A World History of War Crimes: From Antiquity to the Present by Michael Bryant

Author:Michael Bryant [Bryant, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2020-12-10T00:00:00+00:00

The collapse of the plan to try the Kaiser

On November 28, 1918, the Imperial War Cabinet unanimously approved Lloyd George’s request for a trial of Wilhelm II. In early December the prime minister then tried to rally support for the plan from the Allies at an Inter-Allied Conference in London. Within a short time, Lloyd George, Clemenceau, and the Italian premier Vittorio Orlando had agreed to the Kaiser’s prosecution. At the meeting the Allied leaders also discussed putting other accused war criminals on trial, including the crown prince Friedrich Wilhelm, the ex-chief of the German general staff, General Erich von Falkenhayn, and Talat Paşa, the leader of the Young Turks, who as minister of the interior was implicated in the mass murder of the Armenians during their deportation from the Ottoman Empire’s eastern territories. The Allied leaders were unable to reach agreement on trials ancillary to the Kaiser’s, but the decision to prosecute Wilhelm fulfilled Lloyd George’s main objective for the meeting. The next step was to broach the plan with US President Woodrow Wilson and elicit his consent to it. Participants in the Inter-Allied Conference learned, however, that Wilson was still considering how best to deal with the Kaiser.20

In early 1919 the Allies met in Paris to create an agenda for the peace conference. At this time, Wilson was still dithering on the issue of trying Kaiser Wilhelm. Lloyd George suggested that a panel be convened to investigate the Germans’ responsibility for starting the war. Wilson demurred on the ground that the Allied leaders, he believed, could resolve the issue on their own. In his history of Allied war crimes policy at the Paris Peace Conference, James Willis assumes that Wilson at this time would have agreed to a policy of outlawing and exiling the Kaiser, much as the European powers had dealt with Napoleon.21 On the opening day of the conference, January 18, 1919, Lloyd George and Clemenceau arranged for German war crimes to occupy a position at the top of the agenda. Wilson’s view that the Allies could themselves settle the issue was brushed aside, and a “Commission on the Responsibility of the Authors of the War and the Enforcement of Penalties” was formed to investigate the cause of the war, violations of the Law of War during the fighting, and the prospect of trying accused war criminals. In the ensuing months, the Commission would pursue its inquiry outside of the public eye.22

At roughly the same time as the opening of the conference and the origination of the Commission, Wilson received a memorandum from his legal advisor David H. Miller. Miller sharply differed with the pro-trial perspective of the British and the French on the Kaiser’s criminal liability. Bracketing moral from legal considerations, the memo constructed its analysis on a bedrock question: at the time of the alleged crime, was it prohibited by a criminal law, i.e., a law that threatened punishment for violation? Miller answered this question in the negative, stating that in August 1914 international law did not criminalize aggressive warfare.

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