Simona Tobia

Crime and Judgement: Interpreters/Translators in British War Crimes Trials, 1945–1949

Abstract This article analyzes the key function of interpreters and translators in a number of war crimes tribunals set up in the British zone of occupation in Germany. Based on archival primary sources, the paper examines the link between legal and military policies and interpreter practices, and raises key questions about institutional language policies. The study of the social positions, identities and cognitive dispositions of interpreters and translators in their relationships with defendants, prosecutors and defenders highlights both the fluidity of their role in that particular situation, and the onerous nature of their task within the process of judgement and punishment of war criminals. The paper contributes to broader discussions regarding the role that interpreters and translators play in situations of conflict. It provides some insight into the highly charged and fluid roles of both the Anglophone and German interpreters and translators who provided the ‘linguistic presence’ of all those involved in the war crimes courts, and it offers a historically grounded analysis of their function in violent conflicts.

Questioning the Nazis: languages and effectiveness in British war crime investigations and trials in Germany, 194548

Abstract At the end of the Second World War in Europe, the urge to dispense justice and to punish war crimes was one of the most important issues in the dissolution of the conflict. Investigators, interrogators and interpreters had a crucial function in communicating the conflict in the denazification process. The questioning of enemies in the effort to dispense justice problematizes the meanings of the conflict itself and shapes the identities of those involved. Investigations and the consequent trials are also encounters with the enemy and between speakers of different languages, as well as a moment of collision between different national and cultural identities. Identity and language (including interpreting and translating) are crucial for military effectiveness involved in this process. The account of how the need for military effectiveness shaped the structure of the War Crimes Investigation Unit, of the whole process of judgement and punishment of enemies, and especially the identities of those involved in relation to the social space in which they operated, is the purpose of this article. It also contributes to the early history of court interpreting, by providing an account of how the new profession of court interpreter is born, and how it is related, again, to justice and to the needs of occupation and efficiency.

Victims of War: Refugees’ First Contacts with the British in the Second World War

Among those who ‘meet the other in war and conflict’ are the hundreds of thousands of refugees, displaced people, exiles and escapers — all of them ‘victims of war’ — who for various reasons had to leave their countries during and after World War II. At the end of the conflict, this massive forced migration represented a problem of great magnitude, as millions of people had been expelled, or had chosen to leave their homes: more than ten million slave labourers had been forcedly deported by the Nazis to work in German factories and mines; a series of compulsory population transfers, the changes in national boundaries, the Third Reich’ effort to build a new racial order and direct Nazi occupation had affected millions of Europeans (among them Germans, Italians, Yugoslavs, Bulgarians, Romanians, Soviets, Hungarians, Czechs and Poles) (Reinisch 2007). In the first, still widely cited, work on this topic, Malcolm Jarvis Proudfoot (1956) estimated that more than sixty million Europeans were displaced from their homes during the conflict and in its aftermath.

Introduction: Europe Americanized? Popular reception of Western Cold War propaganda in Europe

This special issue is the result of a very successful workshop held at the University of Reading, UK, in November 2009. With the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, it seemed a particularly opportune time in which to reconsider the relationship between public policy and mass culture in the Cold War, and reflect on new perspectives in these studies, focusing in particular on reception and audience research. The workshop brought together practitioners as well as international scholars, and resulted in a wide-ranging debate, the outcome of which is represented by the articles published here. Whilst it is true that culture in the Cold War has been widely explored by academics in different fields, the reception and actual impact of western public policies on mass cultures in European countries where Communism had to be contained and defeated is still to be investigated in a comparative context. The aim of this special issue of Cold War History is to examine the impact of Cold War cultural policies on the experience of some of the people affected by them, with particular reference to Italy and France. According to the concept of ‘cultural imperialism’, initially spread in the 1960s by a new left-wing intelligentsia, the western world had colonised and exploited the economies of poorer and less powerful countries, and it was also trying to manipulate the values and cultures of foreign populations. All cultural instruments therefore,

Preparing for War: the British and Foreign Languages

‘We inhabit an island and have no familiar contact with other peoples who cannot understand our tongue’ (Leathes 1928: 17). So said Sir Stanley Leathes, the chair of the Modern Studies Committee, set up by the Government in July 1916 to examine those deficiencies in the British educational system which the First World War experience had recently revealed. It was widely felt that an inability to understand allies and enemies, and to communicate with them, had left Britain radically unprepared for the 1914–18 war (Bayley 1991). The assumption that underlined this part of Leathes’ investigation was that cultural isolation might be an inhibitor of efficient war-making; that there was some sort of relationship between the cultural knowledge about foreign friends and allies which Britons possessed, and their ability to speak the native languages of these ‘other peoples’. Some 23 years later, as the world moved towards another conflict, the country faced much the same issues of how to engage with foreigners in war. Finding out information about the enemy, communicating with allies, preparing for operations on the Continent would all necessarily involve the British in processes in which foreign languages were deeply embedded and where some measure of cultural knowledge might prove to be vital to the success of future war efforts.

