Biography

He was the last surviving member of the three-man US legal team that prosecuted high-ranking Nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg Trials in 1945, and he later became a voice in the founding of the International Criminal Court.

After the Pearl Harbour attack in December 1941, he joined the United States Navy and was recruited to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). He joined the Allied war crimes legal team as the war in Europe came to a close, working and becoming the principal aide to, the United States chief prosecutor Justice Robert Jackson.

At the Nuremberg trials in Nuremberg, Germany, he was the lead prosecutor and chiefly responsible for the prosecution of Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the most senior surviving leader and former Chief of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Main Security Office), and against two of its main agencies, the Gestapo and the SD, or security service. In order to obtain evidence against Kaltenbrunner, he participated in the three-day interrogation of the former Auschwitz concentration camp commandant Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Höss, who claimed unapologetically that 2.5 million people had been exterminated under his supervision.

He also helped in the cross-examination of Hermann Göring, Hitler's second-in-command and designated successor, but Göring evaded the hangman's noose by taking cyanide just before he was due to face execution.

After the Nuremberg Trials, he served as Chief of Legal Advice during the Berlin Blockade before returning home to become professor of law at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas as well as director of the Hoover Commission's Legal Services Task Force and the first Executive Director of the American Bar Association.