Pieter Lagrou

Writing the History of Rape in Wartime

This is how Livy narrated the origins of Rome. Without the desired marriages, Romulus therefore organised games in honour of Neptune the Horse-god. As Livy continued, All the Sabines came, with their women and children. Roman households were opened to them, and as they saw the city, with its pleasing position, its ramparts, and its many houses, they were amazed at its rapid growth. The day came for the games and as all eyes and minds were concentrated on them, the plan was carried out as prepared: at the agreed signal, the youth of Rome rose up on all sides to seize the young girls. Most of them fell victim to the first abductor. Some of the most beautiful, reserved for the principal senators, were carried off into their houses by citizens charged to undertake this task. One among the others, far superior to her companions in height and beauty was, it seems, taken by the senator Talassius’s group; as they were repeatedly asked where they were taking her, to protect her from all insults they cried out as they marched: “to Talassius” — hence the time-honoured phrase in the marriage ceremony. Terror threw the celebration into disarray, the parents of the young girls fled, stricken with grief; and as they cried out against this violation of the laws of hospitality, they invoked the god whose name had drawn them to the solemnisation of the games, as cover for treachery and sacrilege.

Poor Little Belgium? Belgian Trials of German War Criminals, 1944–1951

The Versailles Treaty and the dismissal of Belgian charges by the Leipzig tribunal had prevented the Belgian authorities from bringing German war criminals to justice after 1918. After 1945, one could thus expect that the issue figured high on the political agenda. Belgium obtained the extradition of 523 German suspects from the allied, mainly British, occupation authorities, but it managed to bring only 103 of them to trial. Two were sentenced to death and executed. Due to reduced sentences, early liberations, and pardon not a single German convict remained in Belgian prisons in 1956. The trials of German nationals were considered less urgent and vital than the purge of national collaborationists. The Belgian judiciary tried to turn the judgment of German war criminals into a showpiece of legal procedure, avoiding having recourse to retroactive qualifications as introduced in Nuremberg. Suspects were entitled to integral rights of defense, calling upon German defense attorneys; and they could appeal to the verdict and even defer their case to the Supreme Court. The mobilization of strong German support networks in effect internationalized Belgian jurisprudence, by forcing the courts to incorporate references to verdicts by other allied courts. By establishing unassailable jurisprudence, the Belgian war crime trials were future-oriented rather than backward-looking, trying to establish legal precedent rather than remedy the wrongs of the past.