British Foreign Policy and the Attitudes of Anglo-French Relations towards the Nuremberg Trial in the Shaping of the Cold War Front, 1944-1946.

Abstract

This dissertation reappraises British attitudes toward the development of the Nuremberg Trials during the Second World War and its immediate aftermath. Assessing British reluctance for an international military tribunal, it unearths how British policymakers utilised the diplomatic space to construct the Nuremberg trial for postwar survival. Challenging the collective memory of the Nuremberg Trials as a clinical legal and political procedure for denazification, this dissertation grounds the trials into early Cold War study through the lens of British cultural-legal exchange, competition, and rivalry. To grasp the complexity of British political manoeuvring, this study examines Britain’s diplomatic stance toward France as a fourth major power within the postwar Western European system. It will reveal how British promotion of France as a major Allied power and contributor to postwar operational and major war crimes planning exacerbated wartime Allied tensions due to contrasting legal ideologies. Britain sidelined Anglo-French relations in turn for Anglo-American collusion on the creation of Nuremberg, accentuating both the ideological divide amongst the Allies, but also the hegemonic nature of Anglo-Saxonism. British unwillingness to collaborate openly with France underlined a wider affirmation of Anglo-Saxon superiority towards all ideological frameworks that deviated from its own. This dissertation exposes how British cultural and legal predilection for Anglo-Saxonism strained Foreign Office planning for an Anglo-French alliance and disintegrated inter-Allied cooperation, creating unfeasible political conditions for a second Nuremberg Trial. It highlights how legal and cultural exchanges within major war crimes planning crystallised into a pre-Cold War front. The first chapter situates the Nuremberg Trials in the international climate of 1944, and the Foreign Office's apprehension toward postwar planning for the treatment of major war criminals and a geostrategic reconciliation with France. The Second chapter follows the British impetus to craft France as a world power, chronologically exploring the subsequent ideological implications within the diplomatic channel of major war crimes planning. The final chapter explores Britain’s continued disinclination of the Anglo-French partnership while planning for subsequent trials. It unravels how, by 1946, Anglo-Saxon insularity cemented an ideological divide in the early Cold War, permanently ending inter-Allied cooperation for a failed second Nuremberg Trial.