About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline
LOG IN
LOG IN

40 Int'l J. Legal Info. 599 (2012)
Book Reviews

handle is hein.journals/ijli40 and id is 617 raw text is: BOOK REVIEWS The Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law. By Kevin Jon Heller. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. xviii, 509. ISBN: 978-0-19-955431-7. US$135.00. After Germany's surrender near the end of World War II, the Allies prosecuted some of the high-profile perpetrators of Nazi war crimes and crimes against humanity. The most well known of these trials was the trial prosecuted by Justice Robert Jackson before the International Military Tribunal (IMT). After the IMT trial, the Allies agreed that each Ally would prosecute alleged criminals within their zone of occupation. The United States then established the Nuremberg Military Tribunals (NMTs) to prosecute Nazi defendants in the American zone. This book is a comprehensive legal account of the NMTs' history, proceedings, and influence on the development of international criminal law. The author, Jon Heller, considers the NMTs to have had three primary purposes: to bring Nazi war criminals to justice; to fully document the atrocities committed by the German government, military, and industrialists; and to persuade the German people of the terrible reality of those atrocities. Heller concludes, with ample support, that the tribunals were partially successful at obtaining justice, very successful at documenting Nazi crimes, but a complete failure at convincing the occupied German people. This book is a work of both law and history, but the focus is on the law. Heller thoroughly reviews the events and decisions leading up to the creation of the NMTs, and primary documents are heavily cited throughout the text. However, Heller generally chooses to recite only facts that are needed to discuss questions of law that faced the tribunals (chapter 4 provides a brief summary of each of the twelve trials). Thus, the book does not provide a detailed narrative describing the alleged crimes and courtroom proceedings. Instead, Heller discusses different genres of legal issues, such as evidence, elements of war crimes, defenses, and sentencing. He then selects cases that confronted each legal question and discusses how the tribunals decided (sometimes reaching divergent results). This organization excels at parsing out each legal question and filtering out information irrelevant to each individual question. For readers without deep knowledge of the details of the Nazi atrocities, a source providing a historical account of the crimes would be a valuable supplement to Heller's book. The legal questions the NMTs considered were at times abstract (are the tribunals American or international courts?) and at others very subjective 599

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Short-term subscription options include 24 hours, 48 hours, or 1 week to HeinOnline.

Purchase Access

Contact us for annual subscription options:

Contact Us

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

Log In

profiles profiles most