Peacemaking in Practice

Tasked with collecting records on war, revolution, and peace, the Stanford historians who served as the first curators of the Hoover War Collection, as it was originally known, prioritized securing documentation of peacemaking activities during and after World War I.

Among the founding collections of what later became the Hoover Institution Library & Archives were the so-called delegation propaganda from the Paris Peace Conference. These pamphlets document the efforts of peacemakers to fashion a new international order on the ruins of the old.

As the century progressed, new peace agreements continued to be drafted, and the Hoover collections continued to grow in order to foster the study of peacemaking in practice.

The Consequences of the Paris Peace Conference

The Treaty of Versailles was signed during the Paris Peace Conference and required Germany to pay extensive reparations. In the years that followed, the German economy faltered and many Germans blamed the treaty and its financial burden.

The resulting resentment birthed the platform of the National Socialist (Nazi) Party, whose leadership by Adolf Hitler ultimately led to World War II. In the end, the Paris Peace Conference was not able to maintain world peace, but its records give researchers and policymakers insights into how peacemaking can be implemented in the future.

Between 1945 and 1946, German officials who had been implicated in the Holocaust and other criminal activities were brought before an international tribunal in the Nuremberg Trials. Nuremberg was chosen as the site for the trials in part because the city had been the location of the Nazi Party’s annual rallies, and also because anti-Semitic laws had been passed there in 1935.

The first and best known of the Nuremberg trials was the Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal, held from November 1945 to October 1946. It passed judgment on two dozen of the most important captured leaders of Nazi Germany for war crimes, crimes against peace, and crimes against humanity. Twelve of the accused were sentenced to death.

From 1945 to 1953 the Allied powers, led by General Douglas MacArthur, occupied and rehabilitated Japan after its defeat in World War II. The occupation brought sweeping changes to Japan, including the introduction of political, economic, social, and military reforms. The new Japanese constitution was drafted under the close supervision of the Allied leaders, with some rough drafts being composed and edited in English.

One of the most contentious issues was the treatment of the Japanese emperor and his future role as leader of the nation. The figure of the emperor had been deified and universally revered by the Japanese people during the period of empire, and Emperor Hirohito was no different.

This reverence made his complete removal and prosecution for war crimes strategically undesirable from the point of view of Allied officials, who understood that the support of the Japanese people was essential to a successful postwar transition. Hirohito was spared a trial and a prison sentence, but the Japanese constitution was rewritten so that the emperor’s status was reduced to that of a ceremonial figurehead.

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