How the Nuremberg trials found names for the Nazis’ crimes

[From The Guardian]

Tuesday, 1 October 1946, Nuremberg’s Palace of Justice

1392A little after three o’clock in the afternoon, the wooden door behind the defendants’ dock slid open and Hans Frank entered courtroom 600. He wore a grey suit, a shade that was offset by the white helmets worn by the two sombre­faced military guards, his escorts. The hearings had taken a toll on the man who had been Adolf Hitler’s personal lawyer and then personal representative in German occupied Poland, with his pink cheeks, sharp little nose and slicked ­back hair. Frank was no longer the slender and swank minister celebrated by his friend Richard Strauss. Indeed, he was in a considerable state of perturbation, so much so that as he entered the room, he turned and faced the wrong direction, showing his back to the judges.

Sitting in the packed courtroom that day was the professor of international law at Cambridge University. Balding and bespectacled, Hersch Lauterpacht perched at the end of a long wooden table, round as an owl, flanked by distinguished colleagues on the British prosecution team. Seated no more than a few feet from Frank, in a black suit, Lauterpacht was the one who came up with the idea of putting the term ‘crimes against humanity’ into the Nuremberg statute, three words to describe the murder of four million Jews and Poles on the territory of Poland. Lauterpacht would come to be recognized as the finest international legal mind of the twentieth century and a father of the modern human rights movement, yet his interest in Frank was not just professional. For five years, Frank had been governor of a territory that included the city of Lemberg, where Lauterpacht had a large family, including his parents, a brother and sister, and their children. When the trial had opened a year earlier, their fate in the kingdom of Hans Frank was unknown.

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