Role-Playing for War: the Human in Human Intelligence

Unlike open source and signals intelligence, human intelligence, gaining information from meeting and talking with enemies or occupied peoples, required some form of direct face-to-face contact with foreigners. In this context, intelligence agents inevitably found themselves in a complex relationship both with those who were placing them in these situations — the British authorities — and those whom they would be encountering, the soldiers and civilians of enemy or occupied countries. On the one hand, anyone involved in intelligence had to be security-cleared, given an unblemished and proven certificate of loyalty to the British Crown. On the other hand, intelligence work required such people to create the impression, however fleetingly, that they were native speakers who had actually been born into the enemy/occupied cultures. In a sense, the role of intelligence agents was conceived in English but involved performing in a foreign language before an audience of native speakers of that language. Rather than the paradigm of translation which marked the practices of open source and signals intelligence, human intelligence operated through performance, the performance of individuals. Acting, playing a part, making oneself believable to those in the audience, whilst maintaining artistic credibility with the producer and director, lay at the very heart of human intelligence, and language was the key element in this performance.

Continental Invasion: Liberation and Occupation

The culmination of intelligence preparations and psychological warfare for British forces would be the actual military operations in continental Europe. The task before the planners — liberating Europe, and invading and occupying Germany — was massive and unprecedented in its scale and ramifications. By 1 September 1944, approximately two million men were expected to be landed, and an estimated three and a half million would be fighting on the continent seven months later. Quite apart from military and tactical considerations, the British had to face the issue of how this vast number of primarily Anglophone conscript soldiers would behave towards liberated and occupied populations when they met them in the towns and cities of Europe. Whilst the Allied High Command drew a distinction between former enemy-occupied territories which were to be liberated and enemy territory which was to be occupied, the linguistic baseline for the British was much the same. Thousands of primarily Anglophone soldiers would be entering areas in which the people spoke languages entirely foreign to the troops. Meetings on the ground would inevitably involve the military in negotiating with, influencing, or issuing orders to those whom they met. This chapter explores the ways in which the British prepared linguistically and culturally for their future deployment in continental Europe.

Pursuing War Criminals: Military Interpreters in War Tribunals

The area of the judiciary was one in which the British administration in Germany needed to ensure that they could provide adequate foreign language expertise. Pursuing war criminals and bringing them to trial in publicly acceptable and visible forms of judicial process were vital both to the denazification operation and to the liberal democratic ambitions of the British in Germany. Ironically, in view of the problematic relationship with foreign languages which had characterized other areas of the British war experience, this imperative to establish a judicial space for denazification would lay the foundations of an entirely new profession, that of interpreting, with a distinctive paradigm of neutrality and faithfulness to the spoken word. The story of military interpreting in Germany is one which began with the establishment of an embryonic Pool of Interpreters in late 1944, and then, responding to the demands and requirements of the legal process, gradually developed towards what post-war commentators would recognize as the beginnings of a professional interpreting service.

The British and the War Victims: Bringing Relief to Refugees and Displaced Persons Overseas

In 1945, Europe and the world were faced with the astonishing death toll of 40 million people, and had yet to realize that the brave new world many had hoped for during the conflict was still to come. The victors and the vanquished needed to deal with a devastated Europe where, on top of material destruction, huge numbers of people had been involuntarily moved from their homes during the war or in the immediate aftermath. At the end of the conflict, this massive forced migration represented a problem of great magnitude. Millions of people had been expelled, or had chosen to leave their homes: more than ten million slave labourers had been forcibly deported by the Nazis to work in German factories and mines; there had been a series of compulsory population transfers, and changes in national boundaries, in the Third Reich’s efforts to build a new racial order. All this affected millions of Europeans — Germans, Italians, Yugoslavs, Bulgarians, Romanians, Soviets, Hungarians, Czechs, Poles (Reinisch 2007). In the first and still widely-cited work on this topic, Malcolm Proudfoot (1956) estimated that more than 60 million Europeans were displaced from their homes during the conflict and its aftermath (Reinisch 2008: 374). The Allies advancing into German territory found as many as 6 million displaced persons in what was to become the Western part of the country, and another 6 million in the Soviet zone (Cohen 2008: 440). Civilian displacement led to the creation of an increasing number of ‘extraterritorial universes’, camps for displaced persons which stretched throughout Europe from Germany to Italy: 227 in 1945, and several hundreds by 1947, mostly in the British and US zones of occupied Germany (Cohen 2008: 441).

The War of Words: Psychological Warfare in a Foreign Language

From the outset of the war, a key task for the British authorities was that of persuasion, psychological warfare, arguing to the occupied populations of Western Europe that, despite all appearances to the contrary, the enemy had not definitively won, that the fight would be continuing. Countering the messages which the occupiers themselves were mediating to occupied Europe, promoting alternative Allied interpretations, and ‘speaking to the others’ in an effort to (in twenty-first-century parlance) win hearts and minds, was vital both in morale terms and as a strategic contribution to winning the whole war. Inevitably, this particular battleground, that of propaganda and persuasion, was one in which the major weapon was to be language, a ‘war of words’ (Briggs 1995: 3). This chapter considers the linguistic dimensions of this psychological warfare in two different contexts. Firstly, what were the language implications of broadcasting to occupied Europe from outside the continent, from Britain itself, and secondly, what happened when psychological war was being conducted ‘on the ground’, during military operations to liberate and occupy?