Martial Law and War Crimes

International Law and Martial Law before 1914

Considering the multiple violations of the regulations and spirit of international law in the First World War, many contemporaries had doubts about the purpose and possibilities for international laws in the age of total war. At the outbreak of the World War, the individual countries already had a corpus of time-honored rules of war, as well as martial law on the basis of more recent international agreements. Attempts at “humanizing” w…