Following the Moscow Declaration on German Atrocities in Occupied Europe of October 1943, the Allies agreed in Potsdam in August 1945 that “war criminals and those who have participated in planning or carrying out Nazi enterprises involving or resulting in atrocities or war crimes shall be arrested and brought to judgment. Nazi leaders, influential Nazi supporters, and high officials of Nazi organizations and institutions, and any other persons dangerous to the occupation or its objectives shall be arrested and interned.” During the immediate postwar years, the internment practices by the Allies of the anti-Hitler coalition were quite similar. Altogether, the Allies interned about four hundred thousand people who were suspected of constituting a danger to occupation policies (a “security threat”) or who had held a rank in the Nazi state apparatus (categorized for “automatic arrest”). In every Allied occupation zone in Germany, investigation of personal guilt and prosecution of “Nazi and war crimes” was not a prerequisite for internment, which can be seen foremost as a means of Allied security policy immediately after the end of the war, in a situation that was still militarily unsafe for the occupying powers. But how was internment connected to the Allies’ overall goal, formulated in the Moscow and Potsdam declarations, to determine and prosecute individual guilt—especially if the crimes affected their own citizens? This chapter will trace the identification and prosecution of guilty parties in the context of internment and Soviet occupation policy by examining the Soviet investigations in the context of internment, the practices of extradition between the Allied forces, and the convictions of former internees in Soviet military tribunals (SMTs), which were held mostly in secret. In connection with our analysis of these procedures, we seek to answer how the secrecy of both internment and prosecution affected the perception and assessment of Soviet efforts to prosecute war crimes in German society. We make extensive use of material from the Russian state archive of the Department of Soviet Special Camps in Germany, an element of the Soviet People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD; renamed Ministry of Internal Affairs, or MVD, in mid-1946). This collection, however, does not contain individual camp prisoner records or case files. The Soviet material is complemented with sources from German and British archives.

In July 1963, the Supreme Court of East Germany convicted West German state secretary Hans Globke to life imprisonment for complicity in war crimes and crimes against humanity during the Nazi rule in Germany. The verdict was returned in absentia in East Berlin. This public event was the end point of a longer history of various Cold War efforts aimed at compromising “Adenauer’s chief aide” by means of the historical record.

Hans Globke, born 1898 in Dusseldorf, who worked from 1929 in the Prussian, then Reich Ministry of Interior, wrote in 1936 together with State Secretary Wilhelm Stuckart the first commentary on the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws (“Reichsburgergesetz” and “Gesetz zum Schutze des deutschen Blutes und der deutschen Ehre,” 1935). Due to the need for expertise in the new postwar public administration, positive testimonies, and luck in the “denazification” process, Globke gradually returned to public service during the second half of the 1940s. From 1953 until his retirement in 1963, he served as federal secretary of state and chief of staff in the West German Chancellery.

Globke belonged to the West German political elite that propaganda by the German Democratic Republic (GDR) continuously referred to in the Adenauer era. In 1956, the Committee of German Unity (ADE) published the first brochure dedicated to Globke. Also in West Germany, Globke was a controversial figure. The Social Democratic Party (SPD) had been critical of Globke and his successful political career from the beginning. His past was no secret. Adolf Arndt, the Social Democrat expert on legal affairs, referred to Globke’s commentary on the Nuremberg Laws already in a parliamentary debate on July 12, 1950.

The international controversy around Hans Globke between 1960, when the anti-Globke press campaign intensified, and 1963, when the Globke case culminated in the East Berlin trial, was a complex public affair. The capture of Adolf Eichmann in May 1960 by the Mossad markedly influenced the Communist campaign that now aimed to implicate or at least discredit Globke by the criminal procedure in Jerusalem. Another turning point of the Globke affair dates to early 1963 when the final decision was made to organize a separate trial in East Berlin to incriminate Globke.

