Henry Torrès

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From left: Nahum Goldmann , Stephen Wise , Henry Torrès at the 1942 World Jewish Congress in New York City

Henry Torrès , also Henri, (born October 17, 1891 in Les Andelys , † January 4, 1966 in Paris ) was a French lawyer .

Life

Torrès was born into a Jewish family, his grandfather Isaiah Levaillant was the founder of a league for civil and human rights during the Dreyfus Affair .

Torrès was initially a journalist for several socialist magazines and an active communist in his youth. During the First World War he was a non-commissioned officer, was wounded at Verdun and received the Croix de Guerre. After the war he studied law and was admitted to the Paris bar. The three brilliant young lawyers Campinchi, Torres and Vincent de Moro-Giafferi were then referred to as the "three musketeers" among Paris lawyers. Torrès defended anarchists like Buenaventura Durruti and also defended in Moscow and Romania, organizing protests against the treatment of Jews there on his return from Bessarabia . He is best known as a lawyer from the 1927 trial of Scholom Schwartzbard (1886–1938). Schwartzbard had lost his Jewish family in the pogroms in Ukraine in 1919 and blamed the then Ukrainian President Symon Petljura , who was living in exile in Paris. In May 1926 he shot him on the street. Torrès brought witnesses to the pogroms and obtained an acquittal for Schwartzbard, whom the prosecution sought to portray as a Moscow agent. He also consulted the defendant in the Herschel Grünspan case , where de Moro-Giafferi was the principal lawyer. However, because of the German occupation, the trial did not take place. Despite his lisp that kept him from becoming a comedian in his youth, he was later known for his full-fledged fiery speeches.

During the occupation of France by German troops, he fled to South America. In Uruguay and Brazil he was expelled because of his left-wing attitudes and went via Canada to the USA, where he agitated against the Vichy regime in New York as editor of the “Voix de France” . He was then a law professor in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo before returning to his work as a lawyer in Paris. From 1948 to 1958 he was a Gaullist senator for the Seine department. He was briefly Vice-President of the Supreme Court and from 1948 to 1959 President of the French state holding company for radio and television.

Torrès also wrote plays with a legal background (he translated, among others, "The Trial of Mary Dugan" and "Witness for the Prosecution").

literature

  • Paul S. Friedman: Pogromchik - the assassination of Simon Petlura . Hart Pub., New York 1976.
  • Henri Torrés: Accuses hors series . Gallimard, Paris 1957 (here he describes, among other things, the Grünspan, Schwartzbard cases)

Web links

Commons : Henry Torrès  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ John F. Oppenheimer (Red.) And a .: Lexicon of Judaism. 2nd Edition. Bertelsmann Lexikon Verlag, Gütersloh u. a. 1971, ISBN 3-570-05964-2 , col. 811.
  2. ↑ http://www.jta.org/1966/01/06/archive/henry-torres-dies-in-france-was-defender-in-historic-jewish-cases
personal data
SURNAME Torrès, Henry
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Torrès, Henri
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French lawyer
DATE OF BIRTH October 17, 1891
PLACE OF BIRTH Les Andelys
DATE OF DEATH 4th January 1966
Place of death Paris