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War Crimes Trials and Investigations pp 111–156Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

International Legal History: From Atrocity Reports to War Crimes Tribunals—The Roots of Modern War Crimes Investigations in Nineteenth-Century Legal Activism and First World War Propaganda

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Abstract

This chapter first addresses the history of international criminal law and war crimes investigations, which used to be primarily written by lawyers seeking precedents for the Nuremberg tribunal. However, new approaches are currently transforming this field. The second section outlines an alternative history of the origins of war crimes tribunals, emphasizing the effect of the codification of the laws of war in the late nineteenth century. The final section explores the origins of atrocity reports, the predecessors of current human rights fact-finding, and their dual nature as both legal and political texts. It highlights the deep entanglement of their development with the atrocity propaganda of the First World War, with a particular focus on the two Bryce reports on Belgium and Armenia.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Alexandra Kemmerer, “Histories of International Law,” 6 (January 2015), available at http://www.ejiltalk.org/volkerrechtsgeschichten-histories-of-international-law/

  2. 2.

    See Alan Kramer, “The First Wave of International War Crimes Trials: Istanbul and Leipzig,” European Review 14, no. 4 (October 2006): 441–455.

  3. 3.

    Georg Schwarzenberger, “A Forerunner of Nuremberg: The Breisach War Crime Trial of 1474,” Manchester Guardian, 28 September 1946, 4.

  4. 4.

    Arthur Nussbaum, A Concise History of the Law of Nations (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1954), 320.

  5. 5.

    M. Cherif Bassiouni, “Perspectives on International Criminal Justice,” Virginia Journal of International Law 50 (2010): 269, 298; idem, International Criminal Law: Sources, Subjects and Contents (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 2008), 18; idem, ed., Introduction to International Criminal Law (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 2012), 29, 416, 1048. See also William A. Schabas, An Introduction to the International Criminal Court (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 1; B. S. Brown, ed., Research Handbook on International Criminal Law (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2011), 4.

  6. 6.

    Gregory S. Gordon, “The Trial of Peter Von Hagenbach: Reconciling History, Historiography, and International Criminal Law,” in The Hidden Histories of War Crimes Trials, ed. Kevin Heller and Gerry Simpson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 13. Note that Gordon upholds the trial’s status as the first international war crime tribunal by describing the late Holy Roman Empire as ‘an intergovernmental organisation with hundreds of independent member states.’ (p. 42).

  7. 7.

    See for example Randall Lesaffer, “International Law and its History: The Story of an Unrequited Love,” in Time, History and International Law, ed. Matthew Craven, Malgosia Fitzmaurice and Maria Vogiatzi (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 2007), 27–41, 34–35.

  8. 8.

    Kevin Jon Heller, The Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 241. The judges in the High Command Trial felt more positive towards the precedent, but noted it was ‘of academic interest only’—see United Nations War Crimes Commission, Law Reports and Trials of War Criminals, Vol. XII, The German High Command Trial (1949), 61.

  9. 9.

    The trial became a focal point of an ongoing dispute between North and South over the morality of the Civil War: James Madison Page, The True Story of Andersonville Prison: A Defense of Major Henry Wirz (1908) takes a very pro-Confederate line, with a pro-Union counterargument made in Norton Parker Chipman, The Tragedy of Andersonville; Trial of Captain Henry Wirz, the Prison Keeper (1911). For a modern account, see Marouf Hasian, In the Name of Necessity: Military Tribunals and the Loss of American Civil Liberties (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012), chapter 5.

  10. 10.

    Guénaël Mettraux, “A Little-known Case from the American Civil War: The War Crimes Trial of Major General John H. Gee,” Journal of International Criminal Justice 8, no. 4 (2010): 1059.

  11. 11.

    George A. Finch, “Superior Orders and War Crimes,” American Journal of International Law 15, no. 3 (1921): 440, 444.

  12. 12.

    Daniel Marc Segesser, “‘Unlawful Warfare is Uncivilised’: The International Debate on the Punishment of War Crimes, 1872–1918,” European Review of History 14, no. 2 (2007): 215; idem, Recht statt Rache oder Rache durch Recht? Die Ahndung von Kriegsverbrechen in der internationalen wissenschaftlichen Debatte (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2010).

