ABSTRACT
The Nuremberg War Crimes Trial after World War II is regarded as a milestone in the legal prosecution of atrocities committed during war. The crimes within the jurisdiction of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg were grouped into three categories: a) crimes against peace, b) war crimes and c) crimes against humanity. The last category is operationalized as follows: ‘murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war, or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crimes within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal’ (IMT Charter, cited after Askin 1997, p. 131). Read today, the lack of any reference to sexual violence is conspicuous. Neither is sexual violence mentioned under category b), war crimes. However, both category b) and category c) contain formulations that made it possible to include sexual violence among the crimes to be punished, for example ‘other inhumane acts’ in category c). Despite numerous accounts of sexual war violence during World War II, rape crimes were not punished at Nuremberg. Hence ‘no new law was established providing precedent for punishing wartime sexual assault’ (Askin 1997, p. 163). The Nuremberg War Crimes Trial was indeed a milestone, but not in terms of making sexual war violence visible.
