Landmark trials museum opens

Almost 65 years to the day after an Allied effort began at Nuremberg, a permanent museum chronicling the Trial of Major War Criminals and subsequent proceedings is now open.

Inauguration of the Memorium Nürnberger Prozesse/Nuremberg Trials Memorial (above right) took place yesterday. (photo credit) Featured were comments by:

► Representatives of the 4 countries that comprised the International Military Tribunal: for Britain, Attorney General Dominic Grieve; for France, former Foreign Minister Roland Dumas; for Russia, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov; and for the United States, Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Stephen J. Rapp.

► A representative of Germany, 2 dozen of whose nationals were defendants at the year-long 1st trial: Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle.

► A representative of the Nuremberg prosecutors, Benjamin B. Ferencz. Ferencz served as Executive Counsel at the dozen subsequent Nuremberg trials conducted by the United States, and lead prosecutor at one of them, the Einsatzgruppen Case.

This week, additional commemorative events will unfold (alas, nothing honoring women at Nuremberg).

And from now on, visitors can tour the museum, located in the Palace of Justice at Bärenschanzstraße 72, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Wednesdays through Mondays. Among the artifacts in the exhibition is the dock that held the former leaders of the Third Reich; it'd been in storage for decades. Courtroom 600 (right), where the trial occurred and which this 'Grrl was honored to visit a few years back, is still a working chamber and so will be open only when court is not in session.

Details here.

Women at Nuremberg redux

At the IntLawGrrls-sponsored "Women and International Criminal Law" roundtable this Friday, I'll have the privilege to hear comments on the latest of my research regarding women who played roles in the Allies' Trial of the Major War Criminals, as well as subsequent trials that the United States held after World War II at Nuremberg, Germany.
The research owes much to IntLawGrrls' alumna Diane Orentlicher, now Deputy, Office of War Crimes Issues, at the U.S. Department of State. She dedicated her work on the blog to "Beatrice," the presumed name of an unremembered woman who prosecuted defendants at Nuremberg. Eventually, Diane determined that any number of women might have been "Beatrice." The most likely candidate was "Ceil" Goetz (above right); the quest for her and her sisters at Nuremberg first was explored in my "Women at Nuremberg" series of blog posts.
My roundtable essay, Cecelia Goetz, Woman at Nuremberg, tells more about Goetz, an American woman who turned 30 at Nuremberg. Included are not only details on how and why she became a prosecutor in the Krupp trial, but also a life story marked by many “first woman” chapters -- on the law review at New York University School of Law, at the U.S. Department of Justice, and, after Nuremberg, in the federal judiciary.
This essay follows upon another overview, "Portraits of Woman at Nuremberg," published recently in Proceedings of the Third International Humanitarian Law Dialogs (Elizabeth Andersen & David M. Crane eds., 2010). "Portraits" places women at the trials within the context of social developments during the post-World War II era. Mentioned are women who were defendants, journalists, or witnesses; however, the focus is on women, mostly Americans, who served as prosecutors at Nuremberg. Among the latter was Sadie Arbuthnot, depicted at left in a photo recently discovered in Harvard Library's digital trove.
Later a judge in the United States' court system in Germany and after marriage a lawyer at NASA, Arbuthnot too was a woman at Nuremberg.
More to come.

On August 7

On this day in ...
... 1890 (120 years ago today), a daughter was born in Concord, New Hampshire, to emigrants from Ireland who espoused socialism and feminism. Their daughter, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (left), would work for both throughout her life. She gave her 1st public speech, "On Women Under Socialism," as a teenager. Her oratory soon got her kicked out of high school, and she became a full-time Industrial Workers of the World organizer. For this group -- whose slogan was "One Big Union," and which was known colloquially as the "Wobblies" -- Flynn, nicknamed "Rebel Girl," organized children, women, and men who worked in industries across the United States. In the wake of World War I she helped found the American Civil Liberties Union; in 1940 the ACLU kicked her off its executive board because she belonged to the Communist Party. That membership also prompted a 9-month trial -- at which she defended herself -- that ended in a Smith Act conviction and a prison sentence served at Alderson federal prison for women. (Among the lawyers who represented Flynn at points in her career was Mary M. Kaufman, previously among the women U.S. prosecutors at Nuremberg.) Having become in 1961 the 1st woman Chair of the U.S. Communist Party, Flynn died in Moscow on September 5, 1964. The Soviet government of Premier Nikita Khrushchev gave her "a full-scale state funeral in Red Square."

