The St James's Declaration on war crimes

On 13 January 1942, at St James’s Palace in London, representatives of nine countries occupied by Germany signed a joint declaration on the punishment of war crimes. The signatories were the governments-in-exile of Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Greece, the Netherlands, Yugoslavia, Luxembourg, Norway and Poland, together with the French National Committee of General Charles de Gaulle, which was not formally a government but represented Free France. The conference was chaired by the Polish Prime Minister and Commander-in-Chief, Władysław Sikorski. The signatories announced that the punishment of those guilty of crimes against civilians, “through the channel of organised justice”, was henceforth one of their principal war aims.

The document is often referred to as the “Punishment for War Crimes” declaration. It was under that title that the British government’s official publisher issued the text of the declaration and the accompanying documents in 1942; the act itself was known as the Inter-Allied Declaration signed at St James’s Palace. It is also worth noting that the declaration did not speak of the Germans alone: it covered the Reich’s allies and local collaborators as well.

Background: hostages, executions, expulsions

By the turn of 1941 and 1942 every country represented in London had endured at least several months of occupation, and Poland and the Czech lands considerably longer. In Poland the Germans had been shooting prisoners of war and civilians from the first weeks of the war, murdering the country’s leading classes, arresting the professors of the Jagiellonian University and sending them to concentration camps in Sonderaktion Krakau, and expelling hundreds of thousands of people from the territories annexed to the Reich. In the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia the demonstrations of autumn 1939 were followed by Sonderaktion Prag, and in September 1941 Reinhard Heydrich, newly appointed Deputy Reich Protector, declared a state of emergency; summary courts sentenced several hundred people to death, and the Protectorate’s Prime Minister, General Alois Eliáš, was himself sentenced to death.

In the summer and autumn of 1941, after the German attack on the Soviet Union, violence spread to countries that had until then been relatively quiet. On 16 September the chief of the OKW, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, ordered that 50 to 100 hostages be shot for every German killed by “communist insurgents”. In Serbia the Wehrmacht carried out the order to the letter: in October several thousand men, among them secondary-school pupils, were shot at Kraljevo and Kragujevac. In France, after the assassination of Karl Hotz in Nantes, the Germans shot 48 hostages. On Crete in the spring of 1941 paratroopers, in reprisal for the resistance of the islanders, massacred the men of Kondomari and razed Kandanos. In Norway Josef Terboven declared a state of emergency in Oslo in September 1941 and had two trade union leaders shot. On 7 December Keitel signed the guidelines later known as the “Night and Fog” decree, under which people in the West suspected of resistance were secretly deported to the Reich.

On 25 October 1941 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill issued separate statements on the execution of hostages. Roosevelt wrote that such terror would “sow the seeds of hatred which will one day bring fearful retribution”. Churchill declared that “retribution for these crimes must henceforward take its place among the major purposes of the war”. These, however, were the words of politicians, not a commitment by states. The governments of the occupied countries wanted something more: a joint, signed act that would promise justice rather than revenge.

The Polish and Czechoslovak initiative

The strongest push for such an act came from the Poles and the Czechoslovaks – the governments whose countries had lived longest under German occupation. The Polish government-in-exile had been collecting evidence of crimes since 1939. On 3 May 1941 it sent the Allied and neutral governments a lengthy note describing German policy in Poland, later published in English as the “Polish White Book”, and pressed for a joint declaration on the punishment of the perpetrators. The Czechoslovak President-in-exile, Edvard Beneš, who from the outbreak of war had linked the restoration of his state with a reckoning for the occupation, thought along the same lines. The two governments were working closely together at the time on plans for a Polish–Czechoslovak confederation.

The British approached the matter cautiously. According to historians of Allied policy on war crimes (among them Arieh Kochavi), the Foreign Office remembered the fiasco of twenty years earlier and feared commitments that could not be honoured, as well as German reprisals against British prisoners of war. The Treaty of Versailles had provided for Kaiser Wilhelm II to be put on trial and for German war criminals to be handed over to the Allies. The Netherlands refused to surrender the Kaiser, Germany refused to extradite its citizens, and of a list of some 900 names only a dozen or so people were brought before the German Reich Court in Leipzig in 1921; a few lenient sentences were handed down. That is precisely why the governments-in-exile decided to act on their own, inviting the great powers to attend as observers.

