Robert M. W. Kempner; Prosecuted Nazis at Nuremberg

Robert M. W. Kempner, a German-born American who prosecuted Nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg trials, has died. He was 93.

Kempner died Sunday at his home in the German town of Koenigstein, his secretary said.

A lawyer who became a senior civil servant in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior before the Nazis came to power, Kempner recommended unsuccessfully in 1931 that Adolf Hitler, who was born in Austria, be tried for treason and perjury and expelled from Germany as a troublesome foreigner.

Kempner was suspended from the German civil service in February, 1933, a month after the Nazis took power. He worked for some time as an adviser to Jews planning to emigrate to escape Nazi persecution before emigrating himself, first to Italy in 1935 and then to the United States in 1939.

Stripped of his German citizenship, Kempner became a U.S. citizen in 1945 and returned to Germany that year on the staff of Robert Jackson, chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg military tribunal.

Kempner led the prosecution of ministers and other top officials from Hitler’s government on charges that included participation in the mass extermination of Jews. He later wrote several books about his experiences.