Here's a recent release from Georgetown University Press:
Human Rights after Hitler: The Lost History of Prosecuting Axis War Crimes (March 2017), by
Dan Plesch (University of London). A description from the Press:
Human Rights after Hitler reveals thousands of forgotten US
and Allied war crimes prosecutions against Hitler and other Axis war
criminals based on a popular movement for justice that stretched from
Poland to the Pacific. These cases provide a great foundation for
twenty-first-century human rights and accompany the achievements of the
Nuremberg trials and postwar conventions. They include indictments of
perpetrators of the Holocaust made while the death camps were still
operating, which confounds the conventional wisdom that there was no
official Allied response to the Holocaust at the time. This history also
brings long overdue credit to the United Nations War Crimes Commission
(UNWCC), which operated during and after World War II.
From the
1940s until a recent lobbying effort by Plesch and colleagues, the
UNWCC’s files were kept out of public view in the UN archives under
pressure from the US government. The book answers why the commission and
its files were closed and reveals that the lost precedents set by these
cases have enormous practical utility for prosecuting war crimes today.
They cover US and Allied prosecutions of torture, including “water
treatment,” wartime sexual assault, and crimes by foot soldiers who were
“just following orders.” Plesch’s book will fascinate anyone with an
interest in the history of the Second World War as well as provide
ground-breaking revelations for historians and human rights
practitioners alike.
Lots more information is available
here, at the book's website.
