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.

Chapter 4 argues that the nascent community of international criminal law practice coalesced around the judgments issued by the International Military Tribunal (IMT) in Nuremberg and International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) in Tokyo after the end of the Second World War. The United Nations (UN) tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and Rwanda (ICTR), established in the 1990s, significantly developed the legal rules regulating the attribution of individual criminal responsibility for mass atrocities, further consolidating the international criminal justice field. Chapter 4 argues that, from the perspective of intersubjective legalism, both the post-Second World War tribunals and the UN tribunals displayed sound legal reasoning in the assessment of criminal responsibility for two reasons: Firstly, they followed a consistent normative logic, namely that morality was the animating force behind legality. Secondly, many judges and outside legal commentators shared that normative logic. Nevertheless, over time the UN tribunals polarized the international criminal justice community of practice on questions concerning the scope and requirements of criminal responsibility rules.