Staging History: Archives, Objects and Architecture


International Workshop
in Wolfenbüttel
16-17 May 2019

The trial before the Belgian military tribunal in 1950

On 17 April 1950, the trial of six guards of the Wolfenbüttel prison began before the military tribunal of Brussels. The six codefendants were, to varying degrees, accused of murder on 40 Belgian, French, Dutch and Polish detainees. Additionally, they were charged with deprivation of food or care on seven mentally or physically weak inmates. Finally, 29 counts of assault and battery on Belgian nationals were also to be judged. Of the 17.000 prisoners (not including those sentenced to death) detained at the prison between 1942 and 1945, 377 died. In the end, one defendant was acquitted in the first instance, two others by the appeals court.

Connecting Documentary Collections

The little-known Wolfenbüttel trial held in Brussels in 1950 produced an exceptional set of documents and witness accounts. It is a rather extraordinary coincidence that the Wolfenbüttel prison has also been a latecomer on the scene of memorials and museums on former sites of Nazi crimes in the Federal Republic of Germany. In April 2018, the Memorial contacted the JUSINBELLGIUM team. Consequently, the Wolfenbüttel trial records were digitised as a priority by the State Archives of Belgium. The digital documents shared with the Memorial will be part of the new exhibition.

Staging History, Handling Mass Documentation

In November 2019, the new Gedenkstätte in der JVA Wolfenbüttel, adjacent to the Wolfenbüttel prison, still in use today, will be inaugurated.

To discuss how archives can be used as exhibits in museums and to reflect on connecting archives and making them accessible, the Jusinbellgium team and the Wolfenbüttel memorial team will hold an international workshop on 16 and 17 May 2019 in Wolfenbüttel.

For more information on the trial, do not hesitate to browse through the online archives: https://www.legal-tools.org/en/browse/ltfolder/0_38528/#results

A failed precedent? Attempts at international justice in the wake of the first World War and their legacy

On 22 August 2018, Pieter Lagrou gave a keynote lecture at the Conference To End All Wars, in Ypres, Belgium.

The Gendarmerie in Grammont. Between October and November 1917, the Geheime Feldpolizei arrested children in Grammont for alleged sabotage of the railways in September-October 1917. The trial of Max Ramdohr was held in Leipzig in June 1921. 

Appraisals of the various attempts to bring the authors of war crimes to justice after 1918 are univocal: they all resulted in pitiful failure and constituted the scenario of disaster the victorious allies of 1945 were determined to avoid.

The inter-allied special tribunal to judge the Kaiser as foreseen in the Versailles Treaty never materialized. Germany, Turkey and even neutral countries like The Netherlands refused to extradite suspects.

Trials held in Leipzig and Istanbul were largely perceived as making a mockery of justice and the trials in absentia held out of spite in France and Belgium were considered illegitimate by the nations of the defendants and ultimately frustrating by the nations of the victims. The accumulated effect of these failures was the triumph of a culture of impunity, with dramatic consequences during the second World War.

This blighting and widely shared assessment does call for a reassessment. The various attempts to bring war criminals to justice were the result of grassroots initiatives to gather evidence, record testimony and invent ways to challenge standing practice that national states and national armies had the exclusive and sovereign right to bring their own soldiers to trial.

The sheer size of popular involvement in initiatives to collect evidence on crimes in anticipation of legal process turned it, in all belligerent societies, into a weapon of mass documentation.

Neither can these attempts be reduced to the judicial version of nationalist propaganda campaigns denouncing the enemy. Part of the public opinion, of the political leaders and of the judicial profession in Germany and Turkey were sincerely committed to reign in the culture of impunity in which their national armies and their political allies acted and to distance themselves of some of the most heinous crimes committed in their name.

Investigating judges and political leaders in countries that had been exposed to these crimes framed some of their cases in such a way as to seize on what they perceived as overtures on the side of the judiciary of their former enemies and establish a dialogue of shared norms of what constituted humanity, atrocity, war crimes and due legal process.

