Creating international humanitarian law (IHL): World War II, the Allied occupations, and the treaties that followed

This study explores Allied actions towards the defeated enemy after World War II, and their impact on the postwar evolution of IHL. Determined to extirpate the last vestiges of the Nazi regime, the victors insisted on unconditional surrender as they sought a legal carte blanche over the defeated foe. Many U.S. and British officials believed Germany could now be dismembered or divided at will, its economy and territories managed and social and political structures altered with little concern for the population. But many acts of the Four Powers appeared to be incompatible with the regulations governing "belligerent occupation" as laid out in the 1907 Hague Rules of Land Warfare, and with the provisions of POW status as outlined in the 1929 Geneva Convention. The discussions that ensued both among and within the various Allied governments revealed huge differences in approaches to compliance with IHL.; The research for this work was drawn from a vast body of legal and historical literature in several languages, and thousands of documents obtained from archives in the United States, Great Britain, and Canada. Among the more explicit Allied violations examined are the employment of POWs in mine clearing work, the denial of political asylum, and the reduction of ration levels for civilians in the occupied territories. In these and other actions, some Allied officials believed non-compliance was justified because existing international law had been outmoded by modern warfare, and the situation in postwar Germany and Japan was even more radically different from anything envisioned by earlier treaty framers. Others believed Germany's utter defeat required innovations in international law to meet a new situation that would later be retroactively recognized by the global community.; What is most significant is that the western democracies closed many of their own loopholes during the revisions of IHL contained in postwar treaties such as the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the 1949 Geneva Conventions, and the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. The latter continue to provide the foundation for much of today's IHL regime.