The Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau, 1939–1945

[citation needed] The 384-page English edition of the book was translated by de Zayas and published by the University of Nebraska Press in November 1989.

De Zayas gave a series of guest lectures on the Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau at universities in Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, including the German Historical Institute in London.

It should generate much discussion and encourage other students of that period to further research, not only into the legal and historical, but also into the sociological and psychological aspects of this facet of that conflict."

De Zayas lectured at All Souls' College, Oxford on 17 May 1990 on the Wehrmacht Bureau and published a summary article on the book.

Anyone who wishes to know more about its work should consult the excellent book of the same name by Alfred M. de Zayas, published by the University of Nebraska Press in 1989.

The stated primary purpose of this interesting and well-written work is to minimize the violations of international law in any future armed conflicts.

[9]Concerning the methodology of this book, Max E. Riedlsperger wrote: "Dr. de Zayas first came upon the previously undiscovered 226 volumes of WUSt documents as a Fulbright fellow on leave from his studies in International Law at Harvard.

The Institute supported the research on which this study is based and arranged for the assistance of a Dutch international law specialist, Dr. Walter Rabus...Mindful that the WUSt might have been manipulated by Goebbels's Propaganda Ministry, the authors were punctilious in their verification.

In this exhaustive analysis, it becomes clear that the WUSt operated with scrupulous objectivity and therefore that its documents constitute a valuable new source for the study of the conduct of war.

[10]The book was positively reviewed in the German Press, including by Andreas Hillgruber in the Historische Zeitschrift,[11] in the leading weekly DIE ZEIT[12] and in the SPIEGEL.

[13] In the Preface to the first German edition of the book, the Director of the Institute of International Law of the University of Göttingen, Dietrich Rauschning (subsequently a judge in the Human Rights Chamber of Bosnia and Herzegovina under the Dayton Accords) wrote about the close supervision of the project by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the experts of the five principal archives where the research was conducted, and about the distance and care taken by de Zayas and the members of his team in evaluating the records of the Wehrmacht-Untersuchungsstelle.