ABSTRACT
The Second World War and its aftermath mark key moments for the development of international law and principles, particularly in the areas of human rights and humanitarian law. The creation of the United Nations Organization and the adoption of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the four 1949 Geneva Conventions all constitute landmarks in these fields. This period was also the early days of what is now a firmly established area of international law: international criminal law. International criminal law is a branch of law mainly concerned with the criminal responsibility of individuals for atrocity crimes committed during and sometimes outside situations of armed conflict. Contemporary international criminal law focuses on four core crimes: genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and aggression.1 The first international criminal tribunal ever established, the International Military Tribunal (IMT), tried major Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg. The principles embodied in the IMT Charter, further ascertained in the IMT judgment, continue to pervade the field. The IMT judgment determined the criminal responsibility of high-level
figures of the Nazi regime. Moreover, key organisations of the Nazi state; the leadership corps of the Nazi party; and those holding positions of power within the Gestapo, the SD and the Waffen-SS were declared ‘criminal’, hence giving some early indications about the notion of ‘corporate’ crimes, in the sense of collective criminal acts. The IMT indicted a prominent German industrialist, Gustav Krupp, but
he did not appear in court due to health reasons. Hence no businessman who did not otherwise hold a high-level political position within the regime was prosecuted at the IMT. After the IMT trial ended, however, the Allies initiated additional criminal proceedings in their respective zones of occupation in Germany. Those targeted a number of German industrialists and bankers. The French, the British and the Soviets also conducted similar trials, but those conducted by the United States’ military tribunals are the best
documented.2 While these proceedings were not international in nature because they were not held at the IMT but before US military tribunals, the initial plan was to prosecute a number of businessmen at the IMT and the case that the IMT prosecution team put together against those was redirected towards the military tribunals. These subsequent trials result from international collaboration and may thus be considered an ‘international response’ for the purpose for this book.3
