"Der Flick-Konzern steht wie kein anderes Unternehmen fur die enge Verbindung zwischen Wirtschaft und NS-Regime. Sein Wachstum wurde wahrend des Dritten Reiches von kaum einem Unternehmen ubertroffen. Er profitierte in grossem Ausmass von "Arisierungen," war einer der bedeutendsten Rustungsproduzenten und beschaftigte zehntausende Zwangsarbeiter. Die Fuhrungsfiguren des Konzerns wurden dafur vor dem Internationalen Militartribunal in Nurnberg zur Verantwortung gezogen und verurteilt. Die Autoren legen die okonomische Strategie dieses Unternehmens offen, analysieren seine internen Strukturen und Lobbyingmethoden und konnen so zeigen, wie und warum der Flick-Konzern zu einem engen Partner des NS-Regimes wurde. Ein Editionsteil mit 47 Dokumenten erganzt die Konzerngeschichte." "Es ist das Verdienst der Autoren, dass sie keinen Zweifel an der Verstrickung und personlichen Verantwortung Friedrich Flicks lassen und das schonungslose Bild eines Konzernherren zeichnen, der bereitwillig mit den Nationalsozialisten kooperierte, um sein Unternehmen und seine Macht auszubauen." "Eine sehr materialreiche Studie auf hohem Reflexionsniveau." Christopher Kopper, Die Zeit 17.07.2008, Nr. 30 "Das Verdienst des Autorengespanns Johannes Bahr, Axel Drecoll, Bernhard Gotto, Kim C. Priemel und Harald Wixforth liegt allerdings darin, nun eine Vielzahl neuer Mosaiksteine zur Geschichte des Flick-Konzerns im Dritten Reich zusammengetragen zu haben." "Selten wurde eine Unternehmensgeschiche in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus so genau aufgearbeitet. ... Die Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz hat hier eine Dokumentation vorgelegt, die Pflichtlekture fur alle Verantwortlichen in Politik, Zivilgesellschaft und Wirtschaft werden sollte." www.ihre-Stiftung.de"

This volume sheds light on how lawyers have made sense of, engaged in, and shaped international politics over the past three hundred years. Chapters show how politicians and administrators, diplomats and military men, have considered their tasks in legal terms, and how the field of international relations has been filled with the distinctly legal vocabulary of laws, regulations, treaties, agreements, and conventions. Leading experts in the field provide insights into what it means when concrete decisions are taken, negotiations led, or controversies articulated and resolved by legal professionals. They also inquire into how the often-criticised gaps between juristic standards and everyday realities can be explained by looking at the very medium of law. Rather than sorting people and problems into binary categories such as 'law' and 'politics' or 'theory' and 'practice', the case studies in this volume reflect on these dichotomies and dissolve them into the messy realities of conflicts and interactions which take place in historically contingent situations, and in which international lawyers assume varying personas.

At the end of World War II the Allies faced a threefold challenge: how to punish perpetrators of appalling crimes for which the categories of 'genocide' and 'crimes against humanity' had to be coined; how to explain that these had been committed by Germany, of all nations; and how to reform Germans. The Allied answer to this conundrum was the application of historical reasoning to legal procedure. In the thirteen Nuremberg trials held between 1945 and 1949, and in corresponding cases elsewhere, a concerted effort was made to punish key perpetrators while at the same time providing a complex analysis of the Nazi state and German history. Building on a long debate about Germany's divergence from a presumed Western path of development, Allied prosecutors sketched a historical trajectory which had led Germany to betray the Western model. Historical reasoning both accounted for the moral breakdown of a 'civilised' nation and rendered plausible arguments that this had indeed been a collective failure rather than one of a small criminal clique. The prosecutors therefore carefully laid out how institutions such as private enterprise, academic science, the military, or bureaucracy, which looked ostensibly similar to their opposite numbers in the Allied nations, had been corrupted in Germany even before Hitler's rise to power. While the argument, depending on individual protagonists, subject matters, and contexts, met with uneven success in court, it offered a final twist which was of obvious appeal in the Cold War to come: if Germany had lost its way, it could still be brought back into the Western fold. The first comprehensive study of the Nuremberg trials, The Betrayal thus also explores how history underpins transitional trials as we encounter them in today's courtrooms from Arusha to The Hague.

At the end of World War II the Allies faced a threefold challenge: how to punish perpetrators of appalling crimes for which the categories of 'genocide' and 'crimes against humanity' had to be coined; how to explain that these had been committed by Germany, of all nations; and how to reform Germans. The Allied answer to this conundrum was the application of historical reasoning to legal procedure. In the thirteen Nuremberg trials held between 1945 and 1949, and in corresponding cases elsewhere, a concerted effort was made to punish key perpetrators while at the same time providing a complex analysis of the Nazi state and German history. Building on a long debate about Germany's divergence from a presumed Western path of development, Allied prosecutors sketched a historical trajectory which had led Germany to betray the Western model. Historical reasoning both accounted for the moral breakdown of a 'civilised' nation and rendered plausible arguments that this had indeed been a collective failure rather than one of a small criminal clique. The prosecutors therefore carefully laid out how institutions such as private enterprise, academic science, the military, or bureaucracy, which looked ostensibly similar to their opposite numbers in the Allied nations, had been corrupted in Germany even before Hitler's rise to power. While the argument, depending on individual protagonists, subject matters, and contexts, met with uneven success in court, it offered a final twist which was of obvious appeal in the Cold War to come: if Germany had lost its way, it could still be brought back into the Western fold. The first comprehensive study of the Nuremberg trials, The Betrayal thus also explores how history underpins transitional trials as we encounter them in today's courtrooms from Arusha to The Hague.