From The Times (UK)
February 13, 2007

Bernard Meltzer

Nuremberg prosecutor who brought direction to the charges of
crimes against humanity over the death camps
November 21, 1914 - January 4, 2007

"From a lawyer's standpoint it was a dream," Bernard Meltzer
once remarked of his time as a prosecutor at the Nuremberg
trials, "but from a humanist standpoint it was a nightmare."
He was referring to the atrocities committed by the leading
Nazis, which shocked the world when outlined by Meltzer and
his fellow American lawyers in 1945-46. Latterly, however,
as he became one of the last survivors of that team, he
revealed that the management of the case had also frequently
appalled him.

Meltzer was drafted into the prosecution lineup, headed by
Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, on account of his
wartime work at the State Department. This had made him
expert on the economic policies of the Nazis, among them the
wholesale plunder of the occupied countries. His original
brief was to handle the cases against Hjalmar Schacht, who
had run the economy in the 1930s and enabled Hitler to
finance the rearmament of Germany, and his successor,
Walther Funk.

Yet he soon came to feel that though Jackson had an
undoubted gift for rhetoric, he had surrounded himself with
sycophants and advocates of limited talent but large
ambition. Meltzer believed that some of the senior Americans
thought that cases against certain defendants should be
dropped for political reasons, and found his work on these
ignored. When he said he felt that Schacht might be
acquitted on the evidence, and offered to step down to avoid
accusations that Jackson had given the job to too junior a
lawyer - he was then 31 - he was duly relieved of the brief.

He was, however, allowed to outline the case against Funk,
thus being the youngest prosecutor to speak at the trial,
but the main cross-examination was handed to Jackson's
appointee Tom Dodd, who could not quite pin down the
lachrymose Funk. He was ultimately convicted, though not
executed, while Schacht was indeed acquitted.

As part of his original task, Meltzer interviewed Goering,
who had been the economy's supremo. He had found him
unrepentant and candid, given to making such statements as:
"But of course we regarded your treaties as so much lavatory
paper!" Yet when Meltzer offered the fruits of this research
to Jackson, they were dismissed out of hand. Jackson's
subsequent failure to cross-examine Goering effectively, in
large part because of his lack of methodical preparation,
became the great crisis of the trial.

Meltzer was nonetheless able to make an important
contribution to another part of the tribunal's work. Ten
days before the start of the case pertaining to the
concentration camps, he was abruptly asked to review the
briefs prepared so far. A vast mass of information had had
to be processed and digested in a few months, and he was not
surprised to find the case lacking in focus.

Indeed, it is arguable that the institutionalised nature of
the Final Solution largely eluded the prosecution throughout
the trial, but Meltzer, himself Jewish, was able to bring
some direction to what proved to be the most significant of
the charges, those embracing war crimes and crimes against
humanity.

In later years Meltzer became a nuanced supporter of the
trials. He felt that Nuremberg had set an important
precedent, but retained doubts about its impartiality,
failing as it did to call to account wrongs committed by the
Allies, not least by the Soviet Union. It was characteristic
of Meltzer to see every side of a question, and never to be
dogmatic in his opinions.

Bernard David Meltzer was born in Philadelphia in 1914. His
parents were Russian immigrants, his father being a scholar
of Hebrew who made shift with irregular sales work, while
his mother reacted to the New World by seeking refuge in
hypochondria.

He studied law at the University of Chicago and then under
Felix Frankfurter at Harvard. In 1938 this contact secured
him the first of a series of employments with federal
agencies, initially at the Securities and Exchange
Commission and later at the State Department. There he was
an assistant to Dean Acheson, and worked under Donald Hiss,
brother of the communist spy Alger Hiss. Meltzer was given
the task of construing the Neutrality Act to enable the
implementation of the Lend-Lease agreement that was of such
aid to Britain during the Battle of the Atlantic.

Meltzer joined the US Navy, but spent much of the war in
England as an assessor of aerial photographs. He often had
to tone down enthusiastic reports by American pilots, once
pointing out that in recent weeks they claimed to have
destroyed 400 per cent of the Luftwaffe's fighter capacity.
One of his responsibilities was to prepare a likely damage
assessment for a forthcoming raid on Tokyo. He forecast
accurately that the resulting firestorm could claim 100,000
lives, and had qualms about its necessity. In 1945, he
helped to draft the founding charter of the UN.

After the war Meltzer went back to the University of Chicago
to teach law, eventually specialising in that of employment.
He developed a particular interest in monopolies, and in the
balance between the dictates of the market and the rights of
employees - issues that became increasingly important as
Chicago's economists started to wield great influence.

Meltzer's teaching became one of the great attractions of
the university's law school, whose reputation grew steadily
under the leadership of his brother-in-law, Edward Levi, the
Attorney-General who had the task of restoring the image of
justice after the downfall of Nixon. Meltzer was revered by
his students for his sympathetic nature, and for his
emphasis on the pragmatic application of their studies.

He was an adviser to several government bodies, and enjoyed
occasional forays into arbitration, notably in disputes over
salaries for baseball and basketball stars. He retired in
1985, and had latterly been suffering from prostate cancer.

He is survived by his wife, Jean, and by their son and two
daughters.

Bernard Meltzer, prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials and
professor of law, was born on November 21, 1914. He died on
January 4, 2007, aged 92