Hartley Shawcross

Hartley William Shawcross, Baron Shawcross, GBE, PC, KC (4 February 1902 – 10 July 2003) was a British barrister and politician and the lead British prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crimes tribunal.

Early life

Hartley William Shawcross was born to John and Hilda Shawcross in Germany, whilst his father was teaching English at Giessen University. He was educated at Dulwich College, the London School of Economics and University of Geneva and sat for the Bar at Gray's Inn, where he won first-class honours. He was the youngest man ever to be made King's Counsel.

Career

He joined Labour at a young age, and served as Member of Parliament for St Helens from 1945 to 1958, holding the position of Attorney-General from 1945 to 1951. It was in 1946 when debating the repeal of anti-Union laws in the House of Commons that Shawcross made the "We are the masters at the moment" comment (widely misquoted as "We are the masters now") that came to haunt him.

As Attorney-General, he prosecuted William Joyce ("Lord Haw-Haw") and John Amery for treason and also prosecuted Klaus Fuchs and Alan Nunn May, for giving atomic secrets to the Soviet Union and John George Haigh (the acid bath murderer) for murder. He was knighted in 1945 and named Chief Prosecutor for the United Kingdom at Nuremberg. From 1945 to 1949, he was Britain's principal United Nations delegate, though he was recalled in 1948 to lead for the government's interest at the Lynskey tribunal. In 1951, he briefly served as President of the Board of Trade until the Labour government's defeat in the election of that year. He ended his law career the same year, and was expected to become a Tory earning him the nickname "Sir Shortly Floorcross". Instead though he resigned from Parliament in 1958, saying he was tired of party politics. He was made one of Britain's first life peers on February 14, 1959 as Baron Shawcross, of Friston in the County of Sussex, and sat in the House of Lords as a cross-bencher. Because of this change of loyalties away from Labour, his many business interests and, much later, his support for the Social Democratic Party (UK), the 'Floorcross' nickname in the end rang true.

In 1957, he was among a group of eminent British lawyers who founded JUSTICE, the human rights and law reform organisation and he became its first chairman - a position he held until 1972.

He was also instrumental in the foundation of the University of Sussex and served as chancellor of the university from 1965 to 1985.

Family

Lord Shawcross was married three times. His first wife Alberta Rosita Shyvers (m. May 24, 1924) suffered from multiple sclerosis and committed suicide on December 30, 1943. His second wife Joan Winifred Mather (m. September 21, 1944) died in a riding accident on the Sussex Downs on January 26, 1974. At the age of 95 he married Mrs. Susanne Monique Huiskamp on April 18, 1997 in Gibraltar.

He had two sons, the author and historian William Shawcross, Hume Shawcross, and a daughter, Dr Joanna Shawcross, by his second wife. He died at home at Cowbeech, East Sussex at the age of 101, the last surviving member of Clement Attlee's government.

Shawcross and the Nuremberg Trials

Shawcross's advocacy before the Nuremberg Trial was passionate. His most famous line was:

"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 avoided the crusading style of American, Russian and French prosecutors. Shawcross's opening speech, which lasted two days, sought to undermine any belief that the Nuremberg Trials were victor's justice (an exacted vengeance against defeated foes). Instead, he focused on the rule of law and he demonstrated that the laws that the defendants had broken, expressed in international treaties and agreements, were those to which pre-war Germany had been a party. In his closing speech, he ridiculed any notion that any of the defendants could have remained ignorant of the thousands of Germans exterminated because they were old or mentally ill. He used the same argument for the millions of other people "annihilated in the gas chambers or by shooting" and he maintained that each of the 22 defendants was a party to "common murder in its most ruthless forms".

Thus Shawcross' advocacy was instrumental in obtaining convictions against the remaining Nazi leadership, on grounds which were perceived as fair and lawful.

Controversy

Bodkin Adams case

During the committal hearing for the suspected serial killer John Bodkin Adams in February 1957, Shawcross was seen dining with the defendant's lover, Roland Gwynne, at the White Hart Hotel in Lewes. They were accompanied by Lord Chief Justice Goddard, who had already selected Patrick Devlin as judge for Adams' trial and then later phoned Devlin while the jury was considering its verdict, to recommend that Adams was given bail before a second trial for another count of murder. While driving home afterwards, Gwynne crashed his car. He hadn't been drinking. Adams was acquitted but was suspected by police of killing 163 of his patients.

Later, on 10 May 1957, Goddard heard a contempt of court case against Newsweek and W. H. Smith. On April 1 during Adams' trial, they had respectively published and distributed an issue of the magazine containing two paragraphs of material "highly prejudicial to the accused", saying that Adams' victim count could be "as high as 400". Each company was fined £50. Goddard made no mention of his conflict of interest.

Other cases

During a rent tribunal case he referred to certain workers as "six black niggers".

Bibliography

• Shawcross, H. (1995). Life Sentence. London: Constable. ISBN 0094749809.

External links

Obituary, The Independent, July 11, 2003 by James Morton

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