(Prior August 7 posts are here, here, and here.)

'Nuff said

(Taking context-optional note of thought-provoking quotes)

'Thousands would be a conservative estimate.'

-- Dr. Wendy Lower (below right), on the findings of her research respecting the number of women who took some part in genocide and other crimes of the Nazi era. The New York Times article that carries the quote further notes the significance of her addition of a "gender perspective" to the tragedy of the Holocaust. Historian Lower allows that no more than 2% of "perpetrators" were women. (credit for above-left photo from 1947 trial of Auschwitz-Birkenau guard Maria Mandel) But she adds that many other women aided Nazi efforts indirectly; for instance, by hosting parties for men who killed. (Consider too this prior IntLawGrrls post.) The reality that some women were agents of crime is one we 'Grrls have discussed a number of times, in relation not only to postwar accountability at Nuremberg, but also to contemporary tribunals such as the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

Go On! "Nuremberg: Taking Stock"

(Go On! is an occasional item on symposia of interest) This past year a permanent exhibit, "Courtroom 600 - Project "Memorial Nuremberg Trials," has been established in the Palace of Justice at which the International Military Tribunal and 12 subsequent U.S. military tribunals convened under Control Council Law No. 10. To recognize this development, Nuremberg’s Documentation Centre will convene a conference entitled "'That Four Great Nations': The Nuremberg Trials: Taking Stock" from October 1 to 3, 2009, at the Documentation Centre in Nuremberg. (credit for 2007 photo below right, by me, of Courtroom 600)
Session topics and participants:
► Nuremberg Categories of Crimes and their Significance for the Present, Christoph J.M. Safferling, David M. Crane, and Rainer Huhle.
► National and International Media Response to the Nuremberg Trial, Hans-Ulrich Wagner, Brian K. Feltman, and Nina Burkhardt.
► National Contributions and Perspectives on the International Military Tribunal, John Q. Barrett (to whom we tip our hats for news of this conference), David Cesarani, Annette Wieviorka, and Natalja Lebedeva.
► U.S. Intelligence Support and Subversion of the Nuremberg Trial's Process, Michael Salter.
► Problems of Criminal Defence at the International Military Tribunal, Sven Peitzner.
► The Holocaust on Trial?, Michael R. Marrus, Laura Jockusch, and Thomas Bryant.
► A Challenge for the Tribunal: Presenting films as Evidence, Christian Delage.
► Visit to Court Room 600, Klaus Kastner.
► Toward a Conjoined Understanding of the International Military Tribunals of Nuremberg and Tokyo, Neil Boister, Elizabeth Borgwardt, and James B. Sedgwick.
► Legacy of Nuremberg, Claus Kreß.
The conference website is here; registration details here.
I do hope they'll publish the papers, given that this promises to generate a rich information trove to complement this IntLawGrrl's Women at Nuremberg research.

Different take on women at Nuremberg

Research for my lecture this Monday on "Women at Nuremberg" turned up a 75-year-old reminder that not only ethnic status, but also gender status, was a target of totalitarianism during that era.
"Hitler Condemns Women in Politics" declared an Associate Press article published in a September 1934 edition of The New York Times.
The article reported on a speech in Nuremberg, at which Adolf Hitler, who’d become Germany’s Chancellor a year earlier, said:

‘Liberalism has a large number of points for women’s equality. The Nazi program has but one: this is a child. ‘While man makes his supreme sacrifice on the field of battle, woman fights her supreme battle for her nation when she gives life to a child.’

He linked notions that women might play other roles in society to his least-favored ethnic group – of course – and also to the apparent curse of "‘intellectualism.’"
In short, Hitler "derided the mixing of women in political matters," and "added that he believed parliamentary life tended to degrade women."
His audience?
Two thousand "woman politicians," Nazi Party organizers who "applauded his statements energetically."

