Devin O. Pendas

Toward a New Politics? On the Recent Historiography of Human Rights

When the late Kenneth Cmiel undertook the first systematic analysis of the emerging historiography of human rights in 2004, he surveyed a field that was ‘refreshingly inchoate’. In the ensuing seven years, the scholarship on the history of human rights has burgeoned considerably. Yet one might still reasonably characterise the field overall as inchoate. Like any new subfield of historical inquiry, there is a clear lack of consensus among leading historians of human rights about even the most elementary contours of the subject. What are human rights? When and where did they emerge? How and why did they spread (if, indeed, they spread at all)? Who were the crucial agents in this history? Few historians working in the field seem to agree in their answers to any of these questions.

Seeking Justice, Finding Law: Nazi Trials in Postwar Europe*

* The books reviewed in this essay include Gary Jonathan Bass, Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 402,

Retroactive Law and Proactive Justice: Debating Crimes against Humanity in Germany, 1945–1950

27.95 (paper); Bernhard Brunner, Der Frankreich-Komplex: Die nationalsozialistischen Verbrechen in Frankreich und die Justiz der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Gottingen: Wallstein, 2004), pp. 432, €42.00; David Fraser, Law after Auschwitz: Towards a Jurisprudence of the Holocaust (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2005), pp. xi 451,

EXPLAINING THE THIRD REICH: ETHICS, BELIEFS, INTERESTS

48.00; Norbert Frei, ed., Transnationale Vergangenheitspolitik: Der Umgang mit deutschen Kriegsverbrechern in Europa nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (Gottingen: Wallstein, 2006), pp. 656, €44.00; Claudia Frohlich, Wider die Tabuisierung des Ungehorsams: Fritz Bauers Widerstandbegriff und die Aufarbeitung von NS-Verbrechen (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2005), pp. 430, €39.90 (paper); Benjamin Frommer, National Cleansing: Retribution against Nazi Collaborators in Postwar Czechoslovakia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. xv 387,

Orientation: War Crimes Trials in Theory and Practice from the Middle Ages to the Present

75.00 (cloth),

Genocidal Psychology and Genocidal Politics; or, the Trouble with Frames

29.99 (paper); Harald Fuhner, Nachspiel: Die niederlandische Politik und die Verfolgung von Kollaborateuren und NS-Verbrechern 1945–1989 (Munster: Waxmann, 2005), pp. 472, €39.90; Michael Greve, Der justitielle und rechtspolitische Umgang mit den NS-Gewaltverbrechen in den sechziger Jahren (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2001), pp. 438, €69.00 (paper); Friedrich Hoffmann, Die Verfolgung der nationalsozialistischen Gewaltverbrechen in Hessen (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 2001), pp. 369, €25.00; Anne Klein and Jurgen Wilhelm, eds., NS-Unrecht vor Kolner Gerichten nach 1945 (Cologne: Greven Verlag, 2003), pp. 288, €19.90; Stephan Landsman, Crimes of the Holocaust: The Law Confronts the Hard Cases (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), pp. xi 304,

Political trials in theory and history

49.95; Kerstin von Lingen, Kesselrings letzte Schlacht: Kriegsverbrecherprozesse, Vergangenheitspolitik und Wiederbewaffnung; Das Beispiel Kesselrings (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schoningh, 2004), pp. 392, €35.90; Peter Maguire, Law and War: An American Story (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), pp. xi 446,

“The Magical Scent of the Savage”: Colonial Violence, the Crisis of Civilization, and the Origins of the Legalist Paradigm of War

77.50 (cloth), 25.00 (paper); Matthias Meusch, Von der Diktatur zur Demokratie: Fritz Bauer und die Aufarbeitung der NS-Verbrechen in Hessen (1956–1968) (Wiesbaden: Historische Kommission fur Nassau, 2001), pp. 432, €24.00; Marc von Miquel, Ahnden oder amnestieren? Westdeutsche Justiz und Vergangenheitspolitik in den sechziger Jahren (Gottingen: Wallstein, 2004), pp. 448, €44.00; Claudia Moisel, Frankreich und die deutschen Kriegsverbrecher: Politik und Praxis der Strafverfolgung nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (Gottingen: Wallstein, 2004), pp. 288, €42.00; Gerhard Pauli and Thomas Vormbaum, eds., Justiz und Nationalsozialismus—Kontinuitat und Diskontinuitat: Fachtagung der Justizakademie des Landes NRW, Recklinghausen, am 19. und 20. November 2001 (Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 2003), pp. 346, €56.00; Steffen Radlmaier, Der Nurnberger Lernprozes: Von Kriegsverbrechern und Starreportern (Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn Verlag, 2001), pp. 320, €25.90; Peter Reichel, Vergangenheitsbewaltigung in Deutschland: Die Auseinandersetzung mit der NS-Diktatur von 1945 bis heute (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2001), pp. 253, €14.95; Annette Weinke, Die Verfolgung von NS-Tatern im Geteilten Deutschland: Vergangenheitsbewaltigungen 1949–1969 oder; Eine Deutsch-Deutsche Beziehungsgeschichte im Kalten Krieg (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schoningh, 2002), pp. 514, €54.00.

Anatomie eines Skandals. Die Ermittlungen im Mordfall Dr. Hans Hannemann im Kontext der deutschen Nachkriegsjustiz

The Nuremberg Trial may well be the most famous trial of the twentieth century, which is as it should be. After all, the Nuremberg Trial, while perhaps not as unprecedented as is frequently assumed, did mark a decisive turning point in the history of international law. It marked the first broadly successful attempt to impose the rule of law not just on the conduct of war but also, in a limited way, on domestic atrocities as well. The fame of this single trial has had the unfortunate side-effect of overshadowing the literally thousands of other Nazi trials that took place after World War II, however. These additional trials can be divided into three categories: those that took place in the domestic courts of victim nations, those that took place in occupation courts, and, perhaps least well-known, those that took place in German courts.

Punishment as Prevention

In recent years, the historiography of Nazi Germany has taken what Neil Gregor has called a “voluntarist turn.” By this, Gregor means that the recent literature on Nazi Germany has emphasized “that the panoply of organizations actively involved in occupation and murder, the number of German men and women who actively participated in these crimes, and the range of places in which they committed them, was much, much greater than has hitherto been acknowledged.” In the first instance this voluntarist turn has meant an increased stress on the centrality of Nazi criminality and atrocity to the regime, not as one feature, but as the central characteristic, of the Third Reich. Alongside this, however, has come an increased insistence that these criminal policies were both widely known at the time and broadly popular among Germans. As Saul Friedlander has put it, “the everyday involvement of the population with the regime was far deeper than has long been assumed, due to the widespread knowledge and passive acceptance of the crimes, as well as the crassest profit derived from them.” In short, then, the most recent trend among historians of the Third Reich is to insist that people believed in the Nazi project, including its criminal aspects.