The conference at St James’s Palace

St James’s Palace had already hosted Allied meetings. On 12 June 1941 representatives of Great Britain, the Dominions and the governments-in-exile had announced there that they would fight together until victory, and on 24 September 1941 the governments-in-exile and the Soviet Union had adhered in the same place to the principles of the Atlantic Charter. The meeting of 13 January 1942, however, was convened by the occupied countries themselves, and the chair was entrusted to the Polish Prime Minister.

Prime ministers and ministers of foreign affairs or justice took their places at the table. The signatories were:

• for Belgium, Prime Minister Hubert Pierlot and Foreign Minister Paul-Henri Spaak;
• for Czechoslovakia, Prime Minister Jan Šrámek and Minister of State Hubert Ripka;
• for the French National Committee, General de Gaulle and the Commissioner for Foreign Affairs, Maurice Dejean;
• for Greece, Prime Minister Emmanouil Tsouderos and the Minister of Justice;
• for Luxembourg, Foreign Minister Joseph Bech and Minister of Justice Victor Bodson;
• for the Netherlands, Prime Minister Pieter Sjoerds Gerbrandy and the acting Foreign Minister, Edgar Michiels van Verduynen;
• for Norway, Foreign Minister Trygve Lie and Minister of Justice Terje Wold;
• for Poland, General Sikorski and Foreign Minister Edward Raczyński;
• for Yugoslavia, Prime Minister Slobodan Jovanović, who had succeeded General Dušan Simović in that office only two days earlier, and Foreign Minister Momčilo Ninčić.

Representatives of Great Britain, including the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, together with those of the British Dominions, the United States, the Soviet Union and China, attended as guests and observers. The observers signed nothing. According to reports of the conference, however, the Chinese representative declared that his country intended to apply the same principles to the Japanese in occupied Chinese territory. Less than two weeks earlier all these states, Free France excepted, had signed the Declaration by United Nations in Washington, pledging to fight together until victory. The London declaration added to that struggle an aim on which the Washington document had been silent.

The text of the declaration

The text was short. In the preamble the signatories stated that since the beginning of the war, which had been caused by its policy of aggression, Germany had instituted in the occupied countries a “regime of terror”, characterised among other things by imprisonment, mass expulsions, the execution of hostages and massacres. They added that the same acts of violence were being committed by the Reich’s allies and, in certain countries, by the occupier’s accomplices. They recalled that international law, and in particular the Hague Convention of 1907 respecting the laws and customs of war on land, did not permit an occupying power to commit acts of violence against civilians, to disregard the laws in force or to overthrow national institutions.

One sentence of the preamble explained the purpose of the whole declaration: international solidarity was needed “to prevent these acts of violence from being met simply with acts of vengeance by the general public”, and to satisfy the sense of justice of the civilised world. The governments-in-exile knew that liberation might bring lynch law, and they wanted to announce in advance that the reckoning would be the work of courts, not of mobs.

In the operative part the signatories:

1. affirmed that acts of violence against civilian populations had nothing in common with the conception of an act of war or of a political crime as understood by civilised nations;
2. took note of the declarations made on 25 October 1941 by the President of the United States and the British Prime Minister;
3. placed among their principal war aims the punishment, through the channel of organised justice, of those guilty of or responsible for these crimes, whether they had ordered them, perpetrated them or participated in them;
4. resolved, in a spirit of international solidarity, to see to it that those guilty and responsible, whatever their nationality, were sought out, handed over to justice and judged, and that the sentences pronounced were carried out.

The first point had legal weight: crimes against civilians were not to be treated as political offences, which had traditionally been exempt from extradition. The formula covering those who “ordered, perpetrated or participated in” the crimes heralded the liability of both the perpetrators and their superiors. The declaration was drawn up in nine copies and transmitted to the governments of Great Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union in the form of a note.