(credit for photo of September 1934 rally at Nuremberg)

On August 20

On this day in ...
... 1947, following nearly "140 days of proceedings, including the testimony of 85 witnesses and the submission of almost 1,500 documents," U.S. military judges announced their judgment in the Doctors' Trial at Nuremberg. Sixteen of the 23 defendants were convicted on charges related both to the systematic killing of persons deemed unfit on account of mental or physical impairments and to the ghoulish medical experiments conducted on concentration camp detainees. Of the 16 convicted, 7 were sentenced to death on this day and executed on June 2, 1948. To the lone woman defendant, Herta Oberheuser (above left), a physician who conducted experiments at the Ravensbrück camp, the judgment directed these words:

HERTA OBERHEUSER, Military Tribunal I has found and adjudged you guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, as charged under the indictment heretofore filed against you. For your said crimes on which you have been and now stand convicted Military Tribunal I sentences you, Herta Oberheuser, to imprisonment for a term of twenty years, to be served at such prison or prisons, or other appropriate place of confinement, as shall be determined by competent authority.

As posted in our Women at Nuremberg series -- to be reprised later this month during the 3d Annual International Humanitarian Law Dialogs of which IntLawGrrls is a proud cosponsor -- Oberheuser would be released from prison in 1952 and would try to resume the practice of medicine, but would lose her license on account of camp survivors' protests. (photo credit) She died in 1978.

... 1818, according to Spanish WikiPedia, Kamehameha I, the King of Hawaii depicted on the U.S. quarter at right, signed a treaty which included a provision by which Hawaii "became the 1st country to recognize the independence of the Provincias Unidas del Río de la Plata," another name for the country today better known as Argentina. The entry serves as a reminder of Hawaii's former status -- about which we've previously posted here, here, and here -- as a sovereign subject of international law.

(Prior August 20 posts are here and here.)

Go On! IntLawGrrls cosponsors 3d IHL Dialogs, on "Women in International Criminal Law"

(Go On! is an occasional item on symposia of interest) Delighted to announce that for the 1st time ever, IntLawGrrls is cosponsoring an international law conference!
It's the 3d Annual International Humanitarian Law Dialogs, to be held August 31-September 1 at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, a community near Buffalo in upstate New York.
As posted here and here, last year's dialogs marked the 60th anniversary of the Convention Against Genocide; the 1st year, the 100th anniversary of the 1907 Hague Rules on the laws of war. This year's theme -- "Honoring Women in International Criminal Law From Nuremberg to the ICC" -- is ready-made for IntLawGrrls the world over. It's no surprise, then, that a number of 'Grrls were enlisted as the event was put together by our colleague David M. Crane, formerly Prosecutor at the Special Court for Sierra Leone, now law professor at Syracuse University College of Law.
Our thanks to David, who's also the founder Impunity Watch blog (one of the "connections" in our righthand column), both for the invitation and for welcoming IntLawGrrls blog as a cosponsor. Also cosponsoring are the Robert H. Jackson Center in nearby Jamestown, N.Y., which features the work of the Supreme Court Justice who served as Chief U.S. Prosecutor at the Nuremberg trial of the Major War Criminals, Impunity Watch/Syracuse Law, the American Society of International Law, the Enough Project of the Center for American Progress, the Whitney R. Harris World Law Institute at Washington University School of Law, and the Frederick K. Cox International Law Center at Case Western Reserve University School of Law.
Events on the program include:
Monday, August 31:
► Opening remarks, including a moment of silence for Dr. Alison Des Forges, the Human Rights Watch researcher who died in a plane crash this past February, as we then posted.
►Keynote lecture entitled "Katherine Fite, A Prosecutor at Nuremberg," by John Q. Barrett, Professor of Law at St. John's University School of Law, New York, and Elizabeth S. Lenna Fellow at the Robert H. Jackson Center in Jamestown, New York. As Barrett will detail, Katherine Boardman Fite, who'd received her law degree from Yale in 1930, served as Jackson's assistant.
► Keynote lecture entitled "Women at Nuremberg," by me, IntLawGrrl Diane Marie Amann, Professor of Law and Director of the California International Law Center at King Hall, University of California, Davis, School of Law, and an ASIL Vice President. The presentation will be based on my IntLawGrrls series of the same name.
► An update from the current prosecutors, to be moderated by Leila Nadya Sadat, Henry H. Oberschelp Professor of Law and Director of the Harris Institute at Washington University School of Law, St. Louis. That institute's namesake, former Nuremberg prosecutor Whitney R. Harris, also is expected to attend these 3d annual dialogs.
► Luncheon speech by Gayle E. Smith (left), a cofounder of the Enough Project who's now a Special Assistant to President Barack Obama. Introducing her will be Colin Thomas-Jensen, a policy advisor at the Enough Project.
► Roundtable discussion with the prosecutors on "Gender Crimes at the International Level," moderated by IntLawGrrl Diane Orentlicher, Professor of Law at American University's Washington College of the Law.
► A briefing by Sadat on the Crimes Against Humanity Initiative about which IntLawGrrls has posted here and here.
► Dinner speech by the Honorable Patricia M. Wald (right), formerly Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and, subsequently, a Judge of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Introducing Judge Wald will be IntLawGrrl Lucy Reed, ASIL President, Freshfields partner, and a member of the Eritrea-Ethiopia Claims Commission, about which she's posted.
► Showing of NBC's The Wanted, with members of the cast.
Tuesday, September 1:
► "International Criminal Law Year in Review," presented by Michael P. Scharf, Professor of Law and Director of the Cox Center.
► "Reflections on Women in International Criminal Law," by the Honorable Marilyn J. Kaman (below right), Presiding Judge, Probate/Mental Health Court, Hennepin County, Minnesota, and from 2002-2003 a U.N.-appointed judge in Kosovo, where she presided over cases involving war crimes, organized crime, ethnically motivated disputes, and human trafficking.
► Roundtable with 3 women who've worked as international trial attorneys: Christine H. Chung, partner at Quinn Emmanuel and former senior trial attorney, Office of the Prosecutor, International Criminal Court (prior post); Lesley Taylor, Special Court for Sierra Leone; and Renifa Madenga, International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Moderated by Dr. Kelly Askin, IntLawGrrl and Senior Legal Officer, International Justice, Open Society Justice Initiative.
► Lunch speech by Siri Frigaard (above left), Chief Public Prosecutor, Norwegian National Authority for Prosecution of Organised and Other Serious Crime. Former ICC attorney Chung will introduce her.
► Elizabeth Andersen, ASIL Executive Director, will lead the signing of the 3d Chautauqua Declaration.
Prosecutors expected to attend, besides those already named, include: Fatou Bensouda (below left), ICC Deputy Prosecutor (prior posts here and here); William Caming, former trial counsel at Nuremberg; Desmond DeSilva, former Prosecutor at the Special Court for Sierra Leone; Richard Goldstone, formerly the ICTY-ICTR Chief Prosecutor and a Justice on the Constitutional Court of South Africa, and currently leading a U.N. inquiry into the 2008-2009 conflict in the Gaza Strip; Hassan Jallow, International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda; Robert Petit, Co-Prosecutor of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia; and Stephen Rapp, Prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone since 2006, and now, as we've posted, President Barack Obama's nominee to become the U.S. Ambassador at Large for War Crimes Issues.
For details, contact Carol Drake at cdrake@roberthjackson.org.

