Hartley Shawcross was born in Germany on
4th February, 1902. His father, John Shawcross, was professor of English
at Frankfurt University. His mother was related to the politician
John Bright.
Soon
after his birth John and Hilda Shawcross brought their son back to
England. Shawcross took an early interest in politics and by the age
of 16 he had joined the Labour Party and
was ward secretary in Wandsworth. He was also involved in the party's
campaign during the 1918 General Election.
A
brilliant student, Shawcross decided to study French in Switzerland.
While there he became translator to the British delegation at the
Socialist International held in Geneva. He met Ramsay
MacDonald and
Herbert
Morrison,
who suggested that Shawcross should become a lawyer.
After
obtaining a first class honours degree in law he moved to Liverpool.
As well as working as a lawyer in the city he also lectured at the
University of Liverpool (1927-34). Despite his left-wing views he
was willing to work for the coal-owners during the court-case that
followed the 1934 Gresford Colliery Disaster. Richard
Stafford Cripps represented
the miners.
During
the Second World War Shawcross chaired the Enemy
Aliens Tribunal (1939-41) and Deputy Regional Commissioner for the
South-East (1941-42) and Commissioner for the North-West (1942-45).
In
the 1945 General Election Shawcross won with
a large majority at St. Helens. The new prime minister, Clement
Attlee,
immediately appointed Shawcross as Britain's Attorney General. In
this role he led the British prosecution at Nuremberg.
Shawcross
also prosecuted William Joyce for high
treason in September, 1945. In court it was stated that although he
was United States citizen he had held a British passport during the
early stages of the war. It was therefore argued in court by Shawcross
that
Joyce had committed treason by broadcasting for Nazi
Germany between September 1939 and July 1940, when he officially
became a German citizen. Joyce was
found guilty of treason and was executed on 3rd January 1946.
Other
famous prosecutions included the traitor John
Amery, the Acid Bath Murderer, John George Haigh and the Atom
bomb spy, Klaus Fuchs.
In
the House of Commons Shawcross promoted
the Trade Disputes and Trade Unions Bill, redressing anti-union legislation
(the 1927
Trade Disputes and Trade Union Act) that was passed by a Conservative
government following the 1926 General Strike.
During the debate on this legislation Shawcross remarked: "We
are the masters at the moment, and not only at the moment but for
a very long time." He was much attacked for this and later he
admitted it "was the most stupid thing I ever said."
In
April 1951 Shawcross was appointed President of the Board of Trade.
However, he lost office when the Labour Party
lost the 1951 General Election. After this
he concentrated on his lucrative law career and eventually retired
from the House of Commons in 1958. When
he became a life peer later that year he sat on the crossbenches of
the House of Lords, although in the 1980s
he supported the Social Democratic Party.
In
later life Shawcross sat on the boards of a wide variety of different
companies including Hawker Siddeley, Shell, EMI, Rank-Hovis-McDougall,
Times Newspapers, Dominion Continental Bankers and Thames Television.
Hartley
Shawcross, Lord Shawcross of Friston, died on 10th July, 2003.
(1)
Hartley Shawcross, opening statement at Nuremberg
(4th December, 1945)
The British Empire with
its Allies has twice, within the space of 25 years, been victorious
in wars which have been forced upon it, but it is precisely because
we realize that victory is not enough, that might is not necessarily
right, that lasting peace and the rule of international law is not
to be secured by the strong arm alone, that the British nation is
taking part in this Trial. There are those who would perhaps say that
these wretched men should have been dealt with summarily without trial
by "executive action"; that their power for evil broken,
they should have been swept aside into oblivion without this elaborate
and careful investigation into the part which they played in bringing
this war about: Vae Victis! Let them pay the penalty of defeat. But
that was not the view of the British Government. Not so would the
rule of law be raised and strengthened on the international as well
as upon the municipal plane; not so would future generations realize
that right is not always on the side of the big battalions; not so
would the world be made aware that the waging of aggressive war is
not only a dangerous venture but a criminal one.
Human memory is very short.
Apologists for defeated nations are sometimes able to play upon the
sympathy and magnanimity of their Victors, so that the true facts,
never authoritatively recorded, become obscured and forgotten. One
has only to recall the circumstances following upon the last World
War to see the dangers to which, in the absence of any authoritative
judicial pronouncement a tolerant or a credulous people is exposed.
