In 1997, Martin Bormann Jr.—the son of Martin Bormann, the head of the Nazi Party chancellery and Hitler‘s powerful private secretary—described to me his personal experience as a 15-year-old in the chaotic last days of the Second World War.
He had been living in Munich, in a protected compound for the families of senior Nazis. On April …
Erna Paris
Erna Paris was the author of many acclaimed works of literary non-fiction, including The Sun Climbs Slow: The International Criminal Court and the Search for Justice.
Articles by
Erna Paris
“Shortly after 9:00 a.m. on May 27, 1947, the first of forty-nine men condemned to death for war crimes at Mauthausen concentration camp mounted the gallows in the courtyard of Landsberg Prison near Munich.”
So begins Tomaz Jardim’s fine book on the workings of U.S. military justice in a single Nazi concentration camp in the immediate aftermath of the Second World…
Are We Being Helpful?
Western interventions are called to account in this study of the aftermath of war July–August 2008
At the end of the Cold War, Pandora’s box suddenly blew open, liberating the Evils that had been waiting patiently for their next release. It soon became evident that the relative peace the world had enjoyed for the last 50 years had rested upon the flimsiest of foundations: a balance-of-terror stand-off between two superpowers and their respective satellite states that had successfully held local tyrannies at…
How to Wage War Legally
One big country, it seems, is breaking most of the rules these days March 2006
Prior to the 1990s and the re-emergence of the crime of genocide in Bosnia and Rwanda, the arcane world of international law was a subject few non-experts knew or cared about. The Iron Curtain of the Cold War and the threat of mutual nuclear devastation held the world’s superpowers and their respective satellites in check. It became fashionable among certain Cold Warriors to claim that the field did not actually exist—that it…