Ilse Koch’s husband was commandant of Buchenwald, one of Germany’s first and largest concentration camps. As the only woman among 31 people indicted for crimes committed there, she became infamous.
The US faces many of the same problems Germans faced after World War II: how to reject, punish and delegitimize the enemies of democracy. There are lessons in how Germany handled that challenge.
When faced with US rejection of international criminal justice, today’s supporters of the ICC often invoke the country’s Nuremberrg leadership. However, this notion is based on a distorted image of the 1945-46 trials.
Raising the status of the African languages to that of official languages in South Africa post-1994 led to an explosion of translation and interpreting work in local and foreign languages.
The horror of the human experiments by Nazi doctors led to the Nuremberg Code but the international declaration it inspired was watered down for political purposes.