  13. 13.

    The society published a string of pamphlets such as Alpheus Henry Snow, The Development of the American Doctrine of Jurisdiction of Courts over States (1911), or George Wickersham, The Supreme Court of the United States, a Prototype of a Court of Nations (1913). See Paolo Amorosa, “James Brown Scott’s International Adjudication between Tradition and Progress in the United States,” Journal of the History of International Law 17, no. 1 (2015): 15.

  14. 14.

    Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

  15. 15.

    Bardo Fassbender and Anne Peters, “Towards A Global History of International Law,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law, ed. Bardo Fassbender and Anne Peter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 1–26.

  16. 16.

    David M. Crowe, War Crimes, Genocide and Justice: A Global History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

  17. 17.

    Gary Bass, Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crime Tribunals (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).

  18. 18.

    See Sönke Neitzel and Daniel Hohrath, eds., Kriegsgreuel—Die Entgrenzung der Gewalt in kriegerischen Konflikten vom Mittelalter bis ins 20. Jahrhundert (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2008).

  19. 19.

    See Jan Martin Lemnitzer, Power, Law and the End of Privateering (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

  20. 20.

    Art. 24 and 25 of the Lieber code, printed in The Laws of Armed Conflicts, ed. Dietrich Schindler and Jiř Toman (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 1988), 3–23.

  21. 21.

    John Fabian Witt, Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History (New York: Free Press, 2012).

  22. 22.

    The Laws of War on Land, Manual published by the Institute of International Law, adopted by the Institute of International Law at Oxford, 9 September 1880, printed in The Laws of Armed Conflicts, 36–48. US historians tend to ascribe enormous importance to the influence of the Lieber code on the drafting of the Hague conventions, largely ignoring European legal developments between 1863 and 1899.

  23. 23.

    Manchester Guardian, 25 October 1904, 6. For a full account of the incident see Jan Martin Lemnitzer, “International Commissions of Inquiry and the North Sea Incident: A Model for a MH17 Tribunal?” European Journal of International Law 27, no. 4 (January 2017): 923–944.

  24. 24.

    Lansdowne to Hardinge, 27 October 1904, Parliamentary Papers, Correspondence Relating to the North Sea Incident, 1905 (Cd2350), Vol. CIII, 369, No. 17, 10.

  25. 25.

    London Times, 29 October 1904, 11–12.

  26. 26.

    Manchester Guardian, 28 October 1904, 7; New York Times, 28 October 1904, 8; Economist, 29 October 1904, 1727; Economist, 5 November 1904, 1766.

  27. 27.

    Lansdowne to Hardinge, 31 October 1904, Parliamentary Papers, Correspondence relating to the North Sea incident, 1905 (Cd2350), Vol. CIII, 369, No. 41, 25.

  28. 28.

    Lansdowne to Hardinge, 4 November 1904, ibid., No. 58, 35.

  29. 29.

    London Times, 27 February 1905, 3.

  30. 30.

    Economist, 4 March 1905, 342. Chicago Tribune, 26 February 1905, reprinted in London Times, 27 February 1905, 3.

  31. 31.

    Andre Mandelstam, “La commission internationale d’enquête sur l’incident de la Mer du Nord,” Revue Générale de Droit International Public 12 (1905): 351, 414–415.

  32. 32.

    Amos S. Hershey, “Convention for the Peaceful Adjustment of International Differences,” American Journal of International Law 2 (1908): 29, 36; Alexander Pearce Higgins, The Hague Peace Conferences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1909), 168–169.

  33. 33.

    Technically the non-ratification of the 1907 convention respecting the laws and customs of war on land (IV) by Serbia meant that it was not applicable because it was not in force for all belligerents of the conflict (see Art. 2 of the convention), but the very similar 1899 convention was undoubtedly in force for all participants of the conflict.

  34. 34.

