Dreams Born and Shattered 349with lawmaking and dispute settlement, the chief legal task now was pun-
ishment for wrongdoing. To advise on issues in this area, the Allied govern-
ments established a body called the Commission on the Responsibility of
the Authors of the War and on the Enforcement of Penalties. It consisted of
fi ft een persons, including Scott, Lansing, Rolin- Jaequemyns, and Politis. Its
general secretary was La Pradelle.
Th e Commission reached three principal conclusions. Th e fi rst was that
the blame for the outbreak of the war rested primarily on Germany and
Austria- Hungary, and secondarily on Bulgaria and Turkey. Th e second ma-
jor conclusion concerned the question of personal responsibility of the Ger-
man leadership for causing the war. Th e Commission recommended against
placing high- level fi gures on trial, on the ground that the planning of ag-
gressive war was not actually a war crime. A war crime in the legal sense,
the Commission concluded, is a violation of the rules on the conduct of
hostilities aft er a war was under way. It went on to state, however, that penal
sanctions against po liti cal leaders who resorted to aggressive war were “de-
sirable.” Th e Commission’s third conclusion was that enemy nationals ac-
cused of war crimes properly speaking should be tried by panels established
by the Allied powers. Vigorous objections to this plan were voiced by Lan-
sing and Scott, who contended that the trial of war criminals could be un-
dertaken only by the defendants’ own state, not by the opposing victorious
side.
Th e Allied governments accepted the Commission’s fi ndings. Th e respon-
sibility of Germany as a state for the confl ict became the famous “war guilt”
clause of the Treaty of Versailles. It was an implicit fi nding that the war
had not simply been a clash between rival interests— in the manner of the
positivist view of war— but instead had been, in some sense, an illegal act of
aggression on the part of the German state. As in the case of any illegal act,
the consequence was a duty on the part of the culpable party to compensate
those who were injured. Th ere was certainly no shortage of these, aft er four
years of carnage. Th e task of quantifying the damages (or “reparation,” in
technical legal terminology) was assigned to a commission, which later set-
tled on the famous fi gure of 132 billion gold marks (about $33 billion).
As for the personal liability of individuals for illegal acts, provision was
made (as the Commission recommended) for war crimes trials by the victo-
rious powers. For the German po liti cal leadership, a somewhat diff erent fate