Newhouse Fellows Series: Franziska Seraphim

How to Punish War Criminals? Prisons in US-Occupied Japan and Germany

As the ICC debates whether to institute a central prison for international war criminals, it turns out that we know almost nothing about how thousands of Allied-convicted Nazi and imperial Japanese were punished after World War II. I shift the historical lens from the usual focus on courtroom convictions for specific crimes (keyword Nuremberg) to the mass execution of sentences in penal institutions across Asia and Europe and especially the American military prisons Sugamo in Tokyo and Landsberg in Bavaria. They turn out to have been surprisingly interactive, networked, and malleable places where “victor’s justice” and what I call “loser’s justice” met--where criminal judgment morphed into social rehabilitation in the framing stages of the Cold War. What can these prisons as distinct places tell us about justice lived and experienced rather than envisioned in the legal mind? 

This talk takes up a visually arresting part of a book manuscript entitled Geographies of Justice, which assembles a legal geography of the Allied war crimes program after World War II as a global endeavor. I reconstruct the spaces and places that served as sources of legitimation and contestation of legal processes, from (colonial) territoriality and military law to the penal systems used in military prisons and finally to legislation enabling the reintegration of the convicted in society after their release. Encouraged by US penal practices, imprisoned war criminals created a home away from home in Landsberg and in Sugamo, the latter richly illustrated by the prison’s inmate cartoonists and woodblock artists. The talk draws preliminary conclusions about how we might think about war crimes penology comparatively and globally.

This presentation will be livestreamed via Zoom. Click here to pre-register for the livestream.

This event is free and open to the public. No prior registration is required for in-person attendance.