Imprisoning War Criminals on a Trial-and-Error Basis: Spandau, Landsberg, and Sugamo as Improvised Institutions of Sentence Enforcement

Abstract Once the tide of the war began to turn in their favor and the enormity of the crimes of the Axis powers became apparent, the Allied powers of World War II agreed that after their victory, those responsible should be prosecuted. They even agreed on which crimes should be prosecuted in such proceedings. Almost no attention, however, was given to the issue of sentence enforcement. Thus, even as the wheels of the Allies’ war-crimes tribunals in Europe and the Pacific were put in motion, there was no general plan regarding how to run the institutions where the war criminals would serve their sentences. In this article we present some preliminary conclusions of a research project that took a detailed look at the three most important prisons for WWII war criminals: Spandau, Landsberg, and Sugamo. Though the victorious powers faced similar legal and practical problems in the administration of all three institutions, the solutions they found differed considerably. The most significant common feature of the respective systems they established is their improvised nature.