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Do war crimes trials help create a shared historical understanding? Historian Donald Bloxham, this year’s J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Senior Scholar-in-Residence at the Holocaust Memorial Museum, speaks with Jerry Fowler about the effect of the Nuremberg trials of top Nazis on attitudes of the German public and of post-World War I trials of top Ottoman officials on attitudes of the Turkish public.
TRANSCRIPT:
JERRY FOWLER: My guest today is Professor Donald Bloxham, he’s Professor of History at the University of Edinburgh, and this year’s J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Senior Scholar-in-Residence here at the Holocaust Memorial Museum. Among his many publications are the books “Genocide On Trial: War Crimes Trials and the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory,” and “The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians.” Donald, welcome to the program.
DONALD BLOXHAM: Thanks, Jerry.
JERRY FOWLER: There are many things we could talk about, but what I want to focus on is your work on the effects of war crimes trials. Before we get to that, I wanted to ask you a general question, and get you to muse a little bit about what we can learn from history. Santayana is famously quoted as saying “He who forgets history is doomed to repeat it,” but I wonder, how easy is it to draw the correct lessons from history?
DONALD BLOXHAM: This is about the biggest historical question one can be asked.
JERRY FOWLER: But answer it in a minute and a half or less.
DONALD BLOXHAM: Okey dokey. Well, I think the most important things we learn from history are the lessons that we think are important. That sounds like a circular answer, but it’s always intrigued me when politicians will talk about learning lessons of the past to ensure that X, Y or Z will never happen again, only X, Y and Z happen again all the time. I think what’s written in history books, academic monographs and articles, has very little relevance to the public sphere, what is the important use of history in the public sphere is what ordinary people and politicians think history means. They are two very, very different things. Why I think war crimes trials, for instance, would be an important subject of study is that they provide a very popular forum where history, the law and collective memory intersect, and they provide a forum from which people can pick and choose an awfully large number of different lessons. And they tend to pick the lessons that will most suit themselves and their own identity purposes. And I think really that’s the most important legacy of the historical record.
JERRY FOWLER: Well, let’s focus in on war crimes trials then, and you have an essay that’s forthcoming, and I guess it will be out in early 2008, called “Defeat, Due Process and Denial: War Crimes Trials and Nationalist Revisionism in Comparative Perspective.” And the first case that you deal with in this essay is Nuremberg, which is really the most famous of war crimes trials. Let’s start with the basics, why did the allies decide to put top Nazis on trial? They could have done many things: they could’ve not had any punishment, they could’ve had summary punishment, executions, and I know those were on the table. How did they settle on trials?
DONALD BLOXHAM: The trial impetus, or at least the impetus of the trial of major war criminals, as opposed to normal battlefield war criminals, and lower acting war criminals, is really an American initiative, and it gathers pace late 1944 and early 1945, particularly in response to the massacre of American POW’s in Malmedy after the Battle of the Bulge, or during the Battle of the Bulge. The idea really as it develops within various American departments of state, is to provide a forum by which Nazi criminality will be revealed to the German population. It’s part of the general plan of defeat and occupation of Germany, the notion that if you want to re-socialize Germans you need to, alongside the normal reeducation plans, need to reveal to them what was done in their name and by their leaders, by those they at some point indeed elected, of course. The alternative at the time, or there are a series of alternatives, summary execution, which you allude to, also the Morgenthau Plan, which was cooked up in the Treasury Department, for a wide scale de-industrialization of Germany, pastoralization of it, an attempt to make sure that Germany itself could never wage aggressive war within Europe again. That was seen, quite rightly, as very draconian and retrograde. The re-educational process was seen as the more progressive, and that which would also lead to a stable Germany in future, and war crimes trials were an intrinsic part of that project.
JERRY FOWLER: So, as I understand what you’re saying, a key idea behind the trials was that it would have an effect on the German public, and a salutary effect in terms of ensuring peace. So, in the event, what was the response of the German public?
DONALD BLOXHAM: It’s a variable response. I think much of the scholarship on this, particularly the scholarship that comes from the area of international law, has overestimated the positive impact the trials had upon the German population. One can chart a series of trends in terms of German response to the Nuremberg trials. But I think all of them point broadly in the same direction, and this would be the direction of self-exculpation on behalf of the German public. Now, it’s not to say there are not some very engaged – intellectually and morally engaged – individuals here. One thinks of the philosopher Karl Jaspers, for instance, and his essay on the German guilt question. But in the main, the German response to the war crimes trials is really one of self-exculpation, and there are two alternative routes that the German people tend to take down the road towards self-exculpation. The first really is to stigmatize the war criminals in the dock themselves, as it were, to lay all of the blame upon Hermann Goering, the SS chiefs, perhaps the military chiefs, too, although that’s more complicated.
