There was a time in the not-so-distant past when the only discussion about war crimes trials and justice revolved around what scholar Francine Hirsch identifies in her path-breaking book Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg: A New History of the International Military Tribunal after World War II, as the “Nuremberg myth”: the belief that international justice, born in the courtrooms of Nuremberg after World War II, was a singularly American invention.Footnote 1 Given the long Cold War, including a public relations battle that the US fought with zeal, and the prevalent belief in the benefits of liberal democratic justice, this should not be surprising. There were so-called war crimes trials after World War I, but they were not prosecuted with any real conviction or political will. The Soviets prosecuted war criminals in the postwar period, but many of these trials lacked the markers of western justice and were therefore seen as unworthy of serious investigation by scholars. Secrecy also meant that many of the Soviet era trials were out of reach. With the collapse of the USSR in 1991 and the fiftieth anniversary of the IMT (International Military Tribunal) trial in 1995, scholarly perspectives began to change.
The so-called legal turn away from the “Nuremberg myth” saw an explosion of publications on the legal legacy of the IMT and its twelve successor trials, the so-called Nuremberg Military Tribunals or NMT. So many books and articles, in fact, were published, including mine, that today Nuremberg is a starting point of discussion about international criminal justice and those who participated in it, and not an end in itself.Footnote 2 No longer do scholars concern themselves with the lone question of fairness, rather the scholarship is so far-reaching that even Soviet and eastern-bloc trials, once thought to be legal fiction, worthless because they did not employ the same legal standards as western judicial processes, are now the subject of serious scholarly investigation.
Prompted by the Soviet collapse and the opening of east European archives, Alexander Prusin’s pathbreaking work on early Soviet war crimes trials and his later collaborations with Gabriel Finder on postwar Polish People’s trials helped pave the way for what today could be considered a subfield of post-WWII legal studies that focus exclusively (and positively, I might add) on east European and Soviet cases of justice. While quite different in origins, scope, intention, and quality, the two edited collections under review in this essay, Seeking Accountability for Nazi and War Crimes in East and Central Europe and Making Justice Visible offer complimentary perspectives on how justice was carried out, mediated, represented, and remembered after WWII mostly in central and eastern Europe (and a few other locations, including the US, France, and Turkey). Seeking Accountability emphasizes legal mechanisms and the role of social mobilization in holding individuals accountable for war crimes. It also explores how regional justice worked in the Soviet sphere and how different political pressures shaped trials and their outcomes. Whereas Making Justice Visible places significant emphasis on media and public perception, looking at how war crimes trials were covered in different media formats (press, radio, television, and some film) and their role in shaping historical memory. Authors in this volume focus on the media’s role in constructing narratives around justice, especially in highly publicized trials such as Nuremberg and the Eichmann trial. The two books intersect in discussions of the relationship between justice and memory, but they do so through different lenses. Making Justice Visible views memory largely through media, exploring how trials were presented to the public and how these narratives shaped their societies views about the war and the crimes committed during it. On the other hand, Seeking Accountability examines memory culture through legal and political processes. Together, these works illuminate the tensions between visibility and secrecy, state control and civic engagement, legal and didactic aims, and the evolving narratives of justice in postwar east and central Europe (and some places outside Europe) and thus reflect the current state of research on postwar criminal trials.
Drawing on underexplored archives and emphasizing the agency of ordinary people in shaping justice, Seeking Accountability for Nazi and War Crimes is a taught and highly theorized (sometimes overly so) collection of eleven essays devoted to critically examining postwar trials as legitimate legal, political, and social events. Building on a “renewed analytical framework” articulated most recently by legal scholars Devin Pendas and Jens Meierhenrich, the ideas for this volume first gestated at a 2017 colloquium in Prague and grew into a six-year research project funded by the French National Research Agency housed at the Centre d’études des Mondes Russe, Caucasien et Centre-européan in Paris.Footnote 3 While national interests varied, thematically the group was devoted to the study of Nazi-era war crimes and war crimes trials that took place in central and eastern Europe during the life of the Cold War. The volume’s temporal framework is bookended by two important dates: 1943 and 1991. Soviet success at Stalingrad that led to the so-called Krasnodar trial, the first public trial of perpetrators, and the collapse of the USSR are a natural beginning and end. The volume explores how war crimes trials were not only legal proceedings but also public performances. Through press coverage, photographs, and film, these trials were framed in ways that influenced how central and eastern bloc societies and their historical actors understood the crimes they were adjudicating. Eric Le Bourhis, Irina Tcherneva, and Vanessa Voisin, the editors of the volume, bring to bear their expertise on the legal responses to war crimes and social aspects of war crimes trials and their historical memory in the aftermath of WWII.
