Germany’s Nuremberg trials are no blueprint for Syria

At every moment of political transition, ready-made comparisons emerge designed to compress history into a single sentence and reduce the experiences of nations to a number. In the current Syrian debate over transitional justice, some advocates of what might be called “cosmetic justice” invoke the German model after the fall of the Nazi regime, arguing that prosecutions were limited to under 500 defendants despite the enormity of Nazi crimes. The implicit message is clear: that restricting trials to a narrow circle of perpetrators is the realistic and rational path for Syria’s transitional justice process.

Such a reading, at best, is incomplete; at worst, it is a distortion of history.

Germany’s population at the outbreak of World War II in 1939 stood at around forty million. The scale of human losses was so vast that the country did not return to that population level until approximately fourteen years later, in 1953. German society paid an enormous price for Nazi policies, and the “justice” that followed defeat was not confined to courtroom proceedings.

After the fall of the Nazi regime, Germany experienced one of the largest waves of displacement in modern European history. Millions of ethnic Germans living in Eastern Europe were forced to flee or were expelled. By 1950, the number of expellees in West Germany was estimated at eight million, and in East Germany at four million. By 1960, these displaced populations constituted about 18 per cent of West Germany’s total population. These were profound demographic shifts that left deep and lasting social and economic scars.

The darkest chapter, however, lay in the widespread violence that accompanied the advance of Allied forces. Hundreds of thousands of German women were subjected to sexual assault; estimates exceed two million rapes, the majority attributed to Soviet troops, though violations by other forces were also recorded. The British historian Antony Beevor described what occurred as “the greatest phenomenon of mass rape in history.” It is estimated that around 100,000 women were assaulted in Berlin alone. These crimes began even before the regime’s official fall in May 1945, and continued for months thereafter, and did not significantly decline until 1948. The book A Woman in Berlin, the diary of a German woman who lived through that period, conveys the harrowing reality endured by civilians.

In terms of casualties, at least half a million German civilians were killed, according to the lowest estimates, most as a result of intensive British and American aerial bombardment. The total number of German war dead reached approximately five million. The suffering of German prisoners of war did not end with the cessation of hostilities. Around three million German soldiers fell into Soviet captivity, with death toll estimates ranging from 363,000 to one million. Some remained imprisoned until 1956 – eleven years after the war’s end. In the United States, approximately 425,000 German prisoners were held in hundreds of camps and were employed for labour even after the war had concluded, before being gradually repatriated.

These facts are not cited to justify Nazi crimes, but to correct a narrative that presents German transitional justice as a purely legal, orderly process confined to the Nuremberg Trials. While the Nuremberg proceedings marked a milestone in the development of international law, reducing the German experience to those trials alone overlooks the reality that “justice” on the ground was, in significant part, marked by extra-legal retribution and violence. This is not what we want for Syria. 

With the onset of the Cold War, the behaviour of the victorious powers shifted. The United States and the Soviet Union were primarily concerned with building loyal political models in their respective zones of occupation. As a result, policies became more pragmatic. The pace of reprisals slowed, and many former Nazi officials were reintegrated into state institutions; some even rose to senior governmental positions. 

Meanwhile, the pursuit of fugitive Nazis continued outside Germany, particularly by Israeli agents, and delayed prosecutions persisted for decades – even as many defendants had reached advanced age.

The conclusion is that what is now presented as a “successful German model” was not a sanitised legal exercise. It was a complex trajectory in which law, media narratives, revenge, and international politics were intertwined. There were indeed limited trials at the leadership level, along with de-Nazification and societal re-education. But there were also grave violations committed against civilians and prisoners in the immediate aftermath of defeat.

For this reason, the call to replicate the “German model” in Syria – based on selective statistics – is both intellectually and politically hazardous. Syria needs a model rooted in its own realities that learns from other experiences without copying them. It needs justice applied within the rule of law. It needs justice that neither opens the door to collective revenge nor allows perpetrators of murder, torture, and rape to escape accountability.

No official, regardless of position, has the authority to pardon such crimes, as they concern the direct rights of victims and their families. Moreover, transitional justice in Syria cannot be reduced to trials alone. It must also include dismantling the structures of repression – security, military, and economic – and restructuring state institutions to prevent the reemergence of authoritarian rule in any form.

To transform the German experience into a slogan used to lower the ceiling of transitional justice in Syria does not serve the cause of stability. A serious discussion of transitional justice must begin with Syria’s own realities by looking at the scale of violations and the rights of victims, rather than with truncated figures extracted from an entirely different historical context.