    Nicoletta F. Gullace, “Sexual Violence and Family Honor: British Propaganda and International Law during the First World War,” American Historical Review 102, no. 3 (1997): 714–747.

  35. 35.

    Hugh Bellot, “War Crimes: Their Prevention and Punishment,” Grotius Society, Problems of the War, Papers Read Before the Society in the Year 1916 2 (1916): 31–55, 31.

  36. 36.

    House of Commons, 21 November 1917, Hansard, Vol. 99 Col. 1209–82, 1218.

  37. 37.

    Isabel Hull, A Scrap of Paper: Making and Breaking International Law during the Great War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014), 297, 298.

  38. 38.

    House of Lords, 5 May 1915, Hansard, Vol. 18 Col. 942–51, 946/7.

  39. 39.

    Ibid., 950.

  40. 40.

    House of Commons, 9 June 1915, Hansard, Vol. 72, Col. 267–8.

  41. 41.

    House of Commons, 16 July 1918, Hansard Vol. 108, Col. 897–8: 7 August 1918, Vol. 109, Col. 1351–2.

  42. 42.

    See for example House of Commons, 25 June 1840, Hansard Vol. 55 Col. 76–108, 94.

  43. 43.

    House of Commons, 31 March 1879, Hansard, Vol. 245, Col. 20–127, 32.

  44. 44.

    Ibid., 25 July 1882, Vol. 272, Col. 1691–1759, 1709.

  45. 45.

    Ibid., 23 October 1899, Hansard, Vol. 77, Col. 549–568, 558.

  46. 46.

    House of Lords, 14 March 1904, Hansard Vol. 131, Col. 919–948, 928.

  47. 47.

    House of Commons, 25 July 1912, Hansard, Vol. 41, Col. 1384–1501, 1469/70.

  48. 48.

    Ibid., 16 June 1910, Hansard, Vol. 17, Col. 1474–1526, 1485; 21 March 1912, Vol. 35, Col. 2077–201, 2131.

  49. 49.

    Printed in Papers Relating to the foreign relations of the United States, 1915. Supplement, The World War, 981.

  50. 50.

    House of Lords, 28 July 1915, Hansard, Vol. 19, Col. 774–778, 775.

  51. 51.

    Ibid, 778.

  52. 52.

    Art. 7, Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, 17 July 1998, available at http://legal.un.org/icc/statute/romefra.htm

  53. 53.

    James F. Willis, Prologue to Nuremberg: Politics and Diplomacy of Punishing War Criminals of the First World War (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1982), chapter 4.

  54. 54.

    The first article seems to have been an editorial demanding to “Make German Guilt Personal,” New York Times, 16 October 1918, 14. This was followed by a long article written by law professor Asa Bird Gardimer, New York Times, 8 December 1918, 45. See also the editorials of 15 December 1918, 25, and 21 January 1919, 6.

  55. 55.

    Art. 227 Versailles treaty.

  56. 56.

    Nigel J. Ashton and Duco Hellema, “Hanging the Kaiser: Anglo-Dutch Relations and the Fate of Wilhelm II, 1918–20,” Diplomacy & Statecraft 11, no. 2 (2000): 53–78.

  57. 57.

    Gerd Hankel, Die Leipziger Prozesse. Deutsche Kriegsverbrechen und ihre strafrechtliche Verfolgung nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2003).

  58. 58.

    The general rules on a duty to assist the Allies in prosecuting war criminals were included in all of the treaties; see for example the Treaty of Neuilly with Bulgaria, Art. 118–20.

  59. 59.

    See Vahakn Dadrian and Taner Akçam, Judgment at Istanbul: The Armenian Genocide Trials (New York: Berghahn, 2011).

  60. 60.

    James L. Brierly, “Do We Need an International Criminal Court?” British Yearbook of International Law 8 (1927): 81–88, 87.

  61. 61.

    See Frederic Megret, “International Criminal Justice. A Critical Research Agenda,” in Critical Approaches to International Criminal Law: An Introduction, ed. Christine E. J Schwöbel (London: Routledge, 2014), 17, 43.

  62. 62.

