The trial of the Kaiser

We live in an age of anniversaries. The trial of the Kaiser appeared in the centenary year of the armistice that ended the First World War—and just 80 years after Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich in September 1938, announcing peace in our time. (Kristallnacht occurred a couple of months after Munich. In the following year Germany invaded Poland.) Despite German acceptance of article 227 of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, providing for Kaiser Wilhelm to be tried, in the end he only faced the court of public opinion. (See p. 201 for its remarkable terms.) It is hard to understand how ‘one of the most distinguished international lawyers of the twentieth century’ could write that article 227 was ‘a solemn warning to any future aggressor’ (p. 304). Perhaps international lawyers need to be optimists. Writings on international law are too rarely a good read. But readers will recognize well before chapter seven (an account of the abortive attempt by some bumptious young American Army officers to remove the ex-Kaiser from his bolthole in Holland) that this book is an exception. As William Schabas says: ‘The riddles and the controversies that characterize the debates about international criminal justice at the end of the First World War all resonate today. Some have been largely resolved. Others remain controversial’ (p. 315). The riddles and controversies are vividly portrayed—the rhetoric of French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau and Britain's Lloyd George; the reservations of Robert Lansing, the American Secretary of State; the flip-flopping of US President Woodrow Wilson; the weary realism of officials at the British Foreign Office. Good quotes abound—Schabas himself is very quotable—and the author's style carries readers enjoyably along. But his real achievement lies in the book's carefully organized and meticulously documented substance. Its 18 chapters strike a successful balance between following the history of the project of trying the Kaiser and analysing the issues it had to confront, legal as well as political—although this sometimes necessitates flashbacks and repetition. The series of committees and commissions can be confusing, but concentration is rewarded; indeed, the chief players themselves sometimes got mixed up, or ignored the work of their pathfinders

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