The Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau, 1939-1945 - Reviews

Reviews

In his review in the American Journal of International Law, Benjamin B. Ferencz, an American prosecutor at Nuremberg wrote:

Every victim of inhumanity, regardless of nationality, race or creed, should be entitled to the equal protection of the law. The stated primary purpose of this interesting and well-written work is to minimize the violations of international law in any future armed conflicts. If that goal is to be achieved, it is not enough merely to know that the rules are often broken by all sides. Americans learned that lesson at My Lai. There must be continued improvement in the codes in order to meet the changing modes of warfare. There must be inculcation and acceptance of humanitarian values, even in time of war. Most important, there must be a more certain, objective and effective judicial machinery, national and international, to improve the enforcement of international law and the rules of war. The de Zayas book sheds light on a problem that has not yet been resolved.

A review by Professor Christopher Greenwood in the Cambridge Law Journal notes:

This is an excellent book...all the cases examined have to be seen against the background of the Holocaust and the atrocities committed by the German armed forces and SS...nevertheless...atrocities do not excuse the kind of crimes detailed in this book.

Concerning the methodology of this book, Professor Riedlsperger wrote:

"Dr. de Zayas first came upon the previously undiscovered 226 volumes of WUSt documents as a Fulbright fellow on leave from his studies in International Law at Harvard. After concluding his legal studies, de Zayas subsequently earned a PhD. in history and the University of Göttingen, where he later became an associate. The Institute supported the research on which this study is based and arranged for the assistance of a Dutch international law specialist, Dr. Walter Rabus...Mindful that the WUSt might have been manipulated by Goebbels's Propaganda Ministry, the authors were punctilious in their verification. They carefully examined the documents for internal consistency and continuity and then verified the reports and testimony, where possible, with judges, medical examiners and witnesses still alive. In addition, they compared WUSt documents with those of other German agencies in seven additional German archives, and with documents in British, Dutch, Swiss, and American archives. In this exhaustive analysis, it becomes clear that the WUSt operated with scrupulous objectivity and therefore that its documents constitute a valuable new source for the study of the conduct of war. This carefully documented administrative history together with its excellent bibliography will therefore become an important introduction to this extensive archive. The Wehrmacht-Untersuchungsstelle is at once an interesting history of an internal agency of the Third Reich and an important archival and historiographical contribution to the study of the war." German Studies Review, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Feb., 1981), pp. 150–151.

The book was positively reviewed in the German Press, including in the Historische Zeitschrift, in the leading weekly DIE ZEIT and in the SPIEGEL.

In the Preface to the first German edition of the book, the Director of the Institute of International Law of the University of Göttingen, Professor Dr. Dietrich Rauschning (subsequently a judge in the Human Rights Chamber of Bosnia and Herzegovina under the Dayton Accords) wrote about the close supervision of the project by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the experts of the five principal archives where the research was conducted, and about the distance and care taken by de Zayas and the members of his team in evaluating the records of the Wehrmacht-Untersuchungsstelle. See final report to the Deutsche Forschunggemeinschaft, dated September 1979.