Women at Nuremberg: Defendants

(Final installment of IntLawGrrls' 5-part Women at Nuremberg series)

This series began with the observation of Peter Heigl in his German-English book Nürnberger Prozesse - Nuremberg Trials that among those who played a role at Nuremberg were "a few female defendants." IntLawGrrls've understandably been loathe to claim these women as our own. But they exist, as photos of "SS women" in yesterday's New York Times reminded. Those who stood trial for war crimes have an undeniable, if unfortunate, international prominence, and at times their story too must be told.
Among the defendants convicted by the International Military Tribunal during the Doctors' Trial was Dr. Herta Oberheuser (right), a physician whose specialty was dermatology. For her part in nonconsensual medical experiments conducted on inmates at Ravensbrück Concentration Camp, Oberheuser received a sentence of 20 years, later halved. On release from prison 1952 she tried to open a medical practice but was forced to close it on account of former inmates' protests.
Women defendants further included a number of Nazi camp guards, prosecuted in proceedings such as as:
Buchenwald trial
Conducted by a U.S. military tribunal at the former concentration camp at Dachau. Among those convicted was Ilse Koch (left), wife of the Buchenwald Camp commander who was complicit in the atrocities committed under his command. Furor erupted in 1948, when her initial sentence to life in prison was cut to 4 years. "Koch was released in 1949, rearrested by German authorities, retried, and sentenced to life imprisonment. She committed suicide at Aichach prison in Bavaria in 1967."
Bergen-Belsen trial
A British military court adjudicated charges against 45 defendants, including: "the most notorious" Irma Grese (#9 at right) executed in 1945 along with Elizabeth Volkenrath and Juana Borman, plus at least 18 other women. Of these, 5 were acquitted; the rest received sentences ranging from 1 to 15 years.
Auschwitz trial
Conducted by Polish authorities in Krakow. Defendants included Therese Brandl, 45 when she was executed in 1947; Maria Mandel (below), 36 when executed in 1948; Luise Danz, sentenced to life in prison, released in 1956, and in 1996 subjected to a German trial that was halted on account of her age; Hildegard Lächert, released in 1956, then convicted in a German courtroom in 1981; and Alice Orlowski, sentenced to life in prison but released in 1957.

