Since the nineteenth century, the development of international humanitarian law has been marked by complex entanglements of legal theory, historical trauma, criminal prosecution, historiography, and politics. All of these factors have played a role in changing views on the applicability of international law and human-rights ideas to state-organized violence, which in turn have been largely driven by transnational responses to German state crimes. Here, Annette Weinke gives a groundbreaking long-term history of the political, legal and academic debates concerning German state and mass violence in the First World War, during the National Socialist era and the Holocaust, and under the GDR.

Annette Weinke is an Assistant Professor of History at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena. She has previously been a visiting fellow at Princeton University's History Department. She is the co-editor of Toward a New Moral World Order? (2013) and Human Rights and Humanitarian Intervention (2017).