chapter 2 - Stiftung "Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft"

Günter Saathoff
persons. Fritz Sauckel, who headed the forced labor program from 1942 to the end of the war, was sentenced
to death. Albert Speer, who was Hitler’s minister of armaments and administered the use of forced labor in the
concentration camps for war production, was sentenced to 20 years.
Significantly, the Nuremberg military tribunal charged no industrialists as major war criminals, even though
large German firms had used many thousands of forced laborers, who often lived and worked under extremely
poor conditions. However, some industrialists were charged in the subsequent Nuremberg trials, most famously
the directors of the Flick, Krupp and I. G. Farben companies, although debate persists about the political
motivations of these trials. None of the industrialists convicted in the subsequent Nuremberg Trials served
their full sentences, but were released from prison in the 1951 amnesty granted by the US High Commissioner.
The property and financial holdings confiscated from Krupp as part of the sentence were also returned.
What is also remarkable is that the Nuremberg Trials did not provide the individual victims of forced labor
with legal standing to obtain compensation from the perpetrators of the Nazi state and private firms. The
Nuremberg Trials were purely criminal trials, and the victims only appeared as witnesses for the prosecution.
As such, the Nuremberg Trials did not enable the victims to lodge a claim for compensation against the perpetrators.
This fact gives rise to a number of basic legal and political questions. What are the legal and material
consequences of a conviction for slave or forced labor? What is the relationship between international law and
national law in such cases? How do these international legal norms interact with other norms, such as state
immunity? What courts are responsible for handling these claims? I will only be able to consider a few of these
questions in depth.
First, I want to consider another historical example. Nuremberg was not the first time that crimes committed
by the state during wartime became a subject of international law. For example, Article 3 of the Hague
Convention of 1907 stipulates a claim against the state, which was not standard practice for violations of international
law at the time. However, the Hague Convention did not stipulate how to assess the extent of the
damages, or who would receive compensation from the state. Moreover, the Hague Convention made no provision
for compensation by the state when it was found to have wronged individual persons, and its signatory
states assumed that compensation could be paid only by one state to another state (which is called “reparation”).
This provision for claims against the state was later incorporated into Article 91 of the First Additional
Protocol of the 1949 Geneva Convention, titled “Responsibility,” which stipulates that states that violate the
provisions of the Convention are liable for all acts they commit.
In fact, as a result of (or in spite of) Nuremberg and later international legal reforms, international law in principle
still allows prisoners of war to be used for forced labor. Moreover, there is no international statutory law
that gives individual persons the right to lodge a claim for compensation against the perpetrator state for their
slave or forced labor. These rights, which are often defined under the rubric of reparations law, exist solely
between states, with the fictive assumption that each state will defend the rights of its citizens. Whether the
state in fact defends the rights of its citizens is another matter entirely.
This legal position corresponds closely to the principle of national jurisdiction and state immunity, which
holds that citizens of one state may not seek redress against another in their own state’s courts. Both the issues
of subjective right and state immunity are immensely important to present-day Germany, since cases concerning
Nazi crimes are still before courts in Italy, Greece, and even the European Court of Human Rights.
The Hague Convention and Nuremberg Tribunal also failed to resolve another problem: under international
law, what claims could a victim of slave or forced labor lodge against a civilian perpetrator, such as an industrial
firm or farm that clearly did not belong to the state apparatus? This question was defined not at an
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Stiftung EVZ
HUMAN RIGHTS AND HISTORY: A CHALLENGE FOR EDUCATION