Gary Bass has shown, individuals were first considered subjects of international criminal law following the collapse of the Ottoman empire at the end of the First World War, when the British demanded that certain Turkish leaders be held individually and criminally accountable for the Armenian genocide.9 The goal at the time was not only justice but also to use international law to hold down the vanquished state and the emergent Turkish Republic, which was at the time under a tenuous Allied occupation. Nuremberg would provide a more dramatic and influential repetition of this performance.
