British policy restricted investigations to incidents involving Allied civilians or prisoners of war, excluding the persecution of Jews and other targeted groups. This was a narrow and ultimately inadequate framework, but the investigations into war crimes themselves were far from parochial. They addressed episodes of violence that reflected the broader patterns of cruelty that defined the war. This chapter uses WCIU’s interrogation reports to examine the distinctive challenges the interrogations of so-called ‘minor’ war criminals posed. By following interrogators’ work on the ground, the chapter highlights the complexity of this effort that other records tend to omit. Unlike high-profile defendants such as Göring or Ribbentrop, these perpetrators were difficult even to identify, and their crimes were rarely documented. Investigators therefore relied on a combination of past intelligence – much of it collected through interrogation during the war – as well as on witness testimony. These investigations were as a result shaped by fraught encounters among suspects, witnesses and interrogators.

This chapter examines Britain’s efforts to identify, interrogate and prosecute perpetrators of war crimes in the aftermath of the Second World War. While public memory tends to focus on the major figures tried before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, the vast majority of prosecutions concerned those who had directly committed atrocities, including guards, policemen and soldiers of all ranks. Britain faced a uniquely complex challenge, with more than half a million German prisoners of war held on its soil, many of whom had witnessed or participated in crimes across Europe. To address this, specialist teams were tasked with gathering the evidence needed for trial. The chapter focuses on the main team based in Britain, known as the War Crimes Interrogation Unit. Their work illustrates the sheer scale and unevenness of post-war justice. In some cases, their efforts led directly to prosecutions; in others, equally thorough investigations never resulted in a trial. This chapter considers what those outcomes reveal about the limits of post-war justice.