War Criminals and Social Integration in Postwar Japan and Germany, 1945-1960

FAIN: FA-56786-12

Franziska Seraphim
Boston College (Chestnut Hill, MA 02467-3800)

This book-length project is an international history of the Allied war crimes trial program in Asia and Europe as it moved into its post-trial phase of sentence review, clemency, and parole before ending in 1958. It shifts away from the usual focus on the legal-political characteristics of the international tribunals to a socio-political consideration of the vast majority of "ordinary" Japanese and German war criminals to explore the links between Allied practices of transitional justice and Japanese and German efforts at social reconstruction and the management of public memory. The question is how an issue of criminal responsibility came to be reframed as a social and humanitarian problem of continued imprisonment that bore critically upon the reconstitution of citizenship and the reestablishment of national sovereignty as the occupation gave way to Cold War alliance.