This dissertation is a history of the use of mass grave exhumations in investigating human rights violations, war crimes, and acts of atrocity in the second half of the twentieth century. This history follows forensic scientists and non-governmental organizations to conflict zones around the world, from Germany in World War II to Latin America, Iraqi Kurdistan, and the former Yugoslavia. As it does so, it tells a history of the increasingly international and scientific nature of human rights investigations, in which forensic scientists and the bones they dig up came to play an important role in the historical and legal reconstructions of genocides and other human rights violations.

In 1930s and 1940s Germany, as elsewhere on the European continent, forensic evidence and forensic experts were common features of criminal investigations and prosecutions. It was in the unlikely context of Nazi Germany, though, that forensic science merged with humanitarian and human rights sensibilities and brought about the first international, scientist-led, forensic investigation of a mass grave containing victims of large-scale violence. In 1943, some of Europe’s most respected forensic scientists gathered at a pit in the Katyn Forest, in the western Soviet Union, containing the bodies of some five thousand Polish officers in uniform. The team was tasked with determining which of Europe’s totalitarian regimes was responsible for their deaths. This grand forensic experiment and its aftermath anticipated both the value and the challenges of introducing human bodies into legal and historical reconstructions of past events.

After Katyn, large-scale, human rights-driven forensic exhumations did not reemerge for another four decades. When they did, they met an entirely different geopolitical landscape, one in which such investigations found increased resonance with governments, as well as with victims’ families and survivors of genocide and other atrocities. This traction helped sustain and proliferate their use around the globe. The thawing of the Cold War allowed space for grassroots calls for transitional justice, efforts to end ongoing human rights abuses and genocides, and to investigate ones that had already occurred. This culminated after the Srebrenica genocide, where forensic evidence was used on an unprecedented scale. In telling a history of how and why international scientists, NGOs, national governments, and international criminal tribunals came to view forensic evidence as valuable in the global post-Cold War project of documenting and prosecuting international crimes, this dissertation is distinguished from recent historiography by its focus on the motivations and actions of the individual practitioners who undertook this human rights project.

This dissertation shows how businesses including shipping companies, labor recruitment agents, and landed elites—“agents of globalization”—decisively shaped global mobility in an era of nominally “free” and unregulated migration. From South Carolina and Argentina to Saskatchewan and Australia, businesses tried desperately to court immigrants, resorting to subsidies and marketing campaigns, or, failing these, deceit and coercion. Recruiters were invariably aided by shipping companies, which agglomerated during the 1870s into a handful of globe-straddling, modern corporations like the British Cunard or the German Hamburg-America Line. Never simply neutral conduits of global interconnectivity, steamship lines indiscriminately fomented migration to countless destinations, which delivered profits far exceeding those on freight. Across Europe, meanwhile, the deluge of shipping agents and foreign recruiters provoked a backlash from commercial farmers, who had been buffeted by world markets and now faced a depleting labor force and rising wages. The net result was an international migration regime quite unlike our own. Ours is an age of chronic structural unemployment in the richest countries, in which liberalized immigration policies are consequently a hard sell. In 1900 by contrast the economies of the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand wrestled with an inexhaustible appetite for labor power. Simply put, even unskilled labor was a desperately sought commodity in a world awash in land and capital.

This dissertation is about the problem of runaway advancements in weaponry since the 1860s, and how a vast set of characters—diplomats, international lawyers, and politicians, but also surgeons, chemists, teachers and artists—sought to do something about it by outlawing some of them. Their motivations for calling for a ban varied. Some were moved by budgetary woes and the cost of keeping up with the European arms race. Others saw a threat posed to their ability of mending wartime bodies after battle. Yet others were troubled by endangered cities and trade routes. Each time some called for a ban on a weapon, there were others who came to its defense. Sometimes the opposition to a ban came from a wide embrace of the promise of unfettered technological development to make war more humane—by making battles more brutal and therefore hastening war’s conclusion, by raising the barriers to entry and avoiding war, or even through the purported humaneness of technologically advanced weapons themselves. Others opposed weapons prohibitions because they went too far and curtailed perceived national interest, while yet others complained that weapons prohibitions stopped short of outlawing war altogether.

My dissertation is structured along five case studies in the history of international weapons law, all taking place in what I call the foundational period of this body of law between the 1860s and the 1920s. Chapters one and two focus on the prohibition of explosive bullets at St. Petersburg in 1868, and the prohibition of dum-dum bullets at the 1899 Hague Conference. These prohibitions centered on the concept of unnecessary suffering and injuries to soldiers’ bodies. In chapter three, I turn to the meaning of the prohibition on dum-dum bullets in the First World War. While the prohibition was intended to regulate and humanize warfare, during the war the pariah status of dum-dum bullets—fettered by their special status under international law—turned them into a potent propaganda weapon. Dum-dum weapons did not just harm human bodies; their purported use also violated the body of international law, and as a result of their propagandistic use they contributed to the escalation and confusions of war. Chapter four turns to discussions about submarines in the 1920s, arguing for a shift in scale from soldiers’ bodies to world empires and their trade routes. Chapter five traces the debate about chemical warfare in the same time period. If debates about submarines turned on threats to global connectivity, opponents of chemical weapons pointed to the potential of total destruction of urban centers and, by extension, the threat chemical warfare posed to civilians and civilization at large. The dissertation concludes with a look at discussions about dum-dum bullets today and the ongoing campaigns to outlaw nuclear weapons and lethal autonomous weapons. Throughout, I focus on the relationship between technological innovation, law, and humanity in war as they were negotiated in the context of European imperialism and industrialized warfare.

In 1945, at the end of more than thirty years of violent conflict and occupation in Western Europe, France and Germany were on the verge of a new occupation. This time, France returned to south-west Germany, but this would prove to be the last occupation between the two countries. In 1955, at the occupation’s end, the foundations were laid for a united Europe anchored in the economic collaboration of the member states of the European Coal and Steel Community, with France and West Germany at its heart.

Why did the long history of violent conflict between the two countries end with this last occupation? Historians searching for reasons to explain the end of this cycle of violence have pointed to the French policies in occupied Germany, to common institutions, and to the efforts of French intellectuals acting as mediators between France and Germany. Most of the studies on Europeanization or Western integration, with France and Germany at the center, begin in 1945 and tell a teleological story of reconciliation. The occupation is seen as a first step towards the institutionalized French and German state friendship, culminating in the Elysée Treaty.

My dissertation offers a new explanation for the end of the cycle of violence between France and Germany, arguing that the dual defeat of France and Germany in 1945 was necessary to end the long history of conflict. In other words, the rapprochement of the post-1945 era can only be explained by the entangled histories of French and German occupations since 1914. Only at the moment when France and Germany were vanquished did they begin to reflect on the causes of this catastrophic defeat.

The legacy of this dark pre-history hovered over the French occupation of Germany. The first chapter addresses the presence of former Vichy administrators in high positions of the French occupation administration. Morally tainted by their allegiance to Pétain’s state, they could not remain in their positions in France, but they had the experience to govern a country and they had already collaborated with the Germans. These administrators were thus dispatched to the French occupation zone to build up and control a freshly defeated Germany, working in an amalgam with seasoned resisters. The presence of tainted Vichy administrators in the French administration led to a more lenient denazification strategy in occupied Germany.

In the second chapter, I show how past experiences with violent conflict fed into expectations about continued violence during the upcoming occupation of Germany. The French army and administration expected a German resistance similar to their own resistance against the German occupation during World War II. This chapter illustrates that experiences with former occupations could be misleading – with serious consequences: harsh reprisals for incidents perceived as German resistance were reminiscent of a wartime, rather than a peacetime, occupation and thus prolonged the war well into the period after May 8, 1945. The French experience with resistance thus actually hindered a reconciliation between France and Germany. What would become the last occupation between the two countries was therefore not just the beginning of a peaceful period of reconciliation, but rather the last violent episode in a longer history of mutual wars and occupations since at least 1914. This chapter also demonstrates how members of the occupying forces used the expectation of German resistance for their own ends: to prolong their stay in a peaceful Germany.

Postwar Germans also viewed French rule after 1945 in the light of previous occupations, as the third chapter demonstrates. While there was no active resistance against the allied troops, three groups of Germans feared persecution due to their “collaboration” with the French occupying forces: German administrators helping to implement French orders, German women having relationships with French soldiers, and so-called “neo-separatists” trying to revive the separatist movement of the interwar period. The post-1945 occupation also aimed at correcting past mistakes. The French army and administration therefore sought to avoid a nationalist backlash against them, as had happened in the interwar period when the occupation army had supported the separatists. After 1945, the French army and administration were therefore reluctant to support those “neo-separatists” and tacitly accepted a revived German nationalism in opposition to the separatist movement.

Finally, the French army and administration tried to avoid the impression that they subjected postwar Germans to colonial rule. Chapter four argues that in 1945, the French army and administration did not revert to colonial ruling strategies or the employment of colonial troops precisely because of their experience in the 1920s. The French army thus purged their ranks of colonial soldiers twice, in 1944 of sub-Saharan troops and in 1946/47 of the remaining colonial soldiers from North Africa. The French administration also sought to eliminate “colonial” behavior by the members of the French occupying forces in Germany. Allies and Germans alike referenced alleged colonial rule within Europe in an attempt to criticize and delegitimize French rule in Germany. Instead of drawing references to the French colonial empire, the orientation of French rule in Germany after 1945 was exclusively European, and in particular Franco-German. The long history of mutual French and German conflicts thus remained the frame of reference for historical learning, not the colonial empire.

My dissertation contributes to the historiography of postwar Europe by studying transfers of experience from one occupation to the next. It puts the history of the emergence of European integration in a longue durée perspective and helps us to understand the importance of learning from the past for political decision making in the present.