The crimes of which these women were convicted ought to be unimaginable, and will remain, here at least, unprintable.

Previous installments of in IntLawGrrls' Women at Nuremberg series: Prosecutors, Staffers, Press, Witnesses.

Women at Nuremberg: Witnesses

(Part 4 of IntLawGrrls' Women at Nuremberg series)

A characteristic of modern warfare is its catastrophic consequences for noncombatants; in particular, for women and children. World War II was emblematic of this phenomenon. It's little surprise, then, that the record made during proceedings at which "the entire ideology and bureaucratic reach of the Nazi regime were put to light," as Peter Heigl writes in his book Nürnberger Prozesse - Nuremberg Trials, included testimony from a number of women.

Women's testimony had particular significance at 2 of the later trials.

Doctors' Trial

In what has come to be known as the "Doctors' Trial," the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg adjudicated charges against 23 German physicians alleged to have taken part in the Nazi program to euthanize mentally ill, mentally retarded, and physically disabled persons, or to have performed nonconsensual experiments on concentration camp inmates. Among the latter were Polish women who survived the Ravensbrück concentration camp in Northern Germany. Three -- Maria Kusmierczuk, Wladislawa Karolewska, and Jadwiga Dzido -- are shown above left talking with a nurse about their ordeal. Dzido was a Polish Catholic who'd studied pharmacology before the war (above right). At the December 22, 1946, trial session at left, Dzido stood mute as Dr. Leo Alexander, a Boston psychiatrist and neurologist, pointed to scars on her leg and testified about her mistreatment.

Based on the testimony of Dzido and 84 others, as well as 1,500 documents, the Doctors' Trial ended with the conviction of 16 defendants and the execution of 7. (photos courtesy of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum archives)

Justice Trial

There was also the 3d proceeding, United States v. Alstoetter, known as the Justice Trial. Witnesses included Anna M., whom Heigl describes as "one of countless women subjected to forced sterilization." (Forced sterilization arises, with regard to a male victim, in "Judgment at Nuremberg," the 1961 film based on that trial. In it a defense attorney throws a tu quoque jab at the Allied judges by quoting Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes' infamous 1927 condonation of a forced sterilization in the United States on the ground that "Three generations of imbeciles are enough.")

Of the 14 defendants who faced verdict in Alstoetter, 10 were convicted; 4 of them received life sentences and the other 6, from 5 to 10 years' imprisonment.

Still to come in IntLawGrrls' Women at Nuremberg series: Defendants. Already posted: Prosecutors, Staffers, Press.

Women at Nuremberg: Press

(Part 3 of IntLawGrrls' Women at Nuremberg series)

"Approximately 250 journalists crowded the press section of Courtroom 600 -- on some days such as on opening day, November 20, 1945, or the verdict announcement on August 31, 1946, every last seat was occupied," Peter Heigl writes, in his book Nürnberger Prozesse - Nuremberg Trials, of media coverage of the 1st proceeding, known as the Trial of the Major War Criminals. Reporters hailed from a score of countries, including 80 Americans, 40 Français, 35 Soviets, 20 Poles, 12 Czechs, and 5 Germans. They were joined by broadcasters, photojournalists, and authors, all of whom came to see what was happening at Nuremberg.
This media throng included a number of women, some of whom are profiled in Nancy Caldwell Sorel's The Women Who Wrote the War. Women journalists at Nuremberg included:

Tania Long
During World War II the New York Herald Tribune's assignment of Long to its London office drew this objection from New York Times reporter F. Raymond Daniell, who'd cover the Scottsboro case, among others, before the war: "You don't want a girl. This is a man's job." Long, who'd been born in Berlin and educated in London and Paris, no doubt proved her mettle: within years the couple were married. For decades thereafter they were a dynamic journalistic duo; they're pictured above covering a press conference at the Nuremberg Palace of Justice. While posted in Ottawa in 1954, the couple delivered remarks to the Empire Club of Canada. Long's account of her own experiences and observations on the world's growing interdependence began with this subtle prod to her hosts:

I am greatly honoured to be here today. Indeed I am very flattered to be here, since I understand that it is rare that meetings of this group are open to the ladies.

