Over the course of the long and violent twentieth century, only a minority of international crime perpetrators ever stood trial, and a central challenge of this era was the effort to ensure that not all these crimes remained unpunished. This required not only establishing a legal record but also courage, determination, and inventiveness in realizing justice. Defeating Impunity moves from the little-known trials of the 1920s to the Yugoslavia tribunal in the 2000s, from Belgium in 1914 to Ukraine in 1943, and to Stuttgart and Dusseldorf in 1975. It illustrates the extent to which the language of law drew an international horizon of justice.

This book brings together world-renowned scholars from all over Europe to analyse how successive Europes have been constructed in the wake of the key conflicts of the period: the Cold War and the two World Wars. By regressively tracing Europe's path back to these pivotal moments as part of a unique methodology, Europe's Postwar Periods - 1989, 1945, 1918 reveals the defining characteristics of these postwar periods and integrates the changes that followed 1989 into a more substantial historical perspective. The author team address the crucial themes in recent European history on a chapter-by-chapter basis that gives comprehensive coverage to the whole of the European region for topics such as borders, states, empires, democracy, justice, markets and futures. The volume highlights the fact that Europe was made less by wars than is commonly thought, and more by the nature of the settlements - international, national, political, economic and social - that followed the two World Wars and the Cold War. It is an important, innovative text for all students and scholars of 20th-century European history.

This book offers a comparative analysis of how postwar society dealt with the disruptive legacy of Nazi occupation in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. It examines the postwar trajectories of resistance fighters, labor conscripts employed in Nazi Germany and victims of Nazi persecution and genocide. Their experiences were often incompatible with the patriotic narratives, aimed at restoring national pride and with the international context, requiring reconciliation with West Germany. In the conflict between memories of the war and the contingencies of the postwar political agenda lies a key to understanding European history since 1945.

This volume, in Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare series, examines how France, Belgium and the Netherlands emerged from the military collapse and humiliating Nazi occupation they suffered during the Second World War. Rather than traditional armed conflict, the human consequences of Nazi policies were resistance, genocide and labour migration to Germany. Pieter Lagrou offers a genuinely comparative approach to these issues, based on extensive archival research; he underlines the divergence between ambiguous experiences of occupation and the univocal post-war patriotic narratives which followed. His book reveals striking differences in political cultures as well as close convergence in the creation of a common Western European discourse, and uncovers disturbing aspects of the aftermath of the war, including post-war antisemitism and the marginalisation of resistance veterans. Brilliantly researched and fluently written, this book will be of central interest to all scholars and students of twentieth-century European history.

This book brings together world-renowned scholars from all over Europe to analyse how successive Europes have been constructed in the wake of the key conflicts of the period: the Cold War and the two World Wars. By regressively tracing Europe's path back to these pivotal moments as part of a unique methodology, Europe's Postwar Periods - 1989, 1945, 1918 reveals the defining characteristics of these postwar periods and integrates the changes that followed 1989 into a more substantial historical perspective. The author team address the crucial themes in recent European history on a chapter-by-chapter basis that gives comprehensive coverage to the whole of the European region for topics such as borders, states, empires, democracy, justice, markets and futures. The volume highlights the fact that Europe was made less by wars than is commonly thought, and more by the nature of the settlements - international, national, political, economic and social - that followed the two World Wars and the Cold War. It is an important, innovative text for all students and scholars of 20th-century European history.