    Philip Currie to the Earl of Kimberley, 26 November 1894, Parliamentary Papers, Correspondence relating to the Asiatic Provinces of Turkey, Part 1: Events at Sassoun, and Commission of Inquiry at Moush, 1905 (Cd7894), Vol. CIX. 239, No. 66, 41; Earl of Kimberley to P. Currie, 13 December 1894, ibid., No. 93,49.

  63. 63.

    Inclosure to P. Currie to Earl of Kimberley, 26 December 1894, ibid., No. 126, 62; P. Currie to Earl of Kimberley, 10 January 1895, No. 134, 68.

  64. 64.

    P. Currie to Earl of Kimberley, 26 January 1895, ibid., No. 144, 74; P. Currie to Earl of Kimberley, 28 January 1895, No. 146, 75.

  65. 65.

    P. Currie to Earl of Kimberley, 13 May 1895, ibid., No. 204, 111.

  66. 66.

    See annex to report of consular delegates on the Sasun commission of 20 July 1895, List of victims with table, page, ibid., 155–161.

  67. 67.

    See Larissa van den Herik and Catherine Harwood, “Sharing the Law: The Appeal of International Criminal Law for International Commissions of Inquiry,” in The Transformation of Human Rights Fact-Finding, ed. Philip Alston and Sarah Knuckey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 233, 249, for a discussion of this practice.

  68. 68.

    Annex to report of consular delegates on the Sasun commission of 20 July 1895, Parliamentary Papers, Correspondence relating to the Asiatic Provinces of Turkey, Part 1: Events at Sassoun, and Commission of Inquiry at Moush, 1905 (Cd7894), Vol. CIX. 239, 166.

  69. 69.

    P. Currie to Earl of Kimberley, 21 May 1895, Parliamentary Papers, Correspondence relating to the Asiatic Provinces of Turkey, Part 1: Events at Sassoun, and Commission of Inquiry at Moush, 1905 (Cd7894), Vol. CIX. 239, No. 209, 117; Kimberley to P. Currie, 3 June 1895, No. 221, 122; P. Currie to the Marquess of Salisbury, 27 July 1895, No. 245, 130; P. Currie to Salisbury, 23 August 1895, No. 254, 190.

  70. 70.

    See Davide Rodogno, Against Massacre: Humanitarian Interventions in the Ottoman Empire 1815–1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 194.

  71. 71.

    New York Times, 10 September 1895, 1.

  72. 72.

    “Report of a Visit to the Camps of Women and Children in the Cape and Orange River Colonies,” June 1901.

  73. 73.

    Keith G. Robbins, “Lord Bryce and the First World War,” The Historical Journal 10, no. 2 (1967): 255–278, 255.

  74. 74.

    Trevor Wilson, “Lord Bryce’s Investigation into Alleged German Atrocities in Belgium, 1914–15,” Journal of Contemporary History 14, no. 3 (1979): 378; London Times, 18 December 1914, 5.

  75. 75.

    Wilson, “Lord Bryce’s Investigation”, 373.

  76. 76.

    Ibid., 374, 380.

  77. 77.

    Ibid., 376–377.

  78. 78.

    Résumé of American press complied by Britain’s propaganda headquarters Wellington House, 27 May 1915, cited in Wilson, ibid., 370; see also Michael L. Sanders, “Wellington House and British Propaganda During the First World War,” The Historical Journal 18, no. 1 (1975): 119–146, 130.

  79. 79.

    James Bryce, The Bryce Report on Alleged German Outrages (12 May 1915).

  80. 80.

    See James Morgan Read, Atrocity Propaganda, 1914–1919 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1941); Arthur Ponsonby, Falsehood in War-Time (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1928); Harold Laswell, Propaganda Technique in the World War (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & co., 1927); George G. Bruntz, Allied Propaganda and the Collapse of the German Empire in 1918 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1938); George Sylvester Viereck, Spreading Germs of Hate (London: Duckworth, 1931); Michael F. Connors, Dealing in Hate: The Development of Anti-German Propaganda (London, n.d.); Clinton H. Grattan, Why We Fought (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1928); Harry Elmer Barnes, In Quest of Truth and Justice (Chicago: National Historical Society, 1928); James Squires, British Propaganda at Home and in the United States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1935); Horace C. Peterson, Propaganda for War: The Campaign Against American Neutrality, 1914–1917 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1938).