Daniel seconded the sentiment in his own remarks.

Martha Gellhorn

The journalism career of Martha Gellhorn (right) began with a gig covering haute couture in Paris in the Thirties, but the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in the middle of that decade, and, it is said, the urging of her then-husband, Ernest Hemingway, turned her into a war correspondent. Gellhorn reported on the beach at D-Day, at the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp, and at the Nuremberg trials. She covered the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama at age 81. When she died 8 years later, an admirer recalled Gellhorn's comment on her own work:

'I wrote fiction because I love to, and journalism from curiosity which has, I think, no limits and ends only with death.'

Rebecca West

Englishwoman Cicily Isabel Fairfield (left) took "Rebecca West," the name of an Ibsen character whom she once played, to write novels and nonfiction, including 2 books inspired by the post-World War II trials, The Meaning of Treason (1947) and A Train of Powder (1955).

Victoria Ocampo

Victoria Ocampo (right) was an Argentine intellectual and ally of Gabriela Mistral, namesake of an IntLawGrrl. Ocampo's "admirable" dispatches, spiced with accounts of participants' "'tics,'" are part of Testimonios. Series primera y quinta, published in Buenos Aires in 2000.

Erika Mann

The oldest daughter of novelist Thomas Mann and his wife, Katia Mann, Erika Mann (right) is described as a "[w]riter, actress, and intellectual refugee from the Third Reich," and "one of the twentieth century's most intriguing nonconformists." This outspoken critic of Nazism

was one of the few women journalists covering the Nuremberg trials who attained access to the defendants. Mann's experience with cabaret irony attuned her senses to the macabre spectacle of unrepentant Nazis treating their trials as a performance. She later commented, 'no spookier adventure could be imagined.'

Janet Flanner

Paris-based Janet Flanner -- she is pictured at left with Hemingway -- wrote about World War II and its aftermath for the New Yorker. The Indiana-born expat had been a feminist activist and part of the Algonquin Round Table before the war. Her coverage of the postwar trial included this food for thought:

When you look at the startling ruins of Nuremberg, you are looking at a result of the war. When you look at the prisoners on view in the courthouse, you are looking at 22 of the causes.

Still to come in this Women at Nuremberg series: Witnesses, Defendants. Already posted: Prosecutors, Staffers.

Women at Nuremberg: Staffers

(Part 2 of IntLawGrrls' Women at Nuremberg series)

Images of the many women who played administrative roles during the Trial of the Major War Criminals and subsequent proceedings jump out at readers of Peter Heigl's book Nürnberger Prozesse - Nuremberg Trials (2001). Women helped direct renovation of the courtroom. They translated documents, transcribed testimony, kept papers in order, and took dictation during witness interviews. Today we'll mention just 2 of those women.

A major-domo, if you will, seems to have been Captain Virginia Gill, Administrative Officer in the Office of Chief Counsel for war crimes. (Heigl also identifies her as the Executive to the Prosecution, in a photo of her greeting 4 visiting U.S. Senators.) Gill, her hand at her cheek, is depicted above during an April 1947 courtroom session. To her left are Brig. Gen. Telford Taylor, a leading prosecutor and later author of a superb memoir of the trials; Gen. Lucius D. Clay; and another prosecutor, Joseph W. Kaufman, deputy Chief of Counsel. To Gill's right, a hatted woman identified only as "Mrs. Clay" and Brig. Gen. Leroy Watson.

Another remarkable staffer at Nuremberg was Edith Simon Coliver (left, in 1940). After receiving a bachelor's degree at the University of California, Berkeley, she signed on with the U.S. Office of War Information, and helped as a translator at the San Francisco Conference that concluded with adoption of the U.N. Charter. Soon after she returned to her birthplace, Germany, to work at Nuremberg. As 1 article put it:

As a 23-year-old, Coliver translated the pretrial testimony of high-ranking Nazi officer Hermann Goering for American interrogators.
'He was not particularly thrilled to see a woman, a Jewish woman, as his interpreter,' she told the Bulletin in 1995.
Coliver surprised herself by later asking Goering to sign a program. 'Then, I was ashamed of myself,' she told the Bulletin. 'Why would I be getting an autograph from Nuremberg?' So she asked her boss to sign as well. He did, next to Goering's signature, and wrote 'To Edith Simon, who helped hang the same.'