Seeking Accountability is divided into two parts. Part One, Justice and Visibility, contains six essays: three devoted to factors that shaped the legal proceedings, and three that deal with tensions between public disclosure and secrecy. With a nod to the role of human agency, the first three essays focus on visible/visual media and how creative professionals interacted with legal issues for rhetorical aims. Illustrative of this is Sylvie Lindeperg’s illuminating essay, “The Nuremberg Trials—To Stage or Not to Stage,” which posits that it was not just the Soviets who had an eye to using the courtroom for propagandist purposes. In fact, as Lindeperg discovers, the Americans had their own “educational” mission for the ground-breaking IMT trial that included men who had an appetite for the role film and images of atrocity could play in advancing American ideology and aims. Gordon Dean, a law graduate and public relations scion led the team that included Oscar-winning director John Ford, and Field Photo, an arm of William Donovan’s Office of Strategic Services (OSS) devoted to collecting photographs and making films about war-time atrocity. With the approval of Chief Prosecutor Robert Jackson, Donovan and a team of Hollywood creatives assembled by Ford worked behind the scenes to produce a series of films depicting American values that would be used in a visual media blitz in the US before, during, and after the trial. While Dean’s plan to turn Nuremberg into a show of American values through a public relations barrage was partially fulfilled, it was ultimately tempered by the realities of politics and the early ending of the OSS by President Harry Truman. Most importantly perhaps for the American legacy of Nuremberg, Lindeperg shows that ultimately Jackson failed to fully embrace the propagandist mission of his public relations director, opting instead to respect the elements of liberal democratic justice and the historical legacy of Nuremberg. Not to conclude there, one of the most important takeaways from Lindeperg’s essay is that in the months immediately leading up to the now famous IMT, the US was not so different from the Soviets.
While less explicitly linked than the first three essays of Part One, the final three, in one way or another, deal with aspects surrounding public disclosure of crimes and closed prosecutions or, as Enrico Heitzer and Julia Landau have explained in their essay on “Internment, Investigation, Extradition, and Conviction,” in the early years of the Soviet Occupation of Germany, a discernable tension existed between keeping investigations secret and making the crimes the defendants committed public. David Adam Rich’s essay on the prosecution of a subset of fifty-two Trawniki guards—men who had defected from the Soviet Red Army, were trained by the Germans at the Trawniki instructional school in German-occupied Poland, and subsequently deployed as guards at death and forced labor camps in Poland—is a fascinating case study of this tension. Using Soviet security service records and investigative files, Rich explores the tension between Stalin-era secrecy and modifications to law after Stalin’s death that enabled Soviet prosecutors to fulfill what legal scholar Lawrence Douglas has described as “didactic aims.” In doing so and despite the impulse to secrecy, Rich concludes this tactic resulted in an early but lasting narrative of the Holocaust.Footnote 4 As scholars such as Götz Lachwitz have observed, courtrooms are natural stages and the new medium of television, as well as documentary film, transmitted messages that shaped public discourse and memory about Germany’s role during the war, proving Douglas’s point about the extra-legal use of war crimes trials in the decades following WWII, a theme I return to below.
Like the first part of the book, Part Two of Seeking Accountability is divided into two smaller sections: one that examines issues related to voluntary social involvement, including how various individuals and groups contributed to and collaborated in investigations and prosecution of Nazi-era crimes, and a second one that looks at those who advocated for trials. Katharina Stengel’s essay on the role of the World Jewish Congress (WJC) and the International Auschwitz Committee (IAC), two non-governmental survivor organizations that were instrumental in bringing Nazi perpetrators to justice, is an excellent example of the theme in the first section of Part Two. In illuminating exactly how the first Frankfurt-Auschwitz trial materialized behind the scenes, she demonstrates just how under-equipped and dependent West German legal authorities were on survivor organizations. The example she highlights is of an Auschwitz survivor who clearly identified the crimes of notorious SS man Wilhelm Boger, yet despite the certainty of the witness, the state prosecutor’s office in Stuttgart failed to investigate. It took Hermann Langbein, the head of the IAC to pressure German authorities to arrest Boger, and then also to provide them with the necessary witnesses and documentation to carry-through with his prosecution. Stengel asserts West German authorities may never have identified any perpetrators whatsoever were it not for IAC involvement, taking victim input to a new level of importance in the decade following the creation of the Central Office in Ludwigsburg. While not as much of an activist organization as the IAC, the WJC and other smaller organizations such as the Wiener Library also contributed witnesses and documentary evidence for prosecution. Ultimately, Stengel’s research contributes another dimension to the on-going debate about the Vergangenheitsbewältigung and West German justice.