JERRY FOWLER: So to use the individuals as an alibi for the nation.
DONALD BLOXHAM: Exactly so, yes, to buy in, as it were, or help create the notion that Nazi Germany was a totalitarian state, where orders were simply conceived at the top and passed down and had to be obeyed unquestioningly. This is I think an idea which very much develops at Nuremberg, and it’s a useful method of prosecution of course, because if you’re trying to prosecute the leaders of a state, it’s important for the American and British and Soviet and French prosecutors to suggest that those people in the dock are those with overwhelming responsibility. And, of course, that’s correct. But read in a different way, you could also read that their very weight of responsibility equates to an absence of responsibility on those lower down the command structure, or those ordinary men, for instance, carrying out the criminal tasks of the Nazi state. And I think that this is – certainly this route of using defendants as an alibi is a very important first step in the self-exculpation process. We move in the aftermath of the Nuremberg trials to the second step of self-exculpation, and that is actually to question whether even what those leaders did was wrong, actually to start a campaign of what today we call revisionism, about the very evidence of Nazi criminality, or at least to start reflecting very much more – the German people to start reflecting very much more – on what they suffered during the war, whether it be under allied aerial bombardment, or in the masses of German prisoners of war in Soviet prison camps, or the forced expulsion of literally millions of ethnic Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia after the war. These are all powerful narratives of German guilt which come to compete, sorry, of German suffering, which come to compete with the main narrative of German guilt. And I think that as part of this process of focusing upon German suffering, focusing upon the crimes of the allies, if you will, an extension of that is to attack the very idea of the allied occupation of Germany, to attack the moral bases of the allied occupation of Germany, suggest that the allies are also war criminals, are also guilty, that German guilt needs to be seen in that context. This is a grand process of relativization. And I think some of the earlier narratives of self-exculpation also feed into this. If, for instance, you as an ordinary German soldier, or even a low ranking SS man, can say “Well, I was merely following orders,” well perhaps that’s also true for the service chiefs themselves. Perhaps the only really guilty people are maybe Adolf Hitler, who’s dead, you know, maybe some of the chief propagandists. But really, even up to the very highest levels you say, “Well, these guys were only following orders, too,” “we’re in fact a nation of people who’ve followed orders,” in some sense “we’re also a nation of victims, you know, where’s the criminal culpability in all this? How is this so very different to anything else? Why are we being singled out?” So, in essence the people in the dock turn from having been an alibi, for the German people as a whole, to having been sort of co-victims of a rather vindictive process of allied trial and occupation.
JERRY FOWLER: Well, you charted out these two responses of using the defendants as an alibi and having sympathy for the defendants, but most people’s perception of looking at Germany today would be of a society that has accepted responsibility for the Holocaust, and there’s not Holocaust denial on the part of German society. That seems a very different reaction than what you’re talking about.
DONALD BLOXHAM: Yes indeed, and this is a conundrum that needs some explanation. Firstly, I would say I think it’s another of the fallacies of some of the international legal scholarship on the subject of Nuremberg, that these weren’t really trials about the Holocaust at all, the Holocaust was not really prominent at Nuremberg. The main object of the Nuremberg trials was to prosecute the Nazi commission of aggressive war, the war crimes trials, crimes against humanity, are very definitely a secondary part of that project. So for a start, such information as emerges about the Holocaust at Nuremberg is not necessarily at the forefront of the Nuremberg trials, and I would personally suggest that it doesn’t do too much in the direction of educating people as to what exactly happened in eastern Europe, in so far as they didn’t know it already. Where I think we see a series of very important changes in post-war German society are really not in the immediate post-war period at all, but rather in the 1960s. I think this is the sort of crucible of the German public coming to terms with what was done by the German public’s forefathers. So the youth movements of the 1960s are very, very important here. Of course, you have a generation that is not directly implicated in the crimes of the Nazis, there’s also a generational shift against parental authoritarianism, you know, the social conservatism of German society. And I think in that time you do start to get a more open, questioning approach to the German past. And at that time you also get a sort of retrospective embracing of Nuremberg, you know, the recognition that this was a more – you know, much more justified than had hitherto been acknowledged. And I think, you know, that’s very definitely a retrospective process, and I think it would be wrong to suggest that Nuremberg heavily influenced the way the Sixties developed, rather I think the 1960s heavily influenced the way that Nuremberg is retrospectively perceived.
