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History & Statutes

The ICWC (International Centre for War Crimes Trials) was established in 2000 at the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for European Legal History in Frankfurt am Main under the name ‘Pilot Project of the Volkswagen Foundation: War Crimes Trials against Germans and Japanese’. This initiative originated with the then Director of the MPI, Prof. Dr. Drs. h. c. Dieter Simon, and the Head of the War Crimes Studies Center at the University of California, Berkeley (WCSC), Prof. Dr. David Cohen. Once the foundation for research had been laid, the ICWC was established in July 2003 as an interdisciplinary research center at Philipps-University Marburg.

Since 11 November 2008, based on the statutes that came into force on that day, the Center has also been officially recognized as an interdisciplinary institution of Philipps-University Marburg.