The senior American prosecutors at the International Military Tribunal had a problem of management. Robert Jackson, the Chief of Counsel, was fifty-three and a Supreme Court Justice; he had to give the openings and closings, run the high-level negotiations with the British, French and Soviet delegations, and field the press. Telford Taylor was thirty-eight and was preparing the case on the German General Staff for what would become the Subsequent Proceedings. Day-to-day management of the courtroom, the loading of documents into evidence, the calling of witnesses, the dozens of small decisions that determine whether a major prosecution succeeds or stumbles, fell to a forty-eight-year-old Connecticut lawyer named Thomas J. Dodd. He held the title of Executive Trial Counsel. He spoke in court for the United States more often than Jackson did. By the close of the trial he was, on most assessments by both colleagues and journalists, the indispensable American at the prosecution table.
Dodd had spent the war as the chief of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Civil Liberties Section in the Department of Justice in Washington. He had no direct war crimes experience but he had spent the previous decade arguing federal cases involving large evidentiary records. The match was right. The IMT was a documentary trial. Dodd’s instinct was for the document. He developed, over the course of the trial, a particular technique of leading a defendant or witness through a sequence of related German documents, each handed across the table at the moment when the previous answer had foreclosed the possibility of denial. The technique was less theatrical than Maxwell Fyfe’s, more methodical, more difficult to evade. The defendants who faced Dodd over the course of 1946 had a hard time.
The cross-examination of Sauckel
Dodd’s most consequential single piece of work was the cross-examination of Fritz Sauckel, the Plenipotentiary General for Labour Deployment, on 28 and 29 May 1946. Sauckel had run the slave-labour programme that had brought five million foreign workers, most of them from Eastern Europe, into the German war economy under conditions that historians have since classified as forced labour amounting in many cases to slavery. Sauckel’s defence was that he had been a humane administrator who had insisted on decent treatment of the workers and that the abuses had been the responsibility of the firms that employed them, not of his office.
Dodd opened with a series of questions about Sauckel’s instructions to his recruiters in occupied Eastern Europe. He produced a document of August 1942 in which Sauckel had ordered that workers were to be brought in at any cost, with or without their consent. Sauckel acknowledged the document. Dodd handed him a second document, a 1943 memorandum from a Sauckel deputy in occupied Ukraine reporting that the recruitment in some districts had taken the form of village burnings to drive families to the trains. Sauckel attempted to argue that the burnings had been the work of subordinates without his authorisation. Dodd handed him a third document, his own signed reply to the deputy, in which he had acknowledged the burnings without criticism and had pressed for higher recruitment quotas. Sauckel’s defence collapsed inside an hour. The transcript records Dodd’s question:
Witness, the document I have just handed you bears your signature, does it not?
Sauckel: Yes.
And the document records that the procedures used in Ukraine to bring in workers included the burning of villages, the separation of children from their parents, and the use of armed force?
Sauckel: That is what the document records.
And your reply, also bearing your signature, expresses no objection to these procedures, but instead urges higher recruitment numbers?
Sauckel: The document is as you describe it.
Dodd then moved on to the conditions in which the workers had been kept inside Germany. He produced photographs of the camps adjoining the Krupp works, the Heinkel works, the IG Farben plants. He produced extracts from the diaries of camp doctors recording mortality rates of one in three among the workers. He produced Sauckel’s own annual reports, which had recorded the deaths in matter-of-fact administrative columns. The case took less than two days to make. Sauckel was sentenced to death and hanged on 16 October 1946.
The witness from Mauthausen
Dodd ran the prosecution’s case on the concentration camps. The case turned on a small number of witnesses; Jackson’s strategic preference for documents over testimony had constrained the use of survivor evidence, but Dodd had argued that the camps required at least some living testimony to be presented to the bench. The most consequential of the witnesses Dodd called was a Frenchman named Marie Claude Vaillant-Couturier, a member of the French resistance who had been deported to Auschwitz and had survived. She testified on 28 January 1946. Dodd led her through her arrival on the ramp at Birkenau in January 1943, the selection by SS doctors, the lines moved to the gas chambers, the smoke. She testified for several hours in a calm voice. Dodd asked her at the end whether she had personally seen children being led to the chambers. The transcript records her answer:
Yes. I saw the children, naked, weeping, being taken to the gas chambers. I saw the column led from the ramp to the small wood and the smoke afterwards. The smell of burning flesh did not leave the camp at any time.
The court adjourned for fifteen minutes. The American radio correspondent who had been broadcasting the proceedings reported that the men in the dock had not lifted their eyes from their hands during the testimony. Vaillant-Couturier returned to France and lived to see her testimony reproduced in school textbooks. She died in 1996.
The lampshade and the head
Dodd presented to the Tribunal, on 13 December 1945, two physical exhibits that have stayed in the public memory of the trial. The first was a tattooed human skin, taken at Buchenwald from prisoners selected by the camp doctor for the patterns of their tattoos and used by the wife of the commandant Karl Otto Koch as decoration. The second was a shrunken human head, prepared at the same camp from a Polish prisoner who had attempted to escape. Dodd produced the exhibits with a brief introduction. He did not describe them at length. He let them sit on the prosecution table for the bench and the press to see. The decision to use the exhibits was Dodd’s; Jackson had been uncertain about it. The British correspondents reported in particular that the lampshade and the head produced more visible reaction in the courtroom than any of the films of the camps that the prosecution had screened. They had been a private object and a personal one. They demonstrated, more than any document or photograph could, the casual everyday horror of what the camps had been.
Afterwards
Dodd returned to Connecticut in October 1946. He was elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1953 and to the Senate in 1958. He served two terms as a Democratic senator from Connecticut, was a leading anti-Communist voice in the 1950s and 1960s, and was a sponsor of major civil rights legislation. The end of his Senate career was marred by a 1967 Senate censure for misuse of campaign funds; he lost his 1970 re-election bid as an independent and died of a heart attack at his Connecticut home in May 1971 at the age of sixty-three.
His son Christopher Dodd served in the United States Senate from 1981 to 2011. Christopher Dodd in 2007 published his father’s letters home from Nuremberg under the title Letters from Nuremberg. The letters are a private record by one of the senior American prosecutors of what he had seen and what he had thought it meant. The figure that recurs in the letters is the figure Dodd’s prosecution case had reached for: the ordinariness of the men in the dock, against the extraordinariness of what they had done. He wrote to his wife on 16 March 1946, after the early sessions of the Göring cross-examination:
These are not monsters in the conventional sense. They are men, like the men one would meet in any law office or any board room, and they have done these things. That is what is most difficult to grasp.
The book is the only record we have of the trial from a senior prosecutor at the level of daily detail. Like Maxwell Fyfe’s memoirs, like Hausner’s, it is a primary source for the wider history of the proceedings.
See also
Sources
- International Military Tribunal, Trial of the Major War Criminals, vol XV (Sauckel cross-examination), Nuremberg, 1947
- Christopher J. Dodd and Lary Bloom, Letters from Nuremberg: My Father’s Narrative of a Quest for Justice, Crown, 2007
- Bradley F. Smith, The American Road to Nuremberg: The Documentary Record, 1944 to 1945, Hoover Institution Press, 1982
- Ann Tusa and John Tusa, The Nuremberg Trial, Macmillan, 1983
- Joseph E. Persico, Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial, Viking, 1994