The attempts were ultimately unsuccessful but they did constitute a crucial and massive attempt to defeat impunity and, in a way, to End All Wars of unlimited recourse to violence.

From Belgium to the Hague via Berlin and Moscow

On 10 July 2018, Delphine Lauwers gave a paper at the International Society for First World War Studies conference “Recording, Narrating and Archiving the First World War”, held in Melbourne.

From Belgium to the Hague via Berlin and Moscow: Documenting war crimes and the quest for international justice

 

 

 

 

 

 

Being able to explore new sources on the Great War, a hundred years after it ended is a quite unique and exciting experience for any WWI historian. But the very nature of the documents that we are dealing with in the present case makes it even more thrilling. We are indeed facing hundreds of investigation and prosecution files, produced by both military and civil jurisdictions during and after the Great War in Belgium. These records offer new material for the study of WWI in Belgium, as well as of the history of international criminal law.

But why would such a rich, fascinating collection remain unexploited? All of it was in fact packed together with a vast amount of various documents, and kept more than 2.500 km away from Brussels for 57 years. It seems like the very existence of some of these documents fell into oblivion as time passed. Before diving into these amazing “sleeping beauties”, let us briefly explain why they have traveled that far and have remained largely unheard of until recently.

International Conference 9 & 10 January 2018

A Century of Pioneering Case-Law in the Digital Era. Belgian Precedents of International Justice in International Perspective (1914-2014)

 

 

 

Download the complete programme 

Register for the conference and Archive visit

The conference discusses the sources of new forms of international justice in three directions:  (1) Case-law in the digital era: archival and legal challenges of online access (2) German Atrocities, 1914. Litigation, Reconciliation, Justice (3) The three moments of International Justice (>1918; >1945; >1990s): Learning from failure or building on precedent. It brings together historians, jurists, anthropologists, archivists, and legal professionals to debate the challenges of access and critical interpretation of sources of (inter)national justice.

The panel discussions and the project presentation will discuss these specific moments and forms of justice through the research experiences of the conference participants. They will question the uses of digital sources, the technological challenges, the ethics of research and the accessibility policies.

Archives as a larger heritage and as material for research will be questioned in the perspective of the emergence of a new form of “public history” in the wake of extensive online access of documentary collections. The diversity of these judicial sources, the challenges of their interpretation and their uses in the humanities and the legal sciences will be debated.

Keynote Lecture

Kim Christian Priemel (University of Oslo) will deliver a lecture on his book The Betrayal. The Nuremberg Trials and German Divergence.
The lecture will be introduced by Pieter Lagrou (ULB)
Where? ULB – Solbosch Campus – Room AY2.108
When? 9 January 2018 – 16h0-18h00

Conference Venue

  • Day 1: 9 January 2018
    Université libre de Bruxelles. Campus: Solbosch. Room: AY2.108
    Av. F.D. Roosevelt 50. 1050 Brussels
  • Day 2: 10 January 2018
    Dépôt Cuvelier, Archives Générales du Royaume 2. Reading Room
    Rue du Houblon 26-28. 1000 Brussels

Conference participants

– Vanessa Voisin (CERCEC)
– Edwin Klijn (NIOD)
– Paul Drossens (State Archives of Belgium)
– Gertjan Desmet (State Archives of Belgium)
– Chantal Kesteloot (Cegesoma)
– Kim Christian Priemel (University of Oslo)
– John Horne (Trinity College Dublin)
– Alan Kramer (Trinity College Dublin)
– Martin Kohlrausch (KU Leuven)
– Xavier Rousseaux (UCL)
– Sebastiaan Vandenbogaerde (UGent)

– Thijs Bouwknegt (NIOD)
– Élisabeth Claverie (ISP)
– Luc Walleyn (Lawyer)
– Pieter Lagrou (ULB)
– Jan Wouters (Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies)
– Wolfgang Form (International Research and Documentation Centre for War Crimes Trials)
– Marie-Anne Weisers (ULB)
– Hendrik Vandekerckhove (Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies)
– Delphine Lauwers (State Archives of Belgium)
– Ornella Rovetta (ULB)

