The resort to international criminal justice after the Second World War has recently been reassessed by a body of creative scholarship that is looking into the foregrounding attempts to design an international justice, transnational dynamics, or longer-term processes. The emergence of new legal definitions and judicial instances (e.g., International Military Tribunal of Nuremberg and IMT for the Far East) has been increasingly studied within a wider framework, both in time and in space, without losing its unique character, while the respective parts played by the governments and the professional actors directly involved have acquired further nuance and deliberation.

Yet the year 1943 remains a turning point, when the idea of resorting to justice to legally qualify and punish the crimes committed by the Nazi occupiers and their local accomplices was asserted and effectuated. Admittedly, the St. James Declaration that the Allied powers signed in January 1942 had already expressed their collective appreciation of the particularity of the violence deployed by the occupier in Europe. It also affirmed their determination in the future to punish severely these infringements of extant rights and customs of war as well as of the international conventions adopted since the middle of the nineteenth century that governed wartime behavior. But the Soviet success at Stalingrad also marked a turning point in this respect: not even waiting for final victory, the governments in exile in London and Stalin in Moscow passed the first laws to punish invaders and indigenous traitors found guilty of unprecedented crimes against the nation.