Re-examining Nuremberg as a New Deal Institution: Politics, Culture and the Limits of Law in Generating Human Rights Norms

Abstract

Major Airey Neave, famous at age twenty-nine for his multiple escapes from Nazi prisons, noticed the unusually brilliant shine on Colonel Burton Andrus' helmet, as the two officers stood waiting outside the prison wing of the Palace of Justice at Nuremberg on the afternoon of October 19, 1945. Neave was a German-speaking London barrister whose wartime heroics with the clandestine British intelligence service, MI-9, had involved disguising himself variously as a Dutch electrical worker, a German corporal, and a German artillery lieutenant. The afternoon before, Francis Biddle, former U.S. Attorney General and the American judge at Nuremberg, had cavalierly informed Neave that the young major was to serve copies of the Nuremberg Charter, along with a detailed criminal indictment, on the Nazi leaders incarcerated in the Palace of