Silence about the Jews

The declaration did not name any group of victims. It spoke of the civilian population of the occupied countries, not of victims singled out because of their nationality, race or religion. By January 1942 the mass murder of Jews was already under way in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union, recorded among other places in the Jäger Report; more than 33,000 people had been killed at Babi Yar in September 1941, and since 8 December Jews had been murdered in gas vans at Chełmno on the Ner. News of these crimes reached London only in fragments.

According to historians (among them Arieh Kochavi and Michael Fleming), the World Jewish Congress and the Jewish members of the Polish National Council, the advisory parliament in exile, among them Ignacy Schwarzbart, reproached the authors of the declaration for leaving out the crimes against the Jews. They were reportedly told in reply that the declaration covered all inhabitants of the occupied countries and that singling out the Jews might be read as accepting the occupier’s racial categories. An explicit condemnation of the extermination of the Jews came only with the joint declaration of the United Nations of 17 December 1942, issued after the Raczyński Note of 10 December.

The great powers respond

The declaration was a political act without executive force: its signatories had neither authority over their own countries nor the means to prosecute anyone. The historian Julia Eichenberg points out, however, that it was the first formulation of a common Allied position on war crimes, and that it placed the issue on the agenda of every subsequent discussion of war aims and the future peace. The great powers felt obliged to respond, even if it took them many months. On 21 August 1942 Roosevelt announced that those who had committed crimes against the populations of the occupied countries would be brought before courts. On 8 September Churchill repeated the pledge in the House of Commons. On 14 October the Soviet government, replying to notes from the Polish and Czechoslovak governments, came out in favour of trying the Nazi leaders before a special international tribunal.

The occupied countries did not wait for the great powers. In February 1942 the Polish Council of Ministers adopted a resolution announcing its intention to try German war criminals, and a war crimes office was set up within the government under a young lawyer, Manfred Lachs, later a judge of the International Court of Justice. In London, lawyers from the governments-in-exile worked on definitions of crimes and on the principles of extradition in inter-Allied bodies in which the Poles played an active part.

Place in the war

The London declaration did not stop the crimes it described. Only a few days after it was signed, on 21–24 January 1942, Hungarian soldiers and gendarmes shot Serbs and Jews on the frozen Danube at Novi Sad; the whole operation in the Bačka region, which lasted from 4 to 29 January, is estimated to have claimed some 4,000 lives. It was exactly the kind of case the preamble had described: a crime committed by an ally of the Reich on the soil of an occupied country. In 1946 the generals responsible for the massacre were sentenced to death in Hungary, then handed over to Yugoslavia and executed.

On 7 October 1942 Great Britain and the United States proposed the creation of a commission to investigate war crimes. The United Nations War Crimes Commission began work in London on 20 October 1943 with seventeen member states, including all the signatories of the St James’s Palace declaration; the Soviet Union did not join. By 1948 it had registered more than 36,000 suspects. On 30 October 1943, in the Moscow Declaration, the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union announced that Germans guilty of crimes would be sent back to the countries in which they had committed them, while the cases of the major war criminals would be dealt with jointly by the great powers. The culmination of this process was the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (PL), established by the London Agreement of 8 August 1945. On 1 October 1946 it sentenced twelve defendants to death, among them Keitel and Hans Frank. The principle laid down in the Moscow Declaration – handing perpetrators over to the countries where they had committed their crimes – made it possible after the war to extradite to Poland, among others, Rudolf Höss, who was tried before the Supreme National Tribunal and hanged at Auschwitz in 1947.

The declaration of 13 January 1942 was thus the first link in that chain: the first joint act in which states of the anti-Hitler coalition recognised the judicial reckoning with crimes as a war aim on a par with the liberation of their own lands. Its force was moral and political rather than legal. Yet the idea that perpetrators should face a court instead of revenge, and that those who gave the orders should answer for their actions too, proved lasting. One of the signatories, the Norwegian Trygve Lie, became in 1946 the first Secretary-General of the United Nations, within whose framework the Nuremberg principles and the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide were later formulated.