With the passage of time the former tend to discount, perhaps because
of their very horror, the stories of aggression and atrocity that
may be handed down; and the latter, the credulous, misled by perhaps
fanatical and perhaps dishonest propagandists, come to believe that
it was not they but their opponents who were guilty of that which
they would themselves condemn. And so we believe that this Tribunal,
acting, as we know it will act notwithstanding its appointment by
the victorious powers, with complete and judicial objectivity, will
provide a contemporary touchstone and an authoritative and impartial
record to which future historians may turn for truth, and future politicians
for warning. From this record shall future generations know not only
what our generation suffered, but also that our suffering was the
result of crimes, crimes against the laws of peoples which the peoples
of the world upheld and will continue in the future to uphold by international
co-operation, not based merely on military alliances, but grounded,
and firmly grounded, in the rule of law.
Nor, though this procedure
and this Indictment of individuals may be novel, is there anything
new in the principles which by this prosecution we seek to enforce.
Ineffective though, alas, the sanctions proved and showed to be, the
nations of the world had, as it will be my purpose in addressing the
Tribunal to show, sought to make aggressive war an international crime,
and although previous tradition has sought to punish states rather
than individuals, it is both logical and right that, if the act of
waging war is itself an offense against international law, those individuals
who shared personal responsibility for bringing such wars about should
answer personally for the course into which they led their states.
Again, individual war crimes have long been recognized by international
law as triable by the courts of those states whose nationals have
been outraged, at least so long as a state of war persists. It would
be illogical in the extreme if those who, although they may not with
their own hands have committed individual crimes, were responsible
for systematic breaches of the laws of war affecting the nationals
of many states should escape for that reason. So also in regard to
Crimes against Humanity. The rights of humanitarian intervention on
behalf of the rights of man, trampled upon by a state in a manner
shocking the sense of mankind, has long been considered to form part
of the recognized law of nations. Here too the Charter merely develops
a pre-existing principle. If murder rapine, and robbery are indictable
under the ordinary municipal laws of our countries, shall those who
differ from the common criminal only by the extent and systematic
nature of their offenses escape accusation?
It is, as I shall show,
the view of the British Government that in these matters, this Tribunal
will be applying to individuals, not the law of the victor, but the
accepted principles of international usage in a way which will, if
anything can, promote and fortify the rule of international law and
safeguard the future peace and security of this war-stricken world.
(2)
Hartley
Shawcross attended the trial of the men charged with killing Vera
Leigh, Diana
Rowden, Andrée Borrel
and Sonya
Olschanezky.
The fearful cremations
at Natzweiler had their counterpart a thousand times at Auschwitz.
Hoess told us, 'The foul and nauseating stench from the continuous
burning of bodies permeated the entire area and all the people living
in the surrounding communities knew that exterminations were going
on at Auschwitz.'
I do not recall these grim
matters of the past for mere morbidity. I mention them as a reminder
that the men convicted of the murder of Miss Andree Borrell, F.A.N.Y.;
Section Officer Diana Rowden, W.A.A.F.; Miss Vera Leigh, F.A.N.Y.,
and another gallant woman, were not isolated, exceptional killings.
These crimes were not sporadic or isolated, depending on the brutality
of some individual sadist. They were a part of that system which arises
when the totalitarian state submerges the fundamental right and destroys
the dignity of man. Month by month, day after day, killings like these
went on by the thousand all over Europe.
But the mind which is lastingly
impressed and shocked by a single crime staggers and reels at the
contemplation of mass criminality: becomes almost impervious to horror,
conditioned against shock. And as events recede into the past, those
who did not themselves experience them begin to question whether these
things could indeed have happened and wonder whether the stories about
them are really more than the propaganda of enemies.
(3)
Adam Bernstein, Washington
Post (11th July, 2003)
At Nuremberg, he worked
alongside American Robert H. Jackson, a U.S. Supreme Court justice,
and jurists from France and Russia.
In his opening address,
Mr. Shawcross set a somber tone that emphasized the individual responsibility
of the accused. "There comes a point," he said, "when
a man must refuse to answer to his leader if he is also to answer
to his conscience."
Movie-star dapper, Mr.
Shawcross was once seen as a potential choice for Labor prime minister.
But his legal eloquence occasionally yielded to public gaffes, including
impolitic statements about newspapermen and British housewives. He
also became increasingly disenchanted with his party's nationalization
policies.
Many Liberals nicknamed
him "Sir Shortly Floorcross" because of his apparent conservative
sympathies during the Cold War. He preferred to call himself a "right-wing
socialist."
(4)
BBC News (10th
July, 2003)
Controversial in public,
Sir Hartley suffered tragedy in private. His first wife killed herself
after years of illness, and his second wife died after being kicked
by a horse on the Sussex Downs in 1974.
Into his 10th decade, he
surprised his family by marrying a third time. His memoirs written
then revealed a lifetime of personal unhappiness and disillusionment,
but his prominence in the worlds of law, business and politics reveals
an idealist surely determined to leave his mark.
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