Honest Errors? Combat Decision-Making 75 Years After the Hostage Case

This book marks the 75th anniversary of the 1948 Hostage Case in which a US military tribunal in Nuremberg acquitted General Lothar Rendulic of devastating Northern Norway on account of his honest factual error. The volume critically reappraises the law and facts underlying his trial, the no second-guessing rule in customary international humanitarian law (IHL) that is named after the general himself, and the assessment of modern battlefield decisions.

Using recently discovered documents, this volume casts major doubts on Rendulic’s claim that he considered the region’s total devastation and the forcible evacuation of all of its inhabitants imperatively demanded by military necessity at the time. This book’s analysis of archival and court records reveals how the tribunal failed to examine relevant facts or explain the Rendulic Rule’s legal origin. This anthology shows that, despite the Hostage Case’s ambiguity and occasional suggestions to the contrary, objective reasonableness forms part of the reasonable commander test under IHL and the mistake of fact defence under international criminal law (ICL) to which the rule has given rise. This collection also identifies modern warfare’s characteristics—human judgment, de-empathetic battlespace, and institutional bias—that may make it problematic to deem some errors both honest and reasonable. The Rendulic Rule embodies an otherwise firmly established admonition against judging contentious battlefield decisions with hindsight. Nevertheless, it was born of a factually ill-suited case and continues to raise significant legal as well as ethical challenges today.

The most comprehensive study of the Rendulic Rule ever to appear in English, this multi-disciplinary anthology will appeal to researchers and practitioners of IHL and ICL, as well as military historians and military ethicists and offers ground-breaking new research.

Nobuo Hayashi is affiliated to the Centre for International and Operational Law at the Swedish Defence University in Stockholm, Sweden.

Carola Lingaas is affiliated to the Faculty of Social Studies at VID Specialized University in Oslo, Norway.

Excerpts from a book review:

Did Rendulic really make an honest mistake, and did the judges get it right? After an introduction that weaves together the book’s main themes and findings, military historians and international lawyers re-examine Rendulic’s defence strategy on the merits. All agree that the case was deeply flawed. The book finds ample evidence to challenge the commander’s claim that he believed the complete destruction of Northern Norway to be justified on strictly military grounds. Through a close examination of archival sources,[fn4] the authors show that Rendulic did perceive uncertain but not unlikely threats of Soviet advances or British military interventions, which some amount of destruction would impede.
Yet the timing and scale of the destruction did not match the evolution of the perceived threats, strongly suggesting that other motives were at play.

[...]

While mistakes in warfare are not a new subject, they have primarily been explored in news articles or academic scholarship focusing on individual, high-profile incidents. With its determination to address institutional and systemic factors and its historical depth, Honest Errors? Combat Decision-Making 75 Years after the Hostage Case fills a gap in the literature. Perhaps ironically for a book dedicated to the “no-second-guessing” rule of IHL, it ultimately demonstrates time and time again the value of hindsight – and while we can agree that, as the well-established Rendulic Rule holds, hindsight should be kept out of the courtroom, it does have a place in the war room, where learning from mistakes will save lives.
- Charlotte Mohr, Reference Librarian, International Committee of the Red Cross
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The full review is available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1816383124000675