War-crimes trials were a crucial aspect of the search for a usable past. The meaning of genocidal conflict was shaped in courtrooms and on gallows throughout what had been Nazi-occupied Europe. Judgements declared who had been a criminal and what their crimes were and why. Those that went unpunished or uninvestigated spoke just as eloquently about the nature of the suffering that had just passed. Trials have also been written into narratives charting the development of historical memories after 1945. The western allies appeared to demonstrate a commitment to working through the past in their trials programmes. But, when those trials were abandoned towards the end of the 1940s, and those convicted in them released from the beginning of the 1950s, this seems to have articulated a turning away from the past and a prioritisation of the future. Unsurprisingly, this waning interest has commonly been explained as the result of Cold War politics, and the need to re-orient the world for new challenges, in which the West, especially, had a new enemy.

However, the abandonment of the trials programme was more than simply the abandonment of the past in favour of the future. It also articulated a specific understanding of that past and constructed a narrative which attached significance to this history. In Britain, for example, the ending of the trials, and the incremental release of Nazi war criminals thereafter, satisfied the desires of a vociferous group of protestors opposed to the principle of war-crimes trials. Those protests never articulated a sense that the past was unimportant; instead they offered a different narrative which suggested that the trial of Germans was an inadequate mechanism for rendering the Second World War meaningful. Just as the decision to first change and then bring to an end the denazification and re-education programmes, as well as plotting a particular route to the future, had given prominence and priority to narratives of the recent past which helped recast the German population as victims, so too the decision to end the trials conformed to an alternative historical narrative to those which had underpinned the trials themselves.