Nazi Prosecutor Lord Elwyn-Jones

Lord Elwyn-Jones, a prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crimes trials and Britain’s chief legal officer under the last Labor Party government, died of cancer Monday at his Brighton home at the age of 80.

Elwyn-Jones remained active in politics until his death, attending the ceremonial opening of Parliament last month. He had been scheduled to be in the House of Lords on Monday to give Labor’s views on whether the government should permit the prosecution of alleged Nazi war criminals living in Britain.

“The memories of Nuremberg are still vivid in my memory,” he said last July. “The millions deliberately put to death--that cannot be passed over as a mere aberration which should be forgotten in the mere tide of history.”

He was born Frederick Elwyn-Jones in Wales in 1909, the son of a frequently unemployed steelworker. He was educated at the University of Wales and then Cambridge University, where he was president of the Cambridge Union, the debating society. He became a lawyer in 1935.

Elwyn-Jones came to national prominence as a member of the British War Crimes Executive at Nuremberg in 1945 where he was a prosecutor at the Nazi trials.

He was elected to the House of Commons in 1945, was attorney general in Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s government from 1964 to 1970 and lord high chancellor, the country’s top law officer, from 1974 to 1979. He received a peerage and moved to the House of Lords in 1974.