The resort to international criminal justice after the Second World War has recently been reassessed by a body of creative scholarship that is looking into the foregrounding attempts to design an international justice, transnational dynamics, or longer-term processes. The emergence of new legal definitions and judicial instances (e.g., International Military Tribunal of Nuremberg and IMT for the Far East) has been increasingly studied within a wider framework, both in time and in space, without losing its unique character, while the respective parts played by the governments and the professional actors directly involved have acquired further nuance and deliberation.

Yet the year 1943 remains a turning point, when the idea of resorting to justice to legally qualify and punish the crimes committed by the Nazi occupiers and their local accomplices was asserted and effectuated. Admittedly, the St. James Declaration that the Allied powers signed in January 1942 had already expressed their collective appreciation of the particularity of the violence deployed by the occupier in Europe. It also affirmed their determination in the future to punish severely these infringements of extant rights and customs of war as well as of the international conventions adopted since the middle of the nineteenth century that governed wartime behavior. But the Soviet success at Stalingrad also marked a turning point in this respect: not even waiting for final victory, the governments in exile in London and Stalin in Moscow passed the first laws to punish invaders and indigenous traitors found guilty of unprecedented crimes against the nation.

There is now an extensive literature looking at the intersection of law, war, and postwar consequences. This includes, in particular, the history of war crimes prosecution and the creation of new postwar legal systems and institutions, but also questions of retribution and repatriation. The last two decades have witnessed an increasing interest in the postwar efforts of European governments to come to grips with citizens who collaborated with the Nazis in their countries and in subsequent scholarship on the topic, including a debate on the issue of Jewish forced cooperation during the Holocaust and the role of the postwar discussion around it in the formation of a post-Holocaust collective of Jews from Poland. While this chapter fits into the scholarship by looking at how justice and accountability were understood in the aftermath of war, it will focus in particular on incorporating into the narrative those Jews who stayed in Poland, and it links postwar justice sought outside courtrooms (demonstrating the initiative and agency of survivors) to that within the official legal system. This will be done by analyzing rehabilitation requests addressed to the Jewish Civic Court in Poland and on this basis demonstrating creation of public knowledge regarding collaboration during the Holocaust, formation of audiences, and circulation of the information on this topic. Central to this chapter, therefore, will be noncombatant victims, who were stigmatized by those surrounding them, both from within and from outside their community.

The chapter will look at the pursuit of justice and accountability in the aftermath of the Second World War, focusing on the case of wartime Jewish collaboration with the Nazi authorities, as investigated by the Jewish Civic Court (known in Polish mainly as sąd obywatelski or sąd społeczny, and in Yiddish as folks-gerikht). The Central Committee of Jews in Poland (Centralny Komitet Żydów w Polsce)—the central representative body of Polish Jewry— operated the court from October 1946 to early 1950. During the time of its existence, the Civic Court investigated 147 cases of members of the Polish Jewish community, who “during the Hitlerite occupation [were suspected of activity] unbefitting a Jewish citizen, through participation and harmful activity on ‘Jewish councils,’ in the [ghetto police], in the administration of concentration camps, or any other type of collaboration with the occupier to the detriment of society.”

On October 13, 1958, the former SS members Gustav Sorge and Wilhelm Schubert were put on trial at the district court of Bonn. The defendants were accused of murder and complicity in murder in more than eleven thousand instances, committed while serving as guards of the concentration camps in Esterwegen and Sachsenhausen between 1935 and 1942. The defendants had been charged once before, during a trial in Berlin-Pankow, which was conducted by the Soviets in 1947. The trial in Bonn, which lasted from October 1958 to February 1959, was the first in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) that dealt extensively with crimes committed in the Nazi concentration camp system. The Bonn trial was litigated only a few months after the well-known Ulm trial, which dealt with mass murders of Jews committed by SS detachments in occupied Lithuania—and as a result of that led to the founding of the Central Office in Ludwigsburg in 1958. The Bonn trial was accompanied by heavy media publicity: in addition to extensive press coverage, parts of the trial were filmed and then broadcast nationwide in the form of a mid-length television report. After that broadcast, the TV report was distributed as a film for “political education” (that is, civic education). This state-initiated activity occurred under the umbrella of the Federal Center for Homeland Service, an authority subordinate to the Federal Ministry of the Interior. At the end of the 1950s, civic education gradually began to put crimes committed during the National Socialist period on its agenda. Thus, the film was distributed and screened with the title KZ-Schergen (Henchmen of the Concentration Camp, 1959, 33 min., produced by the Civic Education Office of North Rhine–Westphalia). In addition to an examination of the crimes committed in concentration camps like Sachsenhausen, the film aimed to demonstrate the procedures of law that guided the Bonn trial as the standards of a state governed by a democratic constitution—as the FRG proclaimed itself to be.

