War Crimes Trials

Posted: Wednesday, February 14, 2007

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London Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Bernard Meltzer

Nuremberg prosecutor who brought direction to the charges of crimes against humanity over the death camps

November 21, 1914 – January 4, 2007

” FROM a lawyer’s standpoint it was a dream,” Bernard Meltzer once remarked of his time as a prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, “but from a humanist standpoint it was a nightmare.” He was referring to the atrocities committed by the leading Nazis, which shocked the world when outlined by Meltzer and his fellow American lawyers in 1945-46.

Latterly, however, as he became one of the last survivors of that team, he revealed that the management of the case had also frequently appalled him.

Meltzer was drafted into the prosecution lineup, headed by Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, left, on account of his wartime work at the State Department. This had made him expert on the economic policies of the Nazis, among them the wholesale plunder of the occupied countries.

His original brief was to handle the cases against Hjalmar Schacht, who had run the economy in the 1930s and enabled Hitler to finance the rearmament of Germany, and his successor, Walther Funk.

Yet he soon came to feel that though Jackson had an undoubted gift for rhetoric, he had surrounded himself with sycophants and advocates of limited talent but large ambition. Meltzer believed that some of the senior Americans thought that cases against certain defendants should be dropped for political reasons, and found his work on these ignored.

When he said he felt that Schacht might be acquitted on the evidence, and offered to step down to avoid accusations that Jackson had given the job to too junior a lawyer — he was then 31 — he was duly relieved of the brief.

He was, however, allowed to outline the case against Funk, thus being the youngest prosecutor to speak at the trial, but the main cross-examination was handed to Jackson’s appointee Tom Dodd, who could not quite pin down the lachrymose Funk. He was ultimately convicted, though not executed, while Schacht was indeed acquitted.

As part of his original task, Meltzer interviewed Goering, who had been the economy’s supremo. He had found him unrepentant and candid, given to making such statements as: “But of course we regarded your treaties as so much lavatory paper!” Yet when Meltzer offered the fruits of this research to Jackson, they were dismissed out of hand.

Jackson’s subsequent failure to cross-examine Goering effectively, in large part because of his lack of methodical preparation, became the great crisis of the trial.

Meltzer was nonetheless able to make an important contribution to another part of the tribunal’s work. Ten days before the start of the case pertaining to the concentration camps, he was abruptly asked to review the briefs prepared so far. A vast mass of information had had to be processed and digested in a few months, and he was not surprised to find the case lacking in focus.

Indeed, it is arguable that the institutionalised nature of the Final Solution largely eluded the prosecution throughout the trial, but Meltzer, himself Jewish, was able to bring some direction to what proved to be the most significant of the charges, those embracing war crimes and crimes against humanity.

In later years Meltzer became a nuanced supporter of the trials. He felt that Nuremberg had set an important precedent, but retained doubts about its impartiality, failing as it did to call to account wrongs committed by the Allies, not least by the Soviet Union. It was characteristic of Meltzer to see every side of a question, and never to be dogmatic in his opinions.

Bernard David Meltzer was born in Philadelphia in 1914. His parents were Russian immigrants, his father being a scholar of Hebrew who made shift with irregular sales work, while his mother reacted to the New World by seeking refuge in hypochondria.

He studied law at the University of Chicago and then under Felix Frankfurter at Harvard. In 1938 this contact secured him the first of a series of employments with federal agencies, initially at the Securities and Exchange Commission and later at the State Department. There he was an assistant to Dean Acheson, and worked under Donald Hiss, brother of the communist spy Alger Hiss.

Meltzer was given the task of construing the Neutrality Act to enable the implementation of the Lend-Lease agreement that was of such aid to Britain during the Battle of the Atlantic.

Meltzer joined the US Navy, but spent much of the war in England as an assessor of aerial photographs. He often had to tone down enthusiastic reports by American pilots, once pointing out that in recent weeks they claimed to have destroyed 400 per cent of the Luftwaffe’s fighter capacity. One of his responsibilities was to prepare a likely damage assessment for a forthcoming raid on Tokyo.

He forecast accurately that the resulting firestorm could claim 100,000 lives, and had qualms about its necessity. In 1945, he helped to draft the founding charter of the UN.

After the war Meltzer went back to the University of Chicago to teach law, eventually specialising in that of employment. He developed a particular interest in monopolies, and in the balance between the dictates of the market and the rights of employees — issues that became increasingly important as Chicago’s economists started to wield great influence.

Meltzer’s teaching became one of the great attractions of the university’s law school, whose reputation grew steadily under the leadership of his brother-in-law, Edward Levi, the Attorney-General who had the task of restoring the image of justice after the downfall of Nixon. Meltzer was revered by his students for his sympathetic nature, and for his emphasis on the pragmatic application of their studies.

He was an adviser to several government bodies, and enjoyed occasional forays into arbitration, notably in disputes over salaries for baseball and basketball stars. He retired in 1985, and had latterly been suffering from prostate cancer.

He is survived by his wife, Jean, and by their son and two daughters.

Bernard Meltzer, prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials and professor of law, was born on November 21, 1914. He died on January 4, 2007, aged 92.

Free download, of David Irving: “Nuremberg, the Last Battle”