Organizing committee

– Pieter Lagrou, Professor, Université libre de Bruxelles, Centre de recherche MMC
– Xavier Rousseaux, Research Director FNRS, Université catholique de Louvain
– Ornella Rovetta, Post-doctoral researcher, Université libre de Bruxelles, Centre de recherche MMC
– Delphine Lauwers, Post-doctoral researcher, Archives Générales du Royaume
– Hendrik Vandekerckhove, PhD researcher, KU Leuven, Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies

Scientific committee

– Pieter Lagrou, Professor, Université libre de Bruxelles, Centre de recherche MMC
– Xavier Rousseaux, Research Director FNRS, Université catholique de Louvain 
– Wolfgang Form, Philipps-Universität Marburg, Research Director of the International Research and Documentation Center for War Crimes Trials
– Jan Wouters, Professor, KU Leuven, Director of the Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies
– Paul Drossens, Head of State Archives in Ghent
– Vanessa Voisin, CERCEC, Coordinator of ANR « Les crimes de guerre nazis dans le prétoire, Europe centrale et orientale, 1943-1991 (2017-2021) ».

03/2016, Workshop: ‘Defeating Impunity, Promoting International Justice’

Defeating Impunity poster

In March 2016, Pieter Lagrou, Pierre-Olivier de Broux, Ornella Rovetta and Thomas Graditzky organized the International conference ‘Defeating Impunity, Promoting International Justice. The Archival Trail, 1914-2014’ in Brussels at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Organized within the framework of the Interuniversity Attraction Pole ‘Justice & Populations: the Belgian experience in International Perspective’, it actively involved all the members of the Jusinbellgium team.

Pieter Lagrou and Ornella Rovetta presented a common paper titled ‘Torture on Trial, 2014-2014: the Words the Crime Elicits’, exploring the possibility to investigate legal discourses and practices in a historical perspective. It offered a reflection on torture accounts in three different judicial contexts, in the aftermath of the two World Wars and after the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda in 1994. By doing so, it described how the crimes of torture were brought before national and international courts through three cases: the Jean-Paul Akayesu trial (1995-1998), the trial of the Geheime Feldpolizei 530 (1950) in Belgium and the Max Ramdohr trial in Leipzig (1921), a case brought by Belgium before this court. Wolfgang Form, an international partner in the Jusinbellgium project, presented a paper about the gathering, digitization and classification work he realized on the United Nations War Crimes Commission records. Marie-Anne Weisers dealt with “The Struggle of Belgian Magistrates to Punish Crimes against the Jews (1947-1951)” in her paper. She focused on the work of the Belgian judiciary, after War World II, regarding the war crimes committed by Germans against the Jews. As the outcome of these trials has generally been considered as a failure, she shed light on the the origins of this failure, showing that there has been a will to prosecute the criminals who committed crimes against the Jews in Belgium. Delphine Lauwers gave a presentation on the Jusinbellgium project and Hendrik Vandekerckhove actively participated in the debates and discussions during the two days.

The conference aimed at combining views from the field with scholarly research in the social and legal sciences and paid close attention to archives and primary sources. How do scholars working on judicial sources cope with the different filters that stand between the sources they work on and the events and processes they study? How can we map networks of militancy and systematic documentation gathering in the wake of war and their impact on national dynamics? Did practitioners, in the 1940s, in the 1990s, ground their legal framework, their investigations, their procedural approach and their final verdicts on their familiarity with national and international judicial precedent?

The conference discussed (inter)national records of engagement with international law and justice from 1914 to 2016 and questioned the way in which the judiciary dealt with gross violations of international law in the wake of war and how legal actors responded to the challenges of an emergent and developing set of international laws. We welcomed researchers from Belgium, France, the United States and Germany.

Full programme: Defeating Impunity – programme 9-10 March

programme 9-10 mars bis

 

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