For me, Robert H. Jackson is alive.

• Author: Sonnenfeldt, Richard W.
• Position: Testimonial

As one without a law degree and with no credentials as a historian, it is a great honor for me to pay a layman's tribute to the most eminent alumnus of the Albany Law School: Robert H. Jackson. He is justly famous as one of the most eloquent Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, but perhaps no judicial comments have ever equaled his opening and closing statements at the Nuremberg trials. His determination to make those trials reflect our highest principles of justice and morality is incomparable. Robert Jackson has been gone for fifty years, but his legacy lives on. With new and different war crimes trials on the front pages of every newspaper, Jackson's legacy takes on ever more powerful meaning.

I was Chief Interpreter for the American prosecution at the Nuremberg trials under Justice Jackson. I interpreted several of his pre-trial interrogations of such arch criminals as Hermann Goering, Joachim von Ribbentrop and Albert Speer. I heard him in court. Here I want to pay tribute to Robert Jackson, who inspired me to believe that my work at the Nuremberg trials was a contribution to human rights and the morality of nations, not an act of victor's vengeance visited upon the defeated.

Robert Jackson sparked the creation of a legal framework for the first trial ever of leaders of a sovereign nation. Before 1945, virtually all accused of war crimes escaped serious punishment. For instance, after World War I the victors identified over 900 Germans as perpetrators of serious atrocities in lands occupied by the Kaiser's army, but less than twenty were brought to trial before a German court. None received sentences befitting their crimes and most were released early in their jail terms.

Justice Jackson had to cope not only with the futility of leaving the prosecution of war criminals to their own government, but also he had several additional challenges. As a result of the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany there was no sovereign nation to try its criminals, even if that course had been advocated. The so-called Allied Control Council, an arm of the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union and France, assumed all powers of sovereignty for defeated Nazi Germany. This included the legislative functions, executive powers and supervision over the judiciary. The Allied Control Council had the official task of organizing war crimes trials and creating the law that would govern.

The leaders of the "Big Three" (the United States, the Soviet Union and Great Britain) had expressed preliminary opinions about dealing with Nazi war criminals. At one point Marshall Stalin had suggested the...