The final two essays of the volume, Part B of Part Two, offer studies in individual and collective advocacy for punishment of Nazi war criminals. “Accusing Hans Globke, 1960–1963” by Jasmin Söhner and Máté Zombory shows how individual members of the public helped to compile evidence against Globke and in doing so pushed his trial forward, a similar finding to Stengel’s research on Jewish survivor organizations. The volume ends with an essay by Anne Klein and Birte Klarzyk that explores the role of individuals in transforming West German discourse about SS perpetrators in France, a somewhat out-of-place ending for a volume devoted mostly to central and eastern bloc trials.
Most importantly for the reader to know is that the starting point of Seeking Accountability is the premise that postwar justice carried out in the USSR and central and eastern Europe was more than mere show trials. Nadège Ragaru’s opening article about photographs as sources of understanding political trials in the Bulgarian context is a good example. While the aim of the article is to explore how the legal realm was politicized, her focus is really on a series of photographs that are used to illuminate visually the proceedings and players at trial. Refusing to assess the trial holistically, she instead focuses her analysis on three snapshots, using photography metaphors to describe her approach. While this will not appeal to everyone and it was admittedly a tad frustrating to read, one must appreciate how contributors to this volume have found creative ways to explore political trials. While maintaining the political dimension of trials or at least keeping it as a backdrop of their analysis, authors embrace frameworks that value the exploration of trials that were once thought to be valueless or otherwise were little known or understood. Collectively these authors have not only produced a meaningful output for their six-year research project, they also go some way toward setting a new path for future scholarship that reconceptualizes the way we study and understand postwar trials, not just as legal events, but as political, social, and cultural experiences.
In contrast, Media and Memory after World War II is a less cohesive volume. Edited by Ruth Leiserowitz, Gintaré Malinauskaitė, and Hektoras Vitkus, the volume comes out of a two-day conference held in Vilnius, Lithuania in September 2019. The conference brought together scholars from across Europe and the US to discuss post-WWII war crimes trials held in the west and in the eastern bloc and how the trials were “staged” in the courtroom and “channeled” through various media. The result of the conference is a collection of thirteen essays devoted to examining the role of media, dually defined as the press as well as the mediums of film, radio, and television, in explicating the various war crimes trials they cover and the narratives they produced. In some ways it is unfair to compare a collection such as Seeking Accountability, the result of a six-year research project, with Making Justice Visible, the outcome of a two-day conference. Conference proceedings do not generally lend themselves to an integrated scholarly analysis, and while Making Justice Visible is not as taught as Seeking Accountability and some of the essays belie haste, it is not without merit. The volume is rich in visual analysis and case studies of press coverage and film representations, and together the essays combine to offer the reader an illuminating snapshot into the role of media and memory in postwar trials of Nazi-era crimes. Prescient of our own digital age, the authors were influenced by Barbie Zelizer’s seminal 1993 work on the power of media to influence and transform collective memory.Footnote 5 All three memory scholars, the editors asked their contributors to explain how media shaped public understanding of wartime atrocities and what role journalists and lawyers played. In the end, perhaps not surprisingly, they assembled a collection that focuses on how war crimes trials were both legal events and mediated moments that shaped historical memory and public consciousness in the aftermath of WWII.
