extra-judicial killing of a deposed leader at the time.

For now, it is sufficient to note how the possibility of a summary execution of the Kaiser registered at the highest levels of government after the Great War. William Schabas’s outstanding history quotes a British official’s written records as stating that the British Prime Minister Lloyd George, I quote “wants to shoot the Kaiser. Winston does not.”[23] As we will later see, that Winston Churchill disagreed with executions after WWI would later contrast with his thinking about Nazis after WWII. Winston Churchill was a staunch advocate of criminal prosecutions in the aftermath of WWI but he learned his lesson from Leipzig. In a dramatic example of the reactive changes of position I highlight at the beginning of this lecture, Churchill would advocate for mass executions of Nazis after the end of WWII.

Instead of focusing on execution, however, I here address the alternative of exile. At the time, Napolean Bonaparte’s exile to the isle of St Helena offered the obvious precedent for the Kaiser’s situation, not a trial before some newly established international tribunal.[24] Legal academics and politicians discussed the Napoleon precedent on many occasions leading up to and after the Treaty of Versailles. Napoleon too was only saved from execution by the British, who treated him as a prisoner of war. At the time, there was no substantial desire to try Napoleon for international crimes, even though his incapacitation was a major priority for the stabilization of Europe. After WWI, various committees, scholars and statesmen worked hard to differentiate Napoleon from the Kaiser in order to make space for the new justice, although there was broad recognition that both options were viable.[25]

Clemenceau, apparently, was strongly in favour of a trial because “he considered it would be very much more impressive.”[26] In a way, his hopes were largely dashed in the end, since the Kaiser lived out his days in the lap of luxury in a Dutch castle rather than facing any sort of judicial process. Yet, unlike in earlier periods, exile’s victory was only partial; the Kaiser’s subordinates were tried in criminal trials in absentia in France, Belgium and in person at Leizpig.[27] Nonetheless, much of the long, passionate and sometimes hostile negotiations about the Kaiser’s criminal responsibility set the stage for the rise of modern international criminal justice in subsequent years. As we will see, as examples of reactionary attempts to cure one iteration of international criminal justice of its earlier ills, many of the same actors adopted inverse positions when they came to consider exactly these same questions after WWII.

E.         The Law

This brings us to the fourth theme I want to use to explore the history of international criminal justice in all of the lectures I will give here. This fourth theme is the law. Like many facets of this history, the legal difficulties involved in prosecutions after WWI reappear many times at every stage of this history. Here, I will limit myself to two areas of law, notably, difficulties in deciding whether to apply international law or national law to these prosecutions, and the problem of retroactive law. Both these issues had enormous political significance after WWI.

First of all, the question whether to apply international law or national law to these prosecutions. In the end, post WWI justice applied both, but this dual application highlighted a major tension between these sources of law. This tension persists to this day. With respect to the Kaiser, an important question posed itself. Why not try him in regular military courts within France, Belgium or Britain?[28] Initial investigations suggested that national law would not be adequate to cover allegations of this sort, which was unsurprising given that much if not all of what the Kaiser was reproached for had no precedent. Apparently, an international tribunal could better find the law necessary.

In addition, the credibility of the condemnation was perceived to depend on the impartiality of the process as well as the prestige of the institution issuing the verdict, such that a unified tribunal would be best for a trial of this global significance. As the two leading French law professors Ferdinand Larnaude and Albert Geouffre de Lapradelle argued, “il faut une juridiction plus élevée, des débats plus retentissants, une scène plus grande.”[29] A national court would not be adequately powerful rhetorically.

Thus, by a process of elimination, the case for internationalising criminal prosecutions was made. National courts were politically controlled by the perpetrators, legally unprepared to deal with the issues, and structurally insufficient to condemn the offending with sufficient rhetorical force. Yet, the debate about whether national courts are preferable to an international one is still a central dilemma for modern international criminal justice. And as a leading British scholar of the period observed in 1929, in an article entitled Do We Need an International Criminal Court, “it does not follow that, because a process of elimination seems to drive us back on the idea of an international tribunal, a solution of the problem will be found there. It may be that there is no solution.”[30] This, apparently, was the case post-WWI.

Taken as a whole, the system of accountability that resulted from the process I discuss here led to an overlapping network of national courts in France, Belgium and Germany, plus a rich public debate about an international tribunal for the Kaiser in particular. The law these institutions would apply varied substantially from one jurisdiction to the next.

For example, the Leipzig court applied German criminal law procedure but this did not satisfy all audiences. Claud Mullins, a bilingual Englishman sent to cover the Leipzig trials for the British observed that “[t]he system of judicial procedure prevailing on the continent differs in many essential points from that obtaining in England.”[31] As a harbinger for what would later emerge as a recurrent problem for ICL, he concluded his legal comparison by observing that “[t]his procedure will strike every English lawyer as strange and dangerous.”[32] As we will see, this socio-legal difference would mark a concern that would repeat itself in later iterations of international criminal justice too.

