The Role of Victims in the International Criminal Tribunals of the Second World War

This article analyses the role of victims within the founding international criminal tribunals of the Second World War, drawing from historical research of the practice and judgements of the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals. While some commentators have decried the absence of victims at Nuremberg and Tokyo, numerous victim-witnesses testified before these tribunals. However, the outcome of these tribunals has been disappointing to victims who still seek justice over sixty-five years later. This article considers the implications of the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals not providing justice to victims and how this has impacted on their legacy. Although these tribunals are neglected in contemporary discussions of victim provisions, they can still provide some important lessons for modern international criminal justice mechanisms, such as the International Criminal Court, to learn from.

Cold War Politics in Britain and the Contested Legacy of the Spanish Civil War

This article offers a sustained examination of how the vicissitudes of the Cold War shaped changing interpretations of the Spanish Civil War in Britain. Considering the perspectives of participants and historians, it focuses on the diverse strands of the Left that frequently drew on the civil war to attack each other and to make wider arguments about the global Cold War. First, with the aim of criticizing Communist take-overs in Eastern Europe in the late 1940s, the article analyzes retrospective assaults on Communist party tactics and Soviet foreign policy in Spain. Second, in order to argue that the Soviet Union took a counter-revolutionary line after 1956, it investigates the re-emergence of debates over the Spanish revolution. Third, to express disapproval of the United States, it examines the increasing use of the civil war as an analogy in Cold War international affairs from the 1960s. Fourth, in support of non-Soviet Left-of-Centre collaboration, most notably Eurocommunism in the 1970s and opposition to Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government in the 1980s, it considers the renewed emphasis on the popular front. The trajectories of these debates reveal that, over time, the weight of the Left’s criticism moved from the Soviet Union towards the United States.

Moving beyond the rhetoric of provocation: the French and World War II in the novels of the Hussards (1949-1954)

In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, only those who had opposed the Germans or were perceived to have done so could freely express themselves. Soon, however, three young writers clearly leaning to the right of the political spectrum – Antoine Blondin, Roger Nimier and Jacques Laurent – dared to challenge their narratives in a series of provocative novels published between 1949 and 1954. Quickly referred to as the Hussards after the publication in 1952 of a famous essay by Bernard Frank, these writers momentarily occupied the literary space left vacant by their older peers. Without denying the provocative, political and subversive dimensions of the Hussards’ war novels, this article will argue that their success was mainly due to the fact that they were largely in line – and not in contradiction – with the ‘horizon of expectations’ of their time (Jauss, 1982).

Truth at 24 frames a second? A working dialogue between a film-maker and a historical consultant about the making of The Enigma of Frank Ryan

We employ a practice-based methodology based on a ‘live’ film project to explore the different ways that film-makers and historians narrate the past. Through a case-study of the production and exhibition of a drama-documentary feature-film, The Enigma of Frank Ryan, on which both authors (film-maker Bell and historian McGarry) worked respectively as director and historical consultant, we explore a range of critical issues arising from our collaboration. Through a dialogue between a director and a historian, a model of good practice between historians and film-makers emerges.