“I Would Prefer to Be Famous”

• DOI: 10.1177/1057567718766404
• Author: Susanne Karstedt
• Published date: 01 December 2018
• Date: 01 December 2018
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

“I Would Prefer to Be Famous”:

Comparative Perspectives

on the Reentry of War Criminals

Sentenced at Nuremberg and

The Hague

Susanne Karstedt

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Abstract

The reentry of sentenced perpetrators of atrocity crimes is part and parcel of the pursuit of

international and transitional justice. As men and women sentenced for war crimes, crimes against

humanity and genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and

the other tribunals return from prisons into society and communities questions arise as to the

impact their reentry has on deeply divided postconflict societies, in particular on victim groups.

Contemporary international tribunals and courts mostly do not have penal or correctional policies

of their own, and the legacy of early release, commuting of sentences and amnesties that Nuremberg

and other post-World War II tribunals have left, is a particularly problematic one. Germany’s his-

torical experience provides an analytic blueprint for understanding in which ways contemporary

perpetrators return into changed and still fragile societies. This comparative analysis between

Nuremberg and the ICTY is based on two data sets including information on returning war criminals

sentenced in both tribunals. The comparative analysis focuses on four themes: politics of reentry,

admission of guilt and justification, memoirs, and political activism.

Keywords

war criminals, Nuremberg trials, ICTY, ex-prisoners, reentry

The Past and the Present

“I would prefer to be famous” was the answer that Albert Speer gave to British journalist Roger

Clark in 1979, when asked whether he would prefer to be a nameless individual with a clear

conscience or rather be famous as he was now as a sentenced perpetrator of war crimes and crimes

against humanity (Brechtken, 2017, pp. 511–512). Speer had been sentenced to 20 years

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Griffith University School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Brisbane, Australia

Corresponding Author:

Susanne Karstedt, Griffith University School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Griffith Criminology Institute, Mt Gravatt,

4122, Australia.

Email: s.karstedt@griffith.edu.au

International CriminalJustice Review

2018, Vol. 28(4) 372-390

ª2018 Georgia State University

Article reuse guidelines:

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DOI: 10.1177/1057567718766404

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imprisonment for his responsibility for forced and slave labor by the International Military Tribunal

(IMT) at Nuremberg and had been released in 1966 from the Spandau Prison which housed public

figures and a number of “celebrities” from the former elite of the Nazi state.

1

He had by then

acquired a new and different celebrity status nationally and internationally as the “Nazi who said

sorry,”

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which he had actually never done.

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Rather he had covered up and sometimes blatantly lied

about his own involvement in and knowledge about the Holocaust and the orchestration of forced

labor. Since the 1970s, and already during his lifetime, new documents, a growing body of historical

research, and documentaries have shattered and finally destroyed the myth that he had carefully

developed from the start, as a new book by the Director of the Institute of Contemporary History

demonstrates (Brechtken, 2017).

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Thus, Speer’s response came as a shocking surprise to the journal-

ist, who had mostly bought into the story of his admission of at least a moral, if not legal guilt, and he

presented this response to his readers as a sign of Speer’s moral indifference (Brechtken, 2017, p.

512). It can also be read as an expression of Speer’s confidence in his celebrity and postwar status

and his success in constructing an unblemished past in his published memoirs.

In an interview for Sputnik News in 2016, Biljana Plavsˇic´ gave an answer that echoed Speer’s in a

way. She was asked whether if she could choose would she act and take decisions in the same way,

as she had done as a member of the presidency of Republika Srpska when they prepared for and

conducted the war in 1992 and for which she stood on trial before the International Criminal

Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

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She unequivocally confirmed that she would. More-

over, in a surprising move, she compared her own trial and imprisonment with the Nuremberg trials

and in particular with Speer’s trial and imprisonment. She referred to his memoir and the account of

his imprisonment in Spandau

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that she said she had read, and now used as a backdrop against which

she detailed her own experience of the Swedish prison at the hands of allegedly Muslim prison

guards. While she indicates that she has been a victim of human rights abuses, she describes Speer’s

imprisonment—not always correctly—as something she “could only dream of.” In view of the

atrocities that were subject of the Nuremberg trials, she compares her sentence of 11 years to Speer’s

20 years (see Choi, 2014; Simic, 2011; Subotic´, 2012). In sum, and like in her memoir (excerpts:

Subotic´, 2012, pp. 49–57), she feels treated unfairly by the ICTY and a victim of maltreatment in the

Swedish prison.

In fact, Biljana Plavsˇic´ and Albert Speer have more in common, but they also differ widely. From

an individualized and ahistorical perspective, they are both high-ranking sentenced perpetrators of

war crimes and crimes against humanity. From a historical and contextualized perspective, they both

have a role in transitional justice processes of pursuing justice for mass atrocity crimes before

international criminal tribunals, which are more than half a century apart. Beyond the legal setting,

transitional justice processes have a “broader cultural meaning, which reflects their own time as well

as a more painful past” (Goda, 2005, p. 419), thus providing bridges between the past and the

present. Sentenced perpetrators in many ways literally embody this transition from the past to the

present, when they after having served their sentence, return from prison into society and start to

rebuild their “life after punishment.” The reentry of sentenced perpetrators of atrocity crimes is part

and parcel of the transitional process and in a way the tail end of the efforts to end impunity for the

atrocities and of doing justice to victims and survivors. Their reentry therefore epitomizes the justice

that has been done, its failures and achievements, how it was perceived, and how it will live on; it

was after Nuremberg and it is today (Brants & Karstedt, 2015; Karstedt, 2011, 2013, 2015;

Vermeulen & De Vree, 2014).

Surprisingly, little thought had been given to this aspect by the international tribunals that hand

out sentences (Choi, 2014; Hola & van Wijk, 2014, 2016; Kelder, Hola, & van Wijk, 2014; van Zyl

Smit, 2005). Nuremberg had left no trace with regard to principles of executing prison sentences nor

any guidance for handling early release. In the end, and after 1949, the Allies left this mainly to the

West German government, with the result that most of the perpetrators, who served their time in

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