Making Justice Visible is divided into four sections. Organized both chronologically and thematically, the book begins with a single, overly descriptive, and unfocused essay by Edith Raim that uses data and charts to compare trial statistics between West and East Germany, including the number of people investigated and their crimes. Examining only cases that dealt with crimes committed in Lithuania limited the author’s ability to investigate and compare the effectiveness of the judicial systems in East and West Germany. Section II contains four divergent essays that, broadly speaking, focus on the various ways in which judicial processes were used to inform the public in Lithuania, the US, Poland, and East Germany. As someone working on evidence of crimes committed in Latvia, Zigmas Vitkus’s essay on the Extraordinary Commission’s 1944 investigation into crimes committed by Germans in Lithuania is of particular interest. Vitkus’s essay stands out as a case study in narrative construction in that it demonstrates how the Commission allowed ideology to influence their investigation and then whitewash crimes against Jews. The result of their work was the “universalization of Lithuanian victims” as “Soviet citizens” which has ultimately impacted memory of the Holocaust in Lithuania and the Baltics more generally.Footnote 6
Editor Gintaré Malinauskaitė’s essay about the 1964 Klaipėda trial is a good example of the impact of the Cold War on legal proceedings, a time when postwar trials were weaponized by the Soviets in their ideological war against the US. Also of note in section II is the essay by Lukasz Jasiniski, which offers a comparison between Polish and East German press reporting about trials held in the 1950s and 60s. The author sets himself the difficult task of attempting to determine what impact reporting had on the Polish and East German public, a challenging aim in societies built on secrecy. The final essay in the section looks at memory culture, but through the lens of the Eichmann trial. Jakub Muchowski compares the reception of the Eichmann trial in East Germany and Poland demonstrating that like in the west, trial narratives similarly affected the memory of the Holocaust and served to reinforce the image of Poles as innocent victims of the war.
Containing three essays wholly devoted to examining film representation of war crimes trials and their theatrical staging in Poland, Lithuania, and East Germany makes Section III of the collection the most cohesive. Justas Stončius’ essay on the “Construction of Soviet Lithuanian Documentary Films about War Crimes Trials” is a perfect example. While acknowledging both the pedagogic value and propagandistic tendencies of documentary films about war crimes trials produced during the Soviet period, Stončius demonstrates that film played an important role in creating a narrative of war that did not exclude Jews as victims of German aggression but did marginalize them. As he puts it, film is a tool of “indoctrination, intended to retouch perceptions of historical reality” (214). The final section of the book attempts to find common ground in five essays whose only commonality is in considering how media contributed to the internationalization of war crimes trials in Yugoslavia, Poland, West Germany, Turkey, and Lithuania. The book ends with Vygantas Vareikis’s study on the reception of the relatively recent (1996–2000) trial against Aleksandras Lileikis, a former officer in the Vilnius Security Police in 1941–44 who was living in the US and was deported to Lithuania for trial. The outcome of the Lileikis case clearly demonstrates the failure of post-Soviet Lithuania to grasp the significance of the Holocaust internationally, perhaps ironically in the current political environment, especially in the US and Israel.
Those familiar with the on-going debate about the purpose of war crimes trials raised most famously in Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt, who emphatically claimed that a trial’s only function is to “render justice and nothing more” will appreciate how ill-suited Arendt’s ideas are to the new historiography about war crimes trials held after WWII. Without exception, all twenty-four essays in the two volumes under review confront, challenge, and demolish Arendt’s singular notion about the purpose of postwar trials. Mentioned above, Sylvie Lindeperg’s essay demonstrates quite clearly that in preparation for trial at Nuremberg, the Americans were just as tempted as the Soviets to transform the courtroom at Nuremberg into a propaganda mission, and only at the eleventh hour chose instead to focus on the trial’s legal and historical gravitas. Annette Weinke’s contribution, “Defensive Visual Justice: Strategies of Mediatization in Early Nazi Trials in East Germany,” is another example. While acknowledging the political goals of Nazi trials in East Germany, she also explores their pedagogical value in creating an anti-fascist narrative. Perhaps an overly ambitious aim, Weinke explores the style of East German anti-fascist trials where legal authorities deployed visual, esthetic, and semantic tactics in the courtroom to promote East German perspectives of history of the war and their vision for a new world order. Weinke aims to illustrate the real impact that East German trials had on cultural memory in the GDR (German Democratic Republic), a legacy that fused international law and communist aesthetics. And the list goes on. Scholar after scholar in these two volumes advance arguments that explode the Arendtian model of trials as nothing more than legal events and demonstrate just how far scholarship has come since the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem.
No one has quantified exactly how many war, perpetrator, and collaborator trials were held in the decades following WWII. Globally, there must have been hundreds. Of these, millions of pages of documents, hundreds of witnesses, thousands of photographs, and hours of film accompany these legal cases. Military men, political and legal personnel, defendants and witnesses, and journalists and filmmakers all contributed to elements of postwar justice. The point is that the potential for scholarship is enormous and the twenty-four essays in these two volumes are an excellent sampling of the multiple ways in which postwar trials of Nazi-era crimes can be explored and understood.
