us War Crimes

A few months after the end of World War II, with the international community outraged at the excesses committed by Germany, trials against war criminals were convened in Nuremberg, the symbolic seat of Nazism. There was a series of twelve trials, but it was the first that was the most prominent. Top military and governmental figures including Goering, Hess, von Ribbentrop, and Doenitz were among those first prosecuted. Later trials followed against doctors, bankers, industrialists and others.

In 2009, Harper's Magazine sent war-crimes expert Lawrence Douglas to Munich to cover the last chapter of the lengthiest case ever to arise from the Holocaust: the trial of eighty-nine-year-old John Demjanjuk.

Tony Nott retired from the Dorset Police in 2002 at the rank of superintendent. He had spent most of his service as a detective, and had been involved in the investigation of a number of murder cases and other serious crimes. In 2000 he led the British forensic team on exhumations in Kosovo and describes the horror and brutality carried out by Serb paramilitaries.

"The communal march against an enemy generates a warm, unfamiliar bond with our neighbors, our community, our nation, wiping out unsettling undercurrents of alienation and dislocation," writes Chris Hedges, a foreign correspondent for the New York Times…