Lord Shawcross, 101; Britain’s Chief Prosecutor of Top Nazis

LONDON —  Lord Shawcross, who was Britain’s chief prosecutor at the Nazi war crimes trials in Nuremberg and the prosecutor at a major treason trial and an atomic bomb spying case, has died. He was 101.

Hartley William Shawcross, who was also a British representative at the United Nations, died Thursday at his home in Cowbeech, south of London, said his secretary, Greta Kinder.

He was elected to Parliament when the Labor Party swept to power under Clement Attlee in 1945, ousting Winston Churchill’s Conservative Party, and quickly became the new government’s attorney general.

Shawcross then was appointed Britain’s chief prosecutor at the trials of Nazi war criminals in Nuremberg, Germany. He called the Nazi defendants “black-hearted murderers, plunderers and conspirators of which the world has not known their equal.”

“There comes a point when a man must refuse to answer to his leader if he is also to answer to his own conscience,” he said in court.

Shawcross served as one of Britain’s representatives at the United Nations through the late 1940s.

As attorney general, he led one of the nation’s most infamous treason cases, prosecuting William Joyce, known as “Lord Haw-Haw,” for aiding the Nazi propaganda effort during World War II.

Joyce, who was active in British fascist groups before the war, was a U.S. citizen who also held a British passport when he broadcast from Germany. Shawcross successfully argued that as long as Joyce possessed that document, he owed Britain his allegiance. Joyce was convicted and hanged.

Shawcross also prosecuted Klaus Fuchs, a German-born physicist convicted of giving American and British atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. Fuchs had fled Germany in the 1930s and aided British atomic research during the war.

Fuchs also worked on the American effort to build an atomic bomb -- known as the Manhattan Project -- in Los Alamos, N.M., and passed secrets from both countries to the Soviets, accelerating their own atomic bomb program by as much as a year, according to some estimates. His espionage was uncovered in 1950, and he served nine years in prison.

Shawcross left his job as attorney general in 1951 and stepped down as a lawmaker in 1958. He was appointed to the House of Lords the following year.

He was knighted in 1945 and received an even higher honor, becoming Knight Grand Cross, Imperial Iranian Order of Homayoon, in 1974.

Shawcross is survived by his third wife, Monique; and a son, William, a contemporary historian who was chosen Wednesday as the official biographer of the late Queen Mother Elizabeth. He is also is survived by another son, Hume, and a daughter, Joanna.