The Second World War in ten trials

Aims

This course aims to:

• give you a refreshingly different way of looking at the Second World War
• introduce you to the links between the disciplines of law and history
• highlight some of the complexities involved in the stories of treason, collaboration and crime from the Second World War

Course content

Trials can be a surprisingly good way of looking at major historical topics. 

Dictatorships always operate outside normal concepts of law, so trials are a good way of tracing how they establish their hold on power. Hitler’s contempt for the law dated to his own trial after his failed coup attempt in 1924. The Nazis used the Reichstag Fire in February 1933 to take complete control of political life in Germany and they made sure it was the last instance of anything resembling normal justice. Instead, they created the ruthless ‘People’s Court’, a violent travesty of judicial process, as Sophie Scholl and her fellow anti-Nazi campaigners found to their cost. 

Vichy France too tried to use the law to justify its hold on power; at the end of the war the tables were turned and Pétain and Laval found themselves accused by those they had put on trial – sometimes in front of the same judges. Postwar trials could highlight the moral ambiguity of the victors, as with the trials of Vidkun Quisling and the broadcaster William Joyce (‘Lord Haw Haw’).

The giant of these postwar trials was the Nuremberg trial of the Nazi leadership, the first international trial in history, but here too questions are asked about its fairness: was it victors’ justice? The Tokyo trial of the Japanese leadership showed the paradox of different empires accusing each other of imperialism.

Trials continued to bring the war back to life in the postwar world. The Holocaust, which had played a relatively minor role at Nuremberg, took centre stage in the trial of Adolf Eichmann, abducted from Argentina to face trial in Jerusalem. There were similar scenes in France when Klaus Barbie was extradited from Bolivia in 1983 to face trial for his wartime crimes.

This course takes an original view at a familiar story.

What to expect on this course

I like to teach with plenty of visuals: when I was a student I was conscious that we never saw the things we were being taught about. We’ll cover quite a lot of ground, but I always build time in for discussion and questions. We’ll also consider some of the source material from the period to understand the issues from the point of view 
of people at the time.

Course sessions

1. Hitler on Trial – the Munich Putsch trial: After his failed attempt at seizing power from Munich in 1924, Hitler faced a trial for sedition which was able to turn to his advantage, turning the courtroom into a platform for his political ideas.

    

2. The Reichstag Fire – the destruction of German justice: The Nazis and Communists blamed each other for the Reichstag fire, and the Nazis used it to seize complete control of the German political and legal systems. The trial of the accused arsonists, however, did not go at all as they had hoped.

    

3. The Riom trial – Vichy versus the Third Republic: The Vichy Regime wanted to establish its legitimacy by accusing its predecessors of having betrayed France in a blatantly political trial. Trying political opponents legally proved more difficult than they had expected and the trial turned into a monstrous travesty of France’s tradition of justice.

    

4. Sophie Scholl, the White Rose and the German People’s Court: The German justice system collaborated with the Nazi regime through the notorious People’s Court, which did Hitler’s bidding by degrading and humiliating his opponents.  It was to be just as brutal with the courageous students of the anti-Nazi White Rose movement as it would later be with the failed bomb plot against Hitler.

    

5. Nuremberg – international justice in action: It was essential for the victorious allies to put the defeated Nazis in front of a genuine court, but without clear precedents they had frame the laws and charges which the defendants would face. The trial faced problems of law and language, and the paradox of the Soviet Union sitting in judgement on a regime not so different from itself.

    

6. The Tokyo trial – imperialisms in court: The allies were set on justice after the revelations of Japanese wartime cruelty but a trial posed huge problems. Some of those sitting in judgement wanted the end of all imperial rule; the European powers only wanted the end of Japan’s empire. The complex politics of the End of Empire were inextricably entwined with the demands of justice.

    

7. Treason at the Old Bailey – the trial of William Joyce: Joyce was a patriotic British fascist who broadcast Nazi propaganda from Berlin. It should have been enough to convict him for treason, but was he British, Irish or American? Was his treason merely a matter of dates?

    

8. Vichy accused – the trials of Pétain and Laval: Postwar France plunged into a period of violent retribution against collaborators which reached its peak in the trials of the Vichy leaders Marshal Pétain and Pierre Laval. In such a febrile atmosphere, was it possible for the men to have a fair trial? Were these trials about political revenge rather than justice?

    

9. Vidkun Quisling – Norway’s Nazi: ‘Quisling’ became a wartime word for traitor or collaborator, after the Norwegian politician Vidkun Quisling, who staged a coup and seized power in Norway while the king took refuge in Britain. After the war he faced charges of treason and collaboration, but by using retroactive legislation, were his accusers committing the same faults of which they accused him?

    

10. The Holocaust trials – Eichmann in Jerusalem, Barbie in Lyon : The persecution of the Jews had not been central to the Nuremberg Trial and by the late 1950s, it seemed even Israel had moved on from the war. But the dramatic abduction of Adolf Eichmann from Argentina to Jerusalem finally brought the world face to face with the horrors of the Holocaust. Twenty years later France faced up to its own agony when it brought Klaus Barbie, the ‘butcher of Lyon’, back to face justice for his crimes.

Learning outcomes

As a result of the course, you will gain a greater understanding of the subject and you should be able to:

• talk with confidence about the individual trials covered in the course
• see some of the complex issues of justice and morality at stake in these trials
• reach an informed assessment of the ways in which history and law can relate to each other

Required reading

There is no required reading for this course. See Course materials for supplementary reading once registered.