Remarks at the memorial program for Professor Henry T. King, Jr.

• Author: Rosenbaum, Eli M.
• Position: A Tribute to Henry King - Testimonial

Thank you, Michael [Schart], Dean Rawson, Suzanne [King Wagner], Dave [King].

For many years now, one of the very first things that I see each morning when I arrive for work at the United States Department of Justice is an 8-by-10-inch black-and-white photo of a not-quite-28-year-old Henry King seated at counsel table, next to Brigadier General Telford Taylor, on April 16, 1947, as the judgment convicting Field Marshal Erhard Milch of war crimes and crimes against humanity is about to be announced by a U.S. military tribunal in Nuremberg, Germany. That framed photograph occupies a place of honor on the wall of my office at the Criminal Division's Office of Special Investigations. Framed right next to it is a second 8x10 inch print--this one a color photo, showing Professor Henry King, by then 89 years of age, chatting with me in Chautauqua, New York, during a break between sessions at last year's International Humanitarian Law Dialogs, sponsored annually by the Robert H. Jackson Center and the Frederick Cox Center of the Case Western Reserve Law School, among others.

The sight of those two wonderful photographs provides me with enormous inspiration, literally on a daily basis, as my colleagues and I continue to work to secure a measure of justice on behalf of the victims of Nazi crimes against humanity and victims of more recent atrocities, from Rwanda to Bosnia, and beyond. As it was for Henry King and his colleagues at Nuremberg sixty-plus years ago, the work is extremely difficult, both technically, one might say, and emotionally. And just as it was for Henry King and his fellow "Nurembergers," the work requires determination, indeed almost superhuman perseverance. That last requirement was perhaps most notably demonstrated here in Cleveland, in OSI's decade-long effort, concluded just this past May, to remove former Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk from the United States. However, the perseverance and tenacity that the women and men of OSI brought to that case was dwarfed by that which Henry King and his Nuremberg colleagues brought, for more than half a century, to the battle to realize their dream of achieving the establishment of a successor court to the International Military Tribunal--a permanent international criminal court. Henry never gave up when fighting for a noble cause, even one that, like the ICC battle, must have seemed as though it had launched him on a nearly hopeless quest, decade after long and fruitless decade...