Something a little different this morning: my interview with two authors on their books about war crimes.
In Safe Haven: The United Kingdom’s Investigations into Nazi Collaborators and the Failure of Justice, the former BBC journalist Jon Silverman asks why the much-contested War Crimes Act 1991 led to only one criminal conviction.
In Bystander Society: Conformity and Complicity in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, the distinguished historian Mary Fulbrook uses a recently discovered contemporary archive to argue that how ordinary Germans reacted to what they saw as war approached in the 1930s was more important than how much they knew at the time.
The interview was recorded in March at Book Week 2024 and has recently been released. You can watch it here: just wait for the image to appear and click the ► symbol.
Mary Fulbrook is professor of German history at University College London. Among other books, she is the author of A Small Town near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust, winner of the Fraenkel Prize, and Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice, awarded the Wolfson History Prize.
Jon Silverman is emeritus professor of media and criminal Jjustice at the University of Bedfordshire. As a BBC home affairs correspondent, he won the Sony radio journalist of the year award for his coverage of the UK’s investigations into Nazi collaborators. He reported from both the Rwanda and Yugoslavia tribunals and has written extensively on international war crimes justice, including the relationship between the International Criminal Court and Africa. Safe Haven is his fourth book.