  81. 81.

    Jeff Lipkes, Rehearsals. The German Army in Belgium, August 1914 (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2007); John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914. A History of Denial (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).

  82. 82.

    House of Lords, 6 October 1915, Hansard, Vol. 19, Col. 994–1004, 996.

  83. 83.

    Ibid., 996/7.

  84. 84.

    Michelle Tusan, “James Bryce’s Blue Book as Evidence,” Journal of Levantine Studies 5, no. 2 (2015): 35–50, 41.

  85. 85.

    Sanders, Wellington House, 144.

  86. 86.

    Miller, History of the Blue Book, 40.

  87. 87.

    Tusan, Blue Book as Evidence, 41.

  88. 88.

    Miller, History of the Blue Book, 40.

  89. 89.

    Memorandum of 26 September 1924, cited in Tusan, Blue Book as Evidence, 43.

  90. 90.

    Michelle Tusan, “‘Crimes against Humanity’: Human Rights, the British Empire and the Origins of the Response to the Armenian Genocide,” The American Historical Review 119, no. 1 (2014): 47–77, 71.

  91. 91.

    Ibid., 69–73.

  92. 92.

    Tusan, Blue Book as Evidence, 35.

  93. 93.

    See in particular “Tall Armenian Tale,” available at http://www.tallarmeniantale.com/atrocity-prop.htm; and http://armenians-1915.blogspot.com/2005/07/120-british-blue-book-james-bryce.html

  94. 94.

    See his article “The Bryce Report: British Propaganda and the Turks,” available at http://www.ataa.org/reference/british_carthy.html

  95. 95.

    http://www.mfa.gov.tr/presentation-made-by-prof_-justin-mccarthy-_seminar-on-turkish-armenian-relations-organized-by-the-democratic-principles-association-15-march-2001-_istanbul_.en.mfa. The reprint he refers to is: Gomidas Institute/Ara Sarafian, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915–16: Documents Presented to Viscount Grey of Falloden by Viscount Bryce, Uncensored Edition (2000).

  96. 96.

    For the full text see http://www.mfa.gov.tr/presentation-by-prof_-justin-mccarthy-at-the-tgna-on-_the-reality-of-armenian-issue_-conference-on-march-24_-2005_.en.mfa

  97. 97.

    See http://www.gomidas.org/campaigns. See also Taner Akcam, “Anatomy of Genocide Denial: Academics, Politicians, and the “Re-Making” of History,” available at http://www.chgs.umn.edu/histories/occasional/akcam_anatomy_of_denial.pdf

  98. 98.

    The council replaced the earlier Human Rights Commission, see the General Assembly resolution of 3 April 2006, A/RES/60/251.

  99. 99.

    The International Commission of Inquiry for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, A/HRC/RES/S-22/13 (2013) and the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic, A/HRC/RES/S-17/1 (2011) both had an explicit mandate to ‘investigate crimes against humanity’.

  100. 100.

    Report of international commission of inquiry on Darfur, 25 January 2005, available at http://www.un.org/news/dh/sudan/com_inq_darfur.pdf

  101. 101.

    Second warrant of arrest issued by Pre-Trial chamber I, 12 July 2010, ICC-02/05–01/09, available at https://www.icc-cpi.int/iccdocs/doc/doc907140.pdf

  102. 102.

    Christian Delage, Caught on Camera: Film in the Courtroom from the Nuremberg Trials to the Trials of the Khmer Rouge (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014).

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    Jan Martin Lemnitzer

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Lemnitzer, J.M. (2018). International Legal History: From Atrocity Reports to War Crimes Tribunals—The Roots of Modern War Crimes Investigations in Nineteenth-Century Legal Activism and First World War Propaganda. In: War Crimes Trials and Investigations. St Antony's Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64072-3_5

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