Hartley Shawcross
Hartley William Shawcross, Baron Shawcross GBE , PC , KC (born February 4, 1902 in Giessen , † July 10, 2003 Cowbeech , East Sussex ) was a British lawyer and Labor Party politician . He was the British chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials .
Life
Hartley William Shawcross' father John Shawcross was a professor of English literature in Giessen and worked as a translator of the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe into English, his mother Hilda Constance Asser a suffragette .
Hartley Shawcross attended school in the London borough of Dulwich and studied at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. He was admitted to the bar as a Barrister-at-Law in 1925 by the Gray's Inn Bar Association , where he was Bencher in 1939 and Treasurer in 1955. 1939 Shawcross was the youngest person to Attorney General appointed (King's Counsel). In 1941 he was judge of the peace (Justice of the Peace, comparable to an arbitrator ) for Sussex, from 1941 to 1944 he was recorder (city judge) for Salford ; he held this office from 1946 to 1961 for Kingston upon Thames .
After the war he appeared as the UK's main prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials , where he earned a great reputation among the Allied victors for his legal expertise and his worthy demeanor. His most famous quote from the Nuremberg Trials is the beginning of his indictment: “Heartless murderers, looters and conspirators as they have never seen the world of their own.” On the other hand, he also solved the Nuremberg Goethe scandal through a poorly researched reference in his closing argument that cast a shadow over the legal “cleanliness” of the process.
He was then from 1946 to 1951 as Attorney General member of the Attlee cabinet . From April 1951 to October 1951 he was President of the Board of Trade (roughly equivalent to a Minister of Commerce). From 1946 to 1958 he represented the constituency of St. Helens in the British House of Commons for the Labor Party . He was also Britain's delegate to the UN General Assembly from 1945 to 1949 . From 1950 to 1967 he was a member of the permanent arbitration court in The Hague for his country .
However, his final political ascent was denied: both the office of foreign minister and the office of Labor party chairman, for which he was brought into play at the beginning of the 1950s , ultimately went to others. On February 14, 1959, as Baron Shawcross , of Friston in the County of Sussex , he was promoted to one of the first Life Peers under the Life Peerages Act 1958 . He was instrumental in founding the University of Sussex and from 1965 to 1985 its chancellor (Chancellor).
Private life
Shawcross married three times: first on May 24, 1924 Alberta Rosita Shyvers († December 30, 1944), the daughter of William Shyvers, then on September 21, 1944 Joan Winifred Mather († January 26, 1974), the daughter of Hume Mather, and on April 18, 1997 in Gibraltar Susanne Monique Huiskamp. With his second wife he had two sons and a daughter. He lived in Friston, near Eastbourne , Sussex , England, in 1999 and died at the age of 101 in Cowbeech , East Sussex, the last surviving member of the Clement Attlee government.
Honors
In 1945 Shawcross was inducted into the Order of the British Empire as an officer and was named Knight Grand Cross of that order in 1974. Since 1946 he was a member of the Privy Council . From 1934 to 1969 he was awarded the title of Honorary Doctor of Law nine times and one honorary Master of Law .
Publications (selection)
- Life Sentence. Constable, London 1995, ISBN 0-09-474980-9 .
- Power and chaos. The West won the Cold War. But can it also promote peace in the world? in: Die Zeit , November 18, 1994
Web links
- Literature by and about Hartley Shawcross in the catalog of the German National Library
- Newspaper article about Hartley Shawcross in the press kit 20th Century of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
- Hartley William Shawcross, Baron Shawcross, on thepeerage.com , accessed September 13, 2016.
- James Morton: Obituary , The Independent , July 11, 2003
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Shawcross, Hartley |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Shawcross, Hartley William, Baron Shawcross (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | British politician, (Labor Party), Member of the House of Commons, Minister |
| DATE OF BIRTH | February 4, 1902 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | to water |
| DATE OF DEATH | July 10, 2003 |
| Place of death | Cowbeech , East Sussex |