De Zayas' work focuses
inter alia on the judicial protection of peoples and minorities. He has written and lectured extensively on human rights, including the jurisprudence of the United Nations Human Rights Committee, the
Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, the US-run detention centers at
Guantanamo Bay,
ethnic cleansing in the former
Yugoslavia, the
expulsion of Eastern European Germans after the Second World War, the invasion of
Cyprus by
Turkey in 1974, the
rights of minorities, the
right to freedom of opinion and expression, and the
rights of indigenous peoples. In 1994, he co-authored with Prof.
Cherif Bassiouni,
The Protection of Human Rights in the Administration of Criminal Justice, published by Transnational Publishers. The first Chairman of the Human Rights Committee, Andreas Mavrommatis, wrote a preface for the handbook. In a review published in the
UN Special magazine, former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights
Bertrand Ramcharan wrote: "It is staggering how much the Human Rights Committee has influenced the human rights jurisprudence of the world, as is striking from reading this exceedingly important book.... From the outset of its work in 1977 there have been two Secretariat pioneers in developing the case law of the Committee when it considers petitions from individuals claiming violations of their rights: Jakob Möller (Iceland) and Alfred de Zayas (USA). Möller was the first Chief of the Petitions branch of what is today the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and de Zayas was his colleague, who eventually succeeded him as Chief." De Zayas has written scholarly articles that were published in the
Harvard International Law Journal, the
UBC Law Review, the
International Review of the Red Cross, the
Criminal Law Forum, the
Refugee Survey Quarterly, the
Netherlands International Law Review, The
International Commission of Jurists Review, the
Historical Journal,
Politique internationale, the
German Yearbook of International Law,
Canadian Human Rights Yearbook and the
East European Quarterly. He has co-authored and co-edited books such as
The International Human Rights Monitoring Mechanisms. De Zayas has published chapters in books
Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe co-edited by Steven Várdy and Hunt Tooley. In
International Humanitarian Law: Origins, edited by John Carey, de Zayas wrote the chapter "Ethnic Cleansing, Applicable Norms, Emerging Jurisprudence, Implementable Remedies". His chapter in Spanish "El crimen contra la paz" was published in the book
La Declaración de Luarca sobre el Derecho Humano a la Paz, edited by Carmen Rosa Rueda Castañón and Carlos Villán Durán.
On the 1944–1950 expulsion of Germans De Zayas' work into the
expulsion of Germans from areas of eastern Germany and Eastern Europe at the end of
World War II is extensive. De Zayas was reportedly the first American historian to address this topic.
Deutsche Welle reported in 2007: "He wrote the first scholarly work on German expellees to appear in English, breaking what had long been a taboo topic." The German Federal Minister
Heinrich Windelen wrote in the foreword to de Zayas's book
Anmerkungen zur Vertreibung: "It is thanks to De Zayas that the debate on The Expulsion has been reopened [...] In the subsequent period, a number of authors have drawn on the work of De Zayas. Thus, he has contributed significantly to the fact that discussion of The Expulsion is no longer considered taboo." According to a doctoral thesis on the historiography of the expulsion, "de Zayas was one of the earliest 'respectable' academics to take up the cause of the expellees... De Zayas does not mention the Holocaust, the Jews, or any other minority ethnic groups that suffered under the Nazis except in passing." However, Professor Doerr in the
Dalhousie Review notes: "De Zayas does not ignore the enormity of the crimes committed by Germans during the course of the war, nor does he deny that an anti-German feeling was natural and that punishment was justified, He does, however, question whether one set of crimes justified a second... whether revenge ... was not only extended to the guilty but to the innocent, whether expulsion itself was a crime ...While critical of western leadership, de Zayas leaves no doubt about the agents of the crime-- the Soviet leaders. ...Praised must be de Zayas's reopening of this largely neglected aspect of modern German history." The 1999
University of Hertfordshire doctoral dissertation of Robert Bard,
Historical Memory of the expulsion of ethnic Germans in Europe 1944–1947, cites de Zayas 58 times and comments approvingly on the historical analysis of
Nemesis at Potsdam and
A Terrible Revenge. He observes: "De Zayas' senior position with the UN Human Rights Commission, his position as a United States citizen (not a German) and his indisputable humanitarian credentials meant that de Zayas' work was taken seriously in Germany and America." In 1975, de Zayas published a study in the
Harvard International Law Journal, questioning the legality of the expulsion of possibly as many as 15 million Germans from their homes after World War II, invoking the
Atlantic Charter, the
Hague Conventions, and the
Nuremberg Principles.
Nemesis at Potsdam The article was followed by his first book
Nemesis at Potsdam (
Routledge und Kegan Paul, 1977) which focused on what, if any, responsibility the British and U.S. governments had for decisions which purportedly led to the expulsions of these ethnic Germans. The book had a preface by
Dwight Eisenhower's political advisor,
Robert Daniel Murphy, a participant at the
Potsdam Conference. British historian Tony Howarth reviewed it in the
Times Educational Supplement as "a lucid, scholarly and compassionate study". Nuremberg prosecutor
Ben Ferencz wrote in the
American Journal of International Law that it was "a persuasive commentary on the suffering which becomes inevitable when humanitarianism is subordinated to nationalism". The
New Statesman reviewer stated: "in his well researched, closely reasoned work, de Zayas leaves little doubt that there have been few historical parallels to this record of modern mass atrocity". In the same year, an enlarged German edition was published by the legal publisher
C.H. Beck, becoming a bestseller.
The Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau His second book (written with Walter Rabus),
The Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau, was published in Germany by Universitas/, in 1979, and the English translation by de Zayas himself by the
University of Nebraska Press in 1989. The book describes some of the work of the
Wehrmacht-Untersuchungsstelle, a special section of the legal department of the
Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, which investigated Allied and
German war crimes. The authors argue that the Bureau carefully investigated war crimes and was largely free of Nazi ideology. De Zayas worked with the 226 extant volumes (about half of the total, the rest apparently having been burned in
Langensalza, Germany, near the end of the war.). The book was savagely attacked in the media of the
Soviet Union and
its satellites. In a review of the book in the
Cambridge Law Journal, Professor of International Law at the University of Cambridge and judge at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) Christopher Greenwood considered the book to be "excellent" and that "the authors deserve the gratitude of all those interested in the laws of war but unable to read German for bringing out an English edition." He goes on to add that "Throughout the book the authors emphasize that all the cases they examined have to be seen against the background of the Holocaust and the atrocities committed by the German armed forces and SS." In the
Historical Journal (Cambridge), vol. 35, 1992, de Zayas published a detailed analysis of the working methods of The Wehrmacht Bureau on War Crimes. The
FAZ favourably reviewed the article: "Following careful study of the records, cross-checking in foreign archives and more than three hundred interviews with surviving witnesses and military judges, de Zayas arrives at the conclusion that the investigations are reliable." The
International Committee of the Red Cross has republished parts of
The Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau in its teaching manual
How does Law Protect in War, edited by Marco Sassoli and Antoine Bouvier.
A Terrible Revenge His third book was
A Terrible Revenge, The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans, 1944–1950, published in Germany in 1986, and in the United States in 1993 by
Palgrave Macmillan under the title
The German Expellees. Historians
Dan Diner and Joel Golb write that the tendency of "allow[ing] the Germans to perceive themselves also as victims" is "manifest in the work of the best-selling author Alfred-Maurice de Zayas".
Nottingham Trent University Bill Niven writes that de Zayas is "often cited in support of the comparability thesis", i.e. the argument that crimes committed by Germany during the war were equivalent to crimes committed against it. A review in the scholarly journal
Central European History describes it as having a "distinctively revisionist flavour". By contrast,
Andreas Hillgruber wrote in the
Historische Zeitschrift: " His succinct and incisive recounting of the events are summarized in ten historical and six international law theses, that precisely because of their lucidity and balance deserve a permanent place in the historiography of the expulsions." Gotthold Rhode wrote in the
FAZ: "de Zayas lets the victims themselves tell their story, providing reports that were hitherto unknown... the book has the character of a new 'Documentation on the Expulsions' and contains descriptions of cruelties and suffering that four decades after the events boggle the mind." Henry Stanhome in the London
Times wrote: "De Zayas's moving plea is that one's home should be a human right. As frontiers once more shift in Eastern Europe and families flee in Bosnia, he could hardly have chosen a better moment to deliver it." (18 November 1993)
Publishers Weekly: "This relatively unknown holocaust claimed more than two million lives...De Zayas... has uncovered testimony in German and American archives detailing these atrocities, adding a new chapter to the annals of human cruelty. His carefully documented book serves as a reminder that many different peoples have been subjected to 'ethnic cleansing'". (July 1994). Twenty years later
Matthias Stickler reviewed a revised edition in the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: "Es vermittelt anschaulich, gut lesbar, quellenorientiert und ohne Polemik Grundwissen zu einem nach wie vor wichtigen Thema" ("the book imparts knowledge on a still very relevant topic vividly, in straightforward language, based on reliable sources and without polemics)." Historian Ernest Fisher reviewed it in the
United States Army magazine
Army: "The author has given the history of these expulsions a dramatic immediacy through a series of eyewitness accounts ... The remarkable sequel to this recital of inhumanity is that this displaced population has, in the 50 years since the war, managed to find a new home in a reunited Germany where nearly 20 percent of the population is made up of first- or second-generation descendants of these exiled millions." De Zayas' book
Nemesis at Potsdam likewise received a positive review in the
Neue Zürcher Zeitung by historian Patrick Sutter.
Genocide as State Secret His 2011 book
Völkermord als Staatsgeheimnis (
Genocide as State Secret) with a substantive preface by Karl Doehring, Director of the
Max Planck Institute for International Law in Heidelberg, explored the issue of who knew what when about
the Holocaust. He is the first historian to have reviewed the issue in the light of published and unpublished Nuremberg documents, and in the light of interviews with Nuremberg prosecutors and defense attorneys, Holocaust survivors as well as German military judges and politicians. The review by Bernward Dörner in the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung described it as an "attempt to deny contemporary perceptions of genocide", while the French-German Historian
Alfred Grosser strongly criticized the Dörner review as political and "completely one-sided", accusing the reviewer of ideological bias and unhistorical approach. Grosser cited the reviewer's own words on "strategy": "The question of contemporary perception of the Holocaust is of strategic importance. Because if it had actually been the case that the genocide could have remained secret, this would severely limit the shared responsibility of the German population in the genocide." In other words, as the title of Grosser's article implies ("the return of collective guilt"), it is a question of instrumentalizing guilt for political purposes, and Zayas was not playing the game. == Activism ==