CYIL vol. 15 (2024)

PETR VÁLEK CYIL 15 ȍ2024Ȏ international criminal court for Germany, he met French Professor Henri Donnedieu de Vabres who later became Judge in Nuremberg. Here Frank acted like a coward: at first he seemed to accept some part of responsibility for execution of the “final solution” in the General Government, however, in his last statement, he took it back by claiming that all guilt of himself and Germany was erased by the subsequent crimes of Russians, Poles and Czechs against Germans. The personality of this Nazi is also described through the dialogue between the author and Frank’s son Niklas, who is ashamed of his father, which is put into contrast with the defense of Wächter by his son Horst. From the perspective of international law, Philippe Sands explained the different approaches of Hersch Lauterpacht and Rafael Lemkin to the legal qualification of Holocaust. While Lauterpacht focused on the protection of an individual and developed the notion of the crimes against humanity, Lemkin preferred the protection of a national, racial or religious group, which was central to his definition of genocide. Importantly, the author suggested that from the two outstanding legal minds, Lauterpacht was more practical and pragmatic, while Lemkin perhaps more idealistic and emotional. In this context, Lauterpacht was aware that the crime of genocide would be much harder to prove before a court, since it is necessary to establish the specific intent of a perpetrator to destroy to above-mentioned group as such. It also seems that Lauterpacht was better in convincing the Government representatives to adopt his approach. For these reasons, Lauterpacht turned out to be more successful during and after the Second World War, as his concept of crimes against humanity was incorporated into Article 6(c) of the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal, while the crime of genocide was not. In spite of this, the term of genocide was, after all, used in the indictment by the British Prosecutor Sir Maxwell Fyfe against Konstantin von Neurath, Reichsprotektor of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, when qualifying his acts leading towards eradication of the Czech intelligentsia. As such, the crime of genocide entered into records from the Nuremberg trial. Despite their different personalities and achievements, both Lauterpacht and Lemkin had in common the determination to put the perpetrators of Holocaust before a court and to prevent such crime for the future. For a better understanding of the development of international law during the Second World War and afterwards, a few pages should have been probably added on two issues. First, according to the reviewed book, it may seem that the adoption of the concept of crimes against humanity was an achievement of solely Hersch Lauterpacht and the United States. Nevertheless, this success was also result of strong diplomatic support of States represented in the United Nations War Crimes Commission, such as Czechoslovakia and the Netherlands, as I tried to describe in CYIL No. 7 in 2016 (“The United Nations War Crimes Commission and the Czechoslovak Charges in Relation to Auschwitz and Birkenau”). Second, there should be at least an epilogue on the adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide on December 9, 1948, and that the definition of genocide from this Convention was copied into the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Such an epilogue would perhaps put Rafael Lemkin into a better light. It should be added that the possibility of negotiating the Convention on Prevention and Punishment of Crimes Against Humanity is still under consideration in the Sixth (Legal) Committee of the UN General Assembly. When it comes to the visual aspect of the comics, its evaluation is inevitably subjective. As for myself, I like the style of Christophe Picaud for his sense for detail and accuracy –

364