Not only the fact of the Bonn trial but also the later usage of the film are noteworthy. In 1964, a half decade after the trial, a law was introduced in West Germany prohibiting the recording of court hearings for the purpose of public use—be it on television, in a film, or on radio.

In August 1960, the Supreme Court of Soviet Latvia condemned Soviet engineer Magnus Eduardovič Kačerovski (born 1907) to death, for having participated in mass crimes as the architect-in-chief of a concentration camp near Riga in 1941–43. This harsh verdict was partly due to the mobilization of some of his fellow citizens. With regard to the wartime activity of the defendant, most of the information gathered in the investigative file has been corroborated by the most recent works on the history of the camp. In October 1941, the commander of the Security Service in Nazi-occupied Latvia had requisitioned the company that employed Kačerovski to design and supervise the construction of a concentration camp for civilians near Salaspils. During the time of Kačerovski’s supervision and until the summer of 1944, the number of inmates interned in the camp was, according to most estimates, about two thousand at a time: deported Jews from the Reich, Latvian political and common law prisoners, families rounded up during antipartisan operations, deserters of the Waffen-SS, a few prisoners of war, and Vlasov Army soldiers serving sentences. After 1945, Kačerovski had been cleared by Soviet security services: his war activities were known, but he was not one of those thousands of Soviet citizens who had been secretly tried and condemned for treason. In 1957, being in charge of the renovation of the Lutheran cathedral in Riga, he was recognized and denounced by a former Salaspils inmate. In 1958, the Latvian KGB, in charge of political crimes (including Nazi crimes) committed on Latvian soil, launched an investigation. It was led by a local officer, Capt. Vladimir Izvestny (1929–2012). In March 1959, the KGB arrested Kačerovski. A first open trial at the Supreme Court in Riga (July 23–25, 1959) condemned him for crimes against the state (under the law of December 25, 1958) to ten years of forced labor. He was deported to the Dubravlag (a correctional labor camp for political prisoners in Mordovia). This verdict revealed a harsh interpretation of the renewed legal and investigative frame for trials after 1955, which were supposedly focused on prominent perpetrators. In the autumn of 1959, the case was reported by the press. In reaction to this media coverage, thousands of Soviet citizens engaged in discussions and wrote “outraged” letters to various authorities.

The chapter deals with the Third OHL and its ideas, differing views of civilian and military leadership of how to continue and end the war.

The chapter analyses the military and political developments in early 1917, especially the submarine warfare, the German retreat on the Western Front, and the events in the east.

This chapter deals with the Central Powers peace offer, its rejection by the Allied Powers, and the German decision to resume unlimited submarine warfare. It shows also how the peace offer, the question of submarine warfare and the peace initiative of Woodrow Wilson were linked.

This chapter deals with German unlimited submarine warfare in 1915, the sinking of the Lusitania and German−American negotiations.

The chapter describes the failure of the German offensive in September 1914.

The chapter analyses the German Reichstag’s peace offer, its background, genesis and intentions; it focuses on the question of whether the offer was honest and states that it was considered to be binding for German politics later in the war. It deals also with the demission of Bethmann Hollweg and shows how these events, the peace offer, the chancellor’s demission and the general mood in Germany in summer 1917 were interconneced.

The conclusion reflects on the costs of the First world War and of the decision to fight it out; on the 'international movement to prolong the war' and the unclear and vague ideas of what a 'victory' can achieve.