[Deathwatch] Lord Hartley William Shawcross, Nuremberg prosecutor , 101

[Deathwatch Central <cdw@slick.org>]

Nuremberg Prosecutor Shawcross Dies
Thu Jul 10, 2:21 PM ET
	
By BETH GARDINER, Associated Press Writer

LONDON - Lord Shawcross, who was Britain's chief prosecutor at the Nazi
war crimes trials in Nuremberg and a representative at the United
Nations (news - web sites) through the late 1940s, died Thursday, his
secretary said. He was 101.

Hartley William Shawcross was involved in a number of high-profile
cases throughout his career, prosecuting a major treason trial and an
atomic spying case.

Shawcross died at his home in Cowbeech, south of London, said his
secretary, Greta Kinder. The cause of death was not announced.

He was elected to Parliament when the Labor Party swept to power under
Clement Attlee in 1945, ousting Winston Churchill's Conservative Party,
and quickly became the new government's attorney general.

Shawcross then was appointed Britain's chief prosecutor at the
Nuremberg, Germany, trials of Nazi war criminals, signing an indictment
along with representatives of the United States, France and the Soviet
Union.

Shawcross called the Nazi defendants "black-hearted murderers,
plunderers and conspirators of which the world has not known their
equal."

"There comes a point when a man must refuse to answer to his leader if
he is also to answer to his own conscience," he said in court.

He later admitted to having some respect for Adolf Hitler's aide,
Hermann Goering, who killed himself the night before he was to be
executed.

"A criminal no doubt, but a courageous one, and a man of great ability
and outstanding personality," Shawcross said. "He defeated the gallows
by taking poison in his cell, and for that I take my hat off to him."

Shawcross served as one of Britain's representatives at the United
Nations through the late 1940s.

As attorney general, he led one of the nation's most infamous treason
cases, prosecuting William Joyce, known as "Lord Haw-Haw," for aiding
the Nazi propaganda effort during World War II.

Joyce, who was active in British fascist groups before the war, was a
U.S. citizen who also held a British passport when he broadcast from
Germany. Shawcross successfully argued that as long as Joyce possessed
that document, he owed Britain his allegiance. Joyce was convicted and
hanged.

Shawcross also prosecuted Klaus Fuchs, a German-born physicist
convicted of giving American and British atomic secrets to the Soviet
Union. Fuchs had fled Germany in the 1930s and aided British atomic
research during the war.

Fuchs also worked on the American effort to build an atomic bomb —
known as the Manhattan Project — at Los Alamos, N.M., and passed
secrets from both countries to the Soviets, accelerating their own
atomic program by as much as a year, according to some estimates. His
espionage was uncovered in 1950, and he served nine years in prison.

Shawcross left his job as attorney general in 1951 and stepped down as
a lawmaker in 1958. He was appointed to the House of Lords the
following year.

He was knighted in 1945 and received an even higher honor, becoming
Knight Grand Cross, Imperial Iranian Order of Homayoon, in 1974.

His son, William Shawcross, has written a number of books on
contemporary history, including "Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the
Destruction of Cambodia." Buckingham Palace said Wednesday he was
chosen as the official biographer of the late Queen Mother Elizabeth.

Shawcross's first wife, Rosina Alberta Shyvers, died in 1943 and his
second wife, Joan Winifred Mather, passed away in 1974.

Shawcross also is survived by his third wife, Monique, and son Hume and
daughter Joanna from his second marriage. A funeral was planned for
next week, Kinder said.