Retroactive law is a second recurring legal issue in the history of trials post WWI, which like the other topics I discuss here, had major political significance. Misgivings about retroactive law were crucial factors in the unwillingness of the United States government to support the creation of an international tribunal to try the Kaiser. In 1918, for instance, US President Woodrow Wilson stated plainly that “It is not right to make such an act a crime retroactively, to make an act of this type a personal crime after it has been committed.”[33] Others, like US Secretary of State Robert Lansing mounted something of a campaign against the tribunal, often citing retroactive law as the basis for his views. [34] Similarly, the dangers of retroactive law were also a basis for German protest against the idea of a new tribunal and a primary reason for the Dutch refusal to extradite the Kaiser. [35] All of this is especially intriguing, of course, since less than three decades later, exactly these same governments were active players in the establishment of a new set of international tribunals to prosecute the very same body of law whose existence they denied so vigorously after WWI. This again is evidence of reactivity to overcoming shortcomings of an earlier era for instrumental political reasons.

F.         Consequences of the Trials

This brings us to our final theme, the consequences of these prosecutions. The consequences of criminal prosecutions are especially difficult to define with any degree of certainty at the best of times, so I will select some that seem particularly apparent to me from my reading of this history.

First, it is clear that vanquished justice failed as a project. After one of the first trials at Leipzig, the Belgians withdrew, calling the process “a travesty of justice.”[36] Moreover, after two days of discussion here in Paris in 1922, an Inter-Allied Commission called the trials “highly unsatisfactory” and “subjective, biased justice.”[37] For the Entente powers, the fact that the Leipzig court was an instrument for the perpetrators reduced many of the trials into exercises in propaganda that probably exacerbated hatred.  As the historian James Willis remarked “far from resolving the issue of war crimes punishment, the Leipzig trials created additional resentment between Germany and Belgium and France.”[38]

To provide two illustrations, while in Northern France in August 1914, Lieutenant General Karl Stenger was alleged to have ordered that “[a]ll the prisoners are to be massacred; the wounded, armed or not, are to be massacred; even men captured in large organised units are to be massacred. No enemy must remain alive behind us.”[39] Because many Frenchmen were killed as a result of this order, the French government listed Stenger at the top of its list of “war accused” it wanted extradited to France to stand trial pursuant to the Treaty of Versailles.[40] Within his trial in Leipzig, Stenger denied having issued the order despite evidence from his own subordinate to the contrary. Nonetheless, the Chief Reich’s Prosecutor, that is to say Stenger’s formal accuser, declared that “I believe him, as I said, completely.”[41] The purpose of his trial, therefore, and I cite the Prosecutor again was “merely to confirm this, especially to a foreign audience.”[42] After Stenger’s acquittal, a large crowd assembled outside the courthouse in Leipzig to present him with flowers and spit at the departing French delegation.[43]

In a second example that the leading historian of these trials Gerd Hankel explores, the relationship between the trials in absentia in France and Belgium and those at Leipzig is revealed. According to Hankel, in 1922, the German government wrote to the Leipzig Court about a Colonel von Giese, who had been sentenced to death in a trial in absentia that was held in Belgium. The German government’s letter explained that the Colonel “wishes that his case be completed in Leipzig as soon as possible,”[44] and that he “wishes to use the Reich Court decision for his further vindication domestically and abroad.”[45] The letter concludes that “[b]ecause the case is very beneficial to our propaganda purposes, I would be especially grateful if you could accommodate Colonel von Giese’s desire for rapid conclusion of his case.”[46] Apparently, the case was dismissed less than a month later as requested.

Apart from these concrete illustrations, there were undoubtedly a series of factors that might lead one to conclude that these trials exacerbated violence in addition to contributing to resentment. Several scholars suggest that the Entente was so motivated to stage these criminal procedures because they were important for justifying the colossal human and economic costs of the Great War in Britain, France and Belgium. If this is true, it would suggest that international criminal justice can contribute to war by helping justify it post hoc. In addition, as part of an exceptionally harsh peace deal that so thoroughly humiliated Germany, these trials may also have contributed to a resurgence of war decades later. Remember, war guilt was by far the most sensitive aspect of the Treaty of Versailles, and Germans risked war externally and revolution internally in order to avoid complying with these demands within a peace agreement that scholars agree was crippling. There were also accidents of circumstance with the Leipzig trials. Adolf Hitler, for example, first met Hermann Göering at a rally protesting the Leipzig trials in 1922.[47]

Of course, this history was ground-breaking for the notion of individual criminal responsibility for international crimes, which was based on moral outrage. As I say, having worked on atrocities personally, I take this moral outrage seriously, consider that it is often legitimate, and view it as imbued with important political influence. But how we view trials brought about in its name will have to wait until we complete this series of lectures so that we can see where the central ideas announced after WWI have led us, and where they may go from here. It goes without saying, however, that the ideas about deterrence proved incapable of preventing a second global conflagration only decades later.

