Gerd Hankel. Die Leipziger Prozesse: Deutsche Kriegsverbrechen und ihre strafrechtliche Verfolgung nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, HIS Verlag, 2003. 550 S. EUR 30.00 (broschiert), ISBN 978-3-930908-85-1.

Reviewed by David Choberka (German Studies Program, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor)
Published on H-German (February, 2005)

War Crimes Trials in Weimar Germany

Many scholars who would likely have an interest in the topic are uninformed or even unaware that after World War I the German high court in Leipzig, under pressure from the nations of the Entente, prosecuted Germans for war crimes. This neglected episode receives magisterial treatment in Gerd Hankel's Die Leipziger Prozesse: Deutsche Kriegsverbrechen und Ihre Strafrechtliche Verfolgung nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg. Hankel shows how the German authorities took up the task of trying their own accused war criminals in order to placate the demands for justice of the victorious nations and to rehabilitate Germany's international status. The mild show-trials that took place, Hankel explains, produced arguments and decisions that did not just show permissiveness toward the acts of the accused but provided for them a catalogue of legal justifications. The author reveals the Leipzig trials as a telling episode in the history of Weimar Germany and situates them as a negative example in the history of international law and prosecution of war crimes.

Hankel, a lawyer and linguist, comes to this topic with a broader interest in the history of human rights in global politics. His background is evident in the way he thoroughly examines the Leipzig trials from the inside, with impressively comprehensive analysis of the proceedings, and from the outside, with extensive coverage of international diplomacy and the domestic politics of Germany as well as the other involved nations. Hankel builds his argument with exhaustive and unprecedented use of all the archival documents relating to the trials, from the proceedings themselves to the personal papers of lawyers and judges. He also looks at how the trials played in other venues, analyzing, for example, how the proceedings, acquittals, and light sentences were received in periodicals of various political stripes. The text is nicely paced, breaking occasionally into passages that provide some historical contextualization, mostly on the causes and events of the war, or, for example, into brief excursions into the development of international law and concepts such as "war crimes." Hankel is well-versed in the numerous historiographical issues to which his topic relates, many of which are fraught with tension. Most importantly, he negotiates questions about the uniqueness of the German case and the connection between the war crimes of World War I and World War II with a caution and deftness that strengthen his conclusion that the Leipzig trials were an effort by a sympathetic judiciary to help the military overcome responsibility for the war and reinstitute its respect and authority.

The book is divided into three parts. In the first part, Hankel concentrates on the post-war diplomacy and domestic politics that led up to Germany conducting its own war crimes trials in Leipzig beginning in 1921. He explains how disagreement among the nations of the Entente along with Germany's calculated efforts to put off and blunt their demands for justice allowed the defeated nation both to take over the responsibility for prosecuting war criminals gradually and to use the trials not to bring the accused to justice but to justify their conduct in the war. What began as an effort by the victorious powers to extradite and try the most prominent figures of Germany's war effort, including the Kaiser, Hindenburg, and Ludendorff, ended in the prosecution and lenient treatment of a list of figures chosen by the German government.

The second and, by far, the largest part of the book is a detailed consideration of the approximately 1700 trials that took place in Leipzig between 1921 and 1927. Hankel works systematically through the types of accusations (systematic cruelty, murder, mistreatment of POWs, forced labor, submarine warfare, and air warfare), providing rich accounts of the proceedings and explaining in each of the types of cases the arguments deployed by the defense and the judgments rendered by the court. He shows how in all the cases, prosecution was undermined by the incipient status of concepts like "war crimes" and enforceable international norms. More importantly, the trials provided a venue for the codification and legitimization of concepts that justified atrocious acts in war, concepts such as Kriegsnotwendigkeit, Kriegsbrauch, und das Handeln auf Befehl. These concepts allowed the judges to accept that the accused could not have been acting criminally as long as their atrocities were not the intended goal of their actions but the consequence of pursuing a legitimate military goal, a concept that itself became so broad in the course of the trials as to become meaningless (pp. 228-259).

In the book's third part, Hankel considers the consequences of the Leipzig trials. He focuses on the similarities between the arguments put forth in the trials and the permissive attitude toward violence that became an ideological plank of the militant right's platform and a defining facet of the Nazi regime. While he warns the reader to keep in mind the vast differences between the two conflicts, Hankel concludes that the Leipzig trials revealed and codified the legal-theoretical grounds that supported atrocious German conduct in both World War I and II (pp. 516-520).

That material all raises quite forcefully the question of the uniqueness of this attitude toward warfare. Hankel aptly addresses the issue in his conclusion. While his work details the exceptional case of Germany, he argues that the effort of a nation-state to use its legal system to justify its own questionable use of violence is far from a German exception and in no way obsolete. With reference to recent conflicts in Vietnam, the former Yugoslavia, and East Timor, Hankel points out a dismal record of states prosecuting their own accused war criminals. True accountability can only come through regime change or international enforcement, and that holds sway over only the weakest states (pp. 522-523).

Hankel's book is a welcome addition to scholarship on Germany in the era of the world wars. It brings to light important continuities between World War I and World War II and reveals yet another facet of the Weimar judiciary's permissive attitude toward violence imbued with nationalism. For scholars interested in the development of international law and the prosecution of war crimes, the book is a substantial contribution on a neglected topic, the appeal of which is made all the more timely by the recent, controversial efforts by the United States to extricate itself from international norms with legalistic appeals to the new necessities of war against terrorism.

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Citation: David Choberka. Review of Hankel, Gerd, Die Leipziger Prozesse: Deutsche Kriegsverbrechen und ihre strafrechtliche Verfolgung nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg. H-German, H-Net Reviews. February, 2005.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=10236

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