JERRY FOWLER: Let me push you on that for a second, because that’s not a trivial effect that you’ve just described, even though it was contingent upon things that happened in the Sixties, having the historical fact of Nuremberg and the trials ultimately had the salutary effect that at least was part of the motivation in the first place.
DONALD BLOXHAM: Yeah, it’s a very good point. I think really the crux of the matter is when you think these things really matter. Nuremberg was an attempt to address the generation that had been directly and indirectly responsible for the commission of war crimes and the crimes against humanity, and it, to cut a long story short, failed in the re-education process at that time. It definitely leaves a cultural trace in Germany, and that’s picked upon, amongst other things, in the 1960s by the youth movement. But of course these are changes being driven by a generation that itself has not been complicit in war crimes and crime against humanity. And in essence it’s easier for them to address Nazi criminality because they’re not personally implicated. And in fact part of their agenda is addressing the way that the older generation, the parental and grand-parental generation, have actually downplayed the crimes of Nazis. And so Nuremberg is actually a useful illustrative tool for them, in a sense. So it’s really a question of, you know, when Nuremberg most matters, and when it most matters it doesn’t work.
JERRY FOWLER: Let’s change gears a little bit, because another episode of trials after genocide and mass violence occurred after World War One when, and many people may not even realize this, there were trials of former Ottoman officials for the massacres of Armenians during the war. And I guess that would be the first question, how did those trials come about? We don’t think of today as there having been a justice process after that.
DONALD BLOXHAM: It’s a very contorted series of events that led to the trial of some Ottoman officials in the aftermath of the First World War. On the 24th of May 1915 the allies, Britain, France and Imperial Russia, declared to the leaders of the Ottoman Empire that if they continue their ongoing murderous policies against the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire, they would be held responsible after the war for the crimes against humanity that were in progress. And I think this is the first time that crimes against humanity are used in that accusatory way and in any sort of connection of actually bringing people to justice. The trials themselves ultimately come about, or a select number of trials come about. They’re actually conducted by the post-war Ottoman government, which is heavily influenced by the Western allies, Britain and France. Now, there are a number of motives for these trials, one of which is the simple moral outrage of what was done. No doubt about that at all, the murder of possibly a million Armenians during the First World War, you know, does provide a massive moral incentive to these procedures. But I would think that those would be necessary but not sufficient factors in the eventuality of the trials. Other factors, for instance, were that Britain was very keen to have these trials by way of illustrating the perfidy of the Ottoman Empire, thus justifying its own policies of dividing the empire up according to its own imperial ends. France, likewise. For the immediate post-war Ottoman government itself, having these trials had some utility, of course. It was a way of placing the blame for the war effort and the genocide of the Armenians on a small clique within the Ottoman elite, within the elite of the former ruling faction, the Committee of Union Progress. Again, this idea of using trials as a way of projecting blame on to a certain number of defendants, using them as an alibi, and thereby distancing the post-war Ottoman regime from the acts of its predecessors. But these trials ultimately fall apart under a series of pressures, primarily a sort of revanchist, resurgent Turkish nationalism personified through Kemal Ataturk, and also through the falling apart of the wartime consensus, and as Britain and France pursue their own selfish imperial goals in the region, and focus more and more upon the European theater and the containment of Germany and the Soviet Union.
JERRY FOWLER: And if we just kind of compress history, which is always a dangerous thing to do, of course, but if we look today, there is not the kind of acceptance – social acceptance – of responsibility of the massacre of the Armenians by the Turkish public, that there is of the murder of Jews by the German public. Without being overly simplistic, can you kind of sketch some of the reasons why that would be, why you would have two very different outcomes?
DONALD BLOXHAM: I think one of the most, perhaps the most, striking difference in the two cases is that the Ottoman Empire was, although defeated in war itself, then under Ataturk, rose again as it were, and defeated a British-sponsored Greek army in Anatolia, in modern day Turkey itself, and ultimately came to regard itself, if not as a victor of the First World War, then very definitely as someone who’d contrived to revise the defeat of the First World War. Now, Nazi Germany on the other hand, was totally defeated, unconditionally defeated, in the Second World War. And I think when one looks at other regimes that have been forced to revise their ideological approaches, any of the great, great wars of the Nineteenth Century lead any of the losing powers to radically rethink some of their social structures and their military and political structures to ensure that they’ll never be defeated in war again. It seems to me that if we’re looking for factors that really ram home the failure of the Nazi project within Germany, it’s not the Holocaust so much as the fact that Nazi Germany was ultimately defeated. And it’s the fact I think that – and then we have the allied imposed rule, which whatever its limitations, does prevent the emergence of certain narratives and certain extreme forms of revisionism, and neo-Nazism, let’s say. None of these factors are present in the Ottoman Empire and then the republic of Turkey once the Kemalist resurgence has come to the fore, once effectively the Greek army is kicked out of Turkey in 1922, and the British are effectively defeated by proxy. The new nationalist republican state, which has many personnel continuities with the genocidal regime of the Committee of Union and Progress, is effectively free to rewrite history as it wants to do, and rewrite it as a victor in a certain sense. You know, the old cliché about the victor writing history, I think, is very, very important here.
JERRY FOWLER: Well, we’re coming near the end of the time that we have, and I was wondering if we can maybe circle back to the question that we started with, which is drawing lessons from history. And being cautious about that, but still taking advantage of the historical record, how would you summarize what we can learn from these episodes of war crimes in the past today as there is an increasing movement to have war crimes in places like Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and now with the creation of a permanent international criminal court?
DONALD BLOXHAM: The first thing I would counsel is modesty on behalf of those who claim great things for these trials. One of the worrying factors, in the first instance at least, in the former Yugoslavia, as in the Ottoman Empire it seems to me, during the First World War, was that trials were almost conceived as a sort of palliative for the absence of action during the crime, and this I think is certainly the case in Rwanda too. And I think maybe this is why there’s such rhetorical investment in what war crimes trials and trials for gross breaches of international humanitarian law can achieve – almost as a sort of apology for not having done something earlier, in some sense. But this brings us to huge questions of intervention and the propriety thereof, which I don’t want to get into, but I do think there has been a way in which war crimes trial rhetoric has substituted for activism at the time of ongoing crimes against humanity. I also think that as part of the caution that I would urge on the rhetorical level, is that, you know, these trials will always be seen by the peoples who are represented by defendants in the dock as being partial exercises, as being partisan, as being unfair, as being victor’s justice in a sense. There has to be great care taken in the presentation of the trials.
JERRY FOWLER: Can I just interrupt, do you think that’s true even when it’s an international process? I mean, great care has been taken to try to make the venues and the judicial processes as fair as possible.
DONALD BLOXHAM: Hopefully that will be an issue that recedes the more genuinely internationalized, the more permanent, the less ad-hoc these trials become. I mean we still – I mean, we’re very much at an experimental level with the ICC. The ICTY and the ICTR are by definition ad-hoc tribunals, and their very ad-hocery, if you like, lends a suggestion that there’s special circumstances, special pleading. And of course particularly with the ICTR, you know, there are problems in terms of the profile of the defendants who are brought. You know, obviously, most of them are representatives of the former “Hutu power” regime. There are also crimes to be answered committed by the Rwandese Patriotic Front and the subsequent representatives of the Rwandese government. Similarly in Uganda we see, I think, a potentially one-sided prosecution process, where criminality has not been evenly distributed, but more than one party has been criminal. And I think, you know, these are issues that do have to be taken into account, not just at the presentational level, but also at that level. Additionally, the other thing we need to, I think, to really talk about at length is kind of complimentary didactic frameworks accompanying the trial. It’s all very well to have trials. But as we know from the experience of the ICTR based at Arusha in Tanzania, very little of this filters through to some of the ordinary Rwandese people. There’s evidence, an awful lot of evidence, that the Serbian people and Croatian people are blissfully ignorant of what goes on at the Hague, you know. It’s not enough to have trials in the abstract and think that is the sort of palliative, the salve that our humanitarian conscience, or our sort of cultural disposition requires us to apply to a situation. You actually have to think about what impact is this having on the ground, what do ordinary people think of this. And I think, you know, ideas are obviously developing in these directions, more and more care is being paid, more and more attention is being paid to these areas. And yet some of the scholarship emerging on popular responses to the ICTR and the ICTY show that really very little is getting through.
JERRY FOWLER: Donald Bloxham is a Professor of History at the University of Edinburgh, and this year’s J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Senior Scholar-in-Residence here at the Holocaust Memorial Museum. Donald, thanks for taking the time to be with us.
DONALD BLOXHAM: Thanks very much Jerry.
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