(The incident no doubt took place during the trial. Goering indeed received the death penalty, but cheated the hangman by committing suicide in his cell.)

In her later years Coliver was an executive at the Asia Foundation, serving in the Philippines and Taiwan. The Bay Area-based "'woman of the world,'" who spoke not only German and English, but also French, Spanish, Tagalog, Portuguese, and Mandarin, died in 2002 at age 79. Among her survivors is her daughter and our colleague, Sandra Coliver, Senior Legal Officer at the Open Society Justice Initiative. (photo at right courtesy of Telford Taylor Papers, Columbia University Law School; at left, Berkeley's International House).

Coming next week in this Women at Nuremberg series: Press, Witnesses, Defendants.

Women at Nuremberg: Prosecutors

As promised, the 1st in a series about women at the Nuremberg trials:
Readers may recall that for months we at IntLawGrrls have stayed on the trail of women who served on the team that prosecuted defendants before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. The quest was launched by Diane Orentlicher, who's assumed the IntLawGrrl nom de plume of "Beatrice" in recognition of a conversation that our colleague Patricia Viseur-Sellers had with IMT prosecutor Benjamin Ferencz; he said

that, along with another woman whose name he could not recall, 'Beatrice' was part of the Nuremberg Prosecution team.

Later, another source relayed a story that 1 of the women at Nuremberg was married to a male prosecutor, a fact the couple tried to keep quiet.
Sleuthing's led us to believe that Ferencz might've had in mind Cecelia H. Goetz, a New Yorker who appeared before the bench during the "industrialists" trial of Alfred Krupp. Other names of women prosecutors at Nuremberg also have surfaced: Phillis Heller Rosenthal, Belle Mayer Zeck, and Mary Kaufman.
Questions remain:
Were those 4 all the women who prosecuted at Nuremberg? These are Americans -- did women work with the Russian, English, or French teams? And what of "Beatrice"?
According to a slim but excellent volume I picked up this summer at Nuremberg, the answer to the 1st question quite clearly is "no."
In his German-English book Nürnberger Prozesse - Nuremberg Trials (2001), Peter Heigl writes:

[I]t is interesting to point out that staffs were comprised about equally of both genders, with the exception of the all-male judges and the prosecutors and defense lawyers; at the follow-up trials there were three female prosecutors and a few female defendants. (pp. 52-53)

The only 1 of those "3" prosecutors whom Heigl gives a name is altogether new: Dorothea G. Minskoff, pictured above next to a defense attorney at a Ministries case hearing. No other names're mentioned, nor any more information given.
A 1948 directory of IMT personnel, however, provides additional clues. Goetz is listed, as is to be expected, and Mary Kaufman, too. But the only Mayer was named Hilde, and neither Heller nor Rosenthal is there. An interesting find: the listing for Dorothea G. Minskoff reveals her at the same address as Emanuel Minskoff, a prosecutor in the I.G. Farben case. Is this the couple mentioned in the story above?
Even more intriguing, 2 women named Beatrice served at IMT in 1948, Beatrice E. Benford and Beatrice O. Bushnell. Might 1 be our "Beatrice"?

Still to come in this Women at Nuremberg series: Staffers, Press, Witnesses, and, alas, those Defendants.

On July 5, ...

... 1996, Dolly the sheep, the first mammal cloned from an adult cell, was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. She gave birth naturally to 4 lambs before she contracted arthritis and was euthanized in 2003.
... 1946, 4 days after the United States began testing atomic weapons in the Bikini Atoll, Louis Reard introduced in Paris a skimpy 2-piece swimsuit he named le bikini. In his Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials, U.S. Prosecutor Telford Taylor made a particular mention of his 1st sight of the new item of couture -- noteworthy given the ongoing search by IntLawGrrl Diane Orentlicher [aka Beatrice] for the women lawyers who contributed to those trials.
... 1937, U.S. Rep. Nita M. Lowey (D-N.Y.) was born in New York City.