This chapter discusses the historic antecedents to modern day international criminal tribunals. It begins with a discussion of the post-World War I 1919 International Commission on the Responsibility of the Authors of the War and the failure to prosecute Kaiser Wilhelm Hohenzollern, despite the Treaty of Versailles providing for such an arraignment. It then turns to the experience of World War II, and the adoption of the London Charter, which formed the basis of the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal (IMT). It describes the operation and convictions of the IMT, followed by an assessment of the critiques which label this tribunal as an example of victor’s justice. It then turns to the operation and convictions of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in Tokyo, and assesses critiques that this tribunal also was an example of victor’s justice. The chapter concludes by consider domestic prosecutions of World War II crimes, both under Control Council Law No. 10 and through military commissions in the Pacific sphere.

While the focus of the book is on the interstate use of force post-WWII, this chapter holds a rear mirror and offers a perspective of evolution of restraints that started long before states came into being. It recounts how human societies over the centuries became states free from widespread internal use of armed force and how great powers sought to avoid major armed conflicts through policies of balance of power and multilateral conferences. It describes how they developed common rules by concluding conventions and built institutions such as the League of Nations and the United Nations to create a rule-based order and mechanisms and methods to prevent the interstate use of force.

At the end of the war in Europe, the Allies wished to prosecute at Nuremberg some of the financiers and industrialists who had rearmed Germany and bankrolled the Nazi regime. But how could the actions of the German magnates be distinguished from those of their Allied equivalents? And at what point did legitimate profit-making, the object of every capitalist, turn into criminal profiteering, the subject of criminal proceedings? This question was never properly answered, but it is not surprising that the most active proponents of the idea of trying individuals for economic aggression hailed not from the capitalist world, but from the USSR.