G.         Conclusion

In sum, much of the literature on international criminal law unjustifiably fixates on Nuremberg as the field’s genesis, but the history of international criminal law starts most clearly several decades earlier. After the Great War, there were multiple inconsistent objectives announced for this new notion of international criminal justice, but these were very closely linked to power. The idea of international criminal law was successful at forestalling executions, but only partially successful at overcoming exile as an alternative. The notion of vanquished justice resulting from Germany’s fierce resistance to assuming responsibility for the war was at best unhelpful and probably counterproductive. Still, it certainly created a body of experience the Allies would work very hard not to repeat after WWII. When the United Nations War Crimes Commission was established in 1943 to begin preparations for trials of Nazi’s, it’s Chairman announced that he was determined not to repeat “the fiasco of Leipzig.”[48] So the great reaction began. In the next lecture, I will address Nuremberg and Tokyo after WWII.


[1] See, for instance, Linear Law: The History of International Criminal Law, in Critical Approaches to International Criminal Law: An Introduction 159–179 (Christine Schwöbel ed., 1 ed. 2014), https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781317929215 (last visited Nov 29, 2019).

[2] Mirjan Damaska, What is the Point of International Criminal Justice?, 83 Chic.-Kent Law Rev. 329 (2008).

[3] William A. Schabas, The Trial of the Kaiser 17 (2018).

[4] Claud Mullins, “Notes of a Conversation with Herr von Tippelskirch at Leipzig on Belgian & French War Trials,” Hanworth Papers, cited in James F. Willis, Prologue to Nuremberg: The Politics and Diplomacy of Punishing War Criminals of the First World War 134 (1st edition ed. 1982).

[5] Gary Bass, Stay the Hand of Vengeance : The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals 84 (2002).

[6] See, for instance, James Morgan Read, Atrocity Propaganda, 1914-1919 (1941).

[7] Gerry Simpson, Human Rights with a Vengeance: One Hundred Years of Retributive Humanitarianism Kirby Lecture in International Law 2015, 33 Aust. Year b. Int. Law 1–14 (2015).

[8] For a defense by one of the leading theorists in the English language, see Michael Moore, Placing Blame: A Theory of the Criminal Law (2010); For a literary critique of non-retributive theories of punishment, see C.S. Lewis, The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment, 3 Twent. Century Aust. Q. Rev. 5–12 (1949).

[9] Schabas, supra note 3 at 81.

[10] Id. at 187.

[11] Bass, supra note 5 at 85–86.

[12] Schabas, supra note 3 at 133; See generally, Ferdinand Larnaude & Albert Geouffre de Lapradelle, Examen de la responsabilité pénale de l’empereur Guillaume II d’Allemagne, 46 J. Droit Int. 131–238 (1919).

[13] Schabas, supra note 3 at 304.

[14] Claud Mullins, The Leipzig trials: an Account of the War Criminals’ Trials and a Study of German Mentality 5 (1921).

[15] Schabas, supra note 3 at 51.

[16] Id. at 56.

[17] Id. at 278.

[18] Christopher Gevers, The “Africa Blue Books” at Versailles: The First World War, Narrative, and Unthinkable Histories of International Criminal Law, in The New Histories of International Criminal Law: Retrials 145–166 (Immi Tallgren & Thomas Skouteris eds., 2019).

[19] Mark Lewis, The Birth of the New Justice: The Internationalization of Crime and Punishment, 1919-1950 (1 edition ed. 2014).

[20] Martti Koskenniemi, Between Impunity and Show Trials, 6 Max Planck Yearb. U. N. Law (2002).

[21] John Horne & Alan Kramer, German Atrocities 1914: A History of Denial 85 (1st edition ed. 2001).

[22] See Chapter 2, Schabas, supra note 3.

[23] Id. at 16.

[24] Id. at 38.

[25] Id. at 38.

[26] Id. at 65.

[27] See Gerd Hankel, The Leipzig Trials: German War Crimes and Their Legal Consequences after World War I (2014).

[28] Schabas, supra note 3 at 51.

[29] Larnaude and de Lapradelle, supra note 12 at 143.

[30] J. L. Brierly, Do We Need an International Criminal Court, 8 Br. Year b. Int. Law 81–88, 83 (1927).

[31] Mullins, supra note 14 at 88.

[32] Id. at 39.

[33] Schabas, supra note 3 at 178.

[34] Id. at 178.

[35] Id. at 178.

[36] Willis, supra note 4 at 135.

[37] Id. at 140.

[38] Id. at 134.

[39] Mullins, supra note 14 at 152.

[40] Liste des personnes désignées par les Puissances Alliées pour être livrées par l’Allemagne en execution des article 228 à 230 du traité de Versailles et du Protocole du 28 juin 1919, at 40.

[41] Hankel, supra note 27 at 101.

[42] Id. at 101.

[43] Willis, supra note 4 at 136.

[44] Hankel, supra note 27 at 360.

[45] Id. at 360.

[46] Id. at 360.

[47] Willis, supra note 4 at 141.

[48] History of the United Nations War Crimes Commission and the Development of the Laws of War, 111 (1948).