Bernard D. Meltzer, 92; co-wrote U.N. charter and prosecuted Nazis

Bernard D. Meltzer, 92, a labor law scholar who helped draft the charter of the United Nations and served as a prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crime trials after World War II, died Thursday at home in Chicago, according to the University of Chicago Law School, where he was the Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus. A cause of death was not given.

Meltzer was born in Philadelphia to Russian immigrant parