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It'd be useful as a reader to have some background on this. Why was it introduced in 1991 (46 years after the war ended), for example? Was there some domestic political impetus? Or was it targeted at some specific individual? And why did the House of Lords block it? --Delirium08:43, 25 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]
A potential source are the memoirs of Edward Heath, which discuss this briefly (pages 592-593 in the UK paperback edition). Although then still in the Commons, Heath's rationale was probably shared by many in the Lords. Heath wrote:
It still seems distasteful that, when so many critical challenges were facing the government, it should have expended its energies on introducing a measure as pointless and pernicious as the War Crimes Bill. Attlee, as Prime Minister, supported by Churchill, as Leader of the Opposition, had proposed in 1948 that the time had come for the British to finish looking in our country for those allegedly connected with war crimes. This was subsequently confirmed by Parliament. The search continued in those countries in Europe which had been directly affected by such crimes, and each national government was accountable for the trials of those considered responsible. Many of them reached the conclusion, after some years, that they too had completed their task. In 1989, under Mrs Thatcher's Government, a Bill was introduced to establish such trials afresh in Britain. This was the result of lobbying, largely on the Labour side of the House of Commons but supported by a considerable number of Conservatives, instigated by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish-American organisation based in California. They had contrived to bring about trials in many parts of the world outside Europe, ad the United Kingdom was almost the last land to which they turned.
I strongly opposed this Bill in the House of Commons, not least because there were so many faults in the procedure put before the House. We were jettisoning without the slightest justification the bipartisan agreement reach almost forty years earlier. We were also introducing legislation against a known, named list of individuals, all of them now aged. Those listed had been accepted whe they sought refuge in our country. Indeed, some of them had been brought to Britain in order to give information to our own officials about what had happened in their places of abode during the war, particularly in the Baltic countries. All had lived respectably after their arrival here. Every one was now being asked to deal with events which took place over forty-five years earlier. Many were in poor health. As the witnesses required were also likely to be frail, ad unable to travel to London for a court case, the system was invented of giving evidence before television cameras in their own towns, often many [593] thousands of miles away. How could any witness be certain after such an interval that the person in the dock was really the evil-doer they were condemning?
The process took several years to inaugurate and cost millions of pounds. In fact, although a handful of men were alleged to be culpable, no one was ever condemned in a court of law. Only one prosecution, that of Joseph Serafinowicz, was brought under the Act. That ran on for several years, inevitably reaching no conclusion. It would have been a hard heart indeed that could feel no pity for the wretched and confused old man who, after living peacefully in Banstead, Surrey for forty years, was now forced to endure an ineffective and miscalculated show trial, as well as for his family. The whole episode was the consequence of a government whose members had no personal experience of the Second World War. An emotional, irrational outburst led to a legal and political disaster, and a humiliation of our parliamentary system.
Wrong, two were prosecuted and only one was convicted. As this book talk shows, there were hundreds of suspected Nazi collaborators who ended up in the UK after the war. It was certainly passed too late, but it was not without reason.
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