"The way Germany treats its inhabitants […] is not our affair, any more than it is the affair of some other government to interpose itself in our problems." The words of Robert Jackson, Chief United States Prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, are unambiguous. The repression of the racist crimes committed in the name of Nazism should not pave the way for an international examination of the race relations then prevalent in the United States. Hence the particularly restrictive definition of crimes against humanity adopted in 1945.
Guillaume Mouralis provides a fascinating reading of the Nuremberg trial based on a study of the lawyers who laid its foundations and propelled and guided the debates in the United States. He reveals the cluster of professional, social, and cultural constraints that weighed heavily on this experimental moment. He also questions the legacy of Nuremberg. How was it mobilised in the Afro-American civil rights movement, or in the anti-Vietnam war movement? And how have these militant appropriations influenced the emergence of an international legal framework?
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