Title: Law Reports of Trials of War Criminals

Source/Sponsoring Agency: United States. Library of Congress. Federal Research Division; United Nations War Crimes Commission

URL: http://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/Military_Law/law-reports-trials-war-criminals.html

Date Checked: 3/18/2010      Status: Active

Date Annotated: 3/18/2010

Topics: International Law; Criminal Law

Other keywords: Court decisions; Law of war; World War II; War crimes

Contents: After World War II, military tribunals in Nuremberg and Tokyo famously tried the most prominent Japanese and Nazi leaders for committing war crimes. It is less commonly known that United Nations members, including the United Kingdom and the United States, established additional military tribunals in locations throughout Europe, East Asia, and the Pacific islands to try “minor” defendants (e.g., lower-ranking military officers and concentration camp administrators) for war crimes. The United Nations War Crimes Commission, believing these trials to be important for the development of international law, particularly in demonstrating the application of law to facts in war crimes trials, selected cases deemed to illustrate important legal or procedural issues for publication in Law Reports of Trials of War. The Commission published fourteen volumes of the Law Reports between 1947 and 1949. The fifteenth volume, published in 1949, contains a summary and overarching analysis of war crimes trials, including trials not included in the Law Reports. The Law Reports do not contain transcripts of the trials; they provide summaries recreated from the notes of court officers who were present at the trials. The amount of detail provided varies from case to case, but an individual trial report may contain some or all of the following: a brief description of the legal issues and facts of the case, the date and location of the proceedings, the names of the court officers, prosecutors, defenders, and accused, the charges, the opening and closing arguments, the positions of the prosecution and defense along with evidence submitted by them, including witness testimony, a summing up, the verdict and sentence, and notes with analysis of the legal issues in the case. The reports often contain direct quotations from the prosecution, defense, and witnesses. Crimes included describe the gassing of concentration camp prisoners, the execution of prisoners of war, scuttling ships, and keeping the head of a dead soldier as a souvenir. The Library of Congress digitized all fifteen volumes of the Law Reports and made them available on its website. The files are organized by volume and provided in PDF format. Each PDF is bookmarked according to the volume’s contents, making for easy access to individual cases (click on the bookmark in the left panel to jump to that section of the volume). The site provides links to additional digitized war crimes materials: The Case of General Yamashita: A Memorandum, and the Blue, Red, and Green series of reports and documents from the Nuremberg Trials. The Law Reports are an excellent resource for anyone studying World War II or the international law of war crimes.

Author of Annotation: I. Haight