Case 1307

In 1947, as part of the United Nations War Crimes Commission (UNWCC), Poland listed eleven German administrators and foresters as war criminals for the devastation of Polish forests. Case no. 1307, as it was filed with the UNWCC, sets one of the earliest precedents of criminal charges for environmental destruction and for ecocide law.

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Exhibition

‘Race and Forest’, INTERPRT’s exhibition for the first time reconstructs case no. 1307 and looks at how forests were used to hide the evidence of mass murder in Chelmno – Nazi Germany’s first extermination camp – using original documents, photographs, diagrams, drawings, and text drawn from the archives of the United Nations War Crimes Commission and the Polish National Archives with visual and cartographic evidence and digital 3-D representations.

ECOLOGICAL IMPERATIVE

Poster Series

INTERPRT developed a poster series on the history of ecocide law for the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw in three sections: precedents of prosecution in International Criminal Law, attempts to codify environmental destruction as a stand-alone crime at the UN, and civil society efforts for the recognition of ecocide as a fifth international crime from the 1970s to the present. The posters were printed and distributed to cultural institutions across Poland.