Franziska Seraphim

In the 1950s, social reconstruction policies in Japan and the Germanies focused on redrawing the post-occupation social body at the expense of wrestling with the political and moral legacies of the war. Both societies worked to rehabilitate as “fully” Japanese or German those nationals who bore the brunt of Allied policies, e.g. those branded war criminals, by transforming an issue of criminal justice into a social and humanitarian problem. This project is a social history of the Allied War Crimes Trial Program in transnational and comparative perspective and rests on an epistemological shift from the courtroom to the prison, and from the trials to post-trial clemency to illustrate a critical aspect of reconstruction after foreign occupation more generally.