Investigating the acts of desperate men.

• Author: Fruchtbaum, Harold
• Position: UN history entrenched in the United Nations War Crimes Commission of 1943

Before there was a UN, there was an organization bearing its name--the United Nations War Crimes Commission (UNWCC). On 20 October 1943, more than two years before the UN Charter came into effect, representatives of 17 nations--Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, Czechoslovakia, France, Greece, India, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, South Africa, United Kingdom, United States and Yugoslavia--met in London at the British Foreign Office to establish the UNWCC. They gave the new agency the tasks of receiving information about war crimes, developing and recording evidence, identifying the persons responsible, and referring cases to the Governments concerned for legal action.

Well before the delegates met to create the UNWCC, a flood of reports about atrocities against civilians in Nazi-occupied Europe had moved public opinion, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and Governments to demand the punishment of war criminals at the end of the global conflict. In a message from 10 Downing Street on 25 October 1941, United Kingdom Prime Minister Winston Churchill denounced as "butcheries" the execution of hostages by "Hitler's Nazis" in France and elsewhere.

"Retribution for these crimes must henceforward take its place among the major purposes of the war", he said. That same day in Washington, United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt called these reprisal murders "the acts of desperate men who know in their hearts that they cannot win". He said: "Frightfulness can never bring peace to Europe. It only sows the seeds of hatred which will one day bring frightful retribution."

Under the auspices of the inter-Allied Conference on the Punishment of War Crimes, the representatives of nine occupied countries--Belgium, Czechoslovakia, France, Greece, Luxembourg, Norway Netherlands, Poland and Yugoslavia--met at St. James's Palace in London and, on 13 january 1942, signed a declaration placing "among their principal war aims the punishment, through the channel of organized justice", of those responsible for acts of violence against the civilian populations.

Responding to information about new waves of atrocities in their countries, the nine Governments together presented notes to Great Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States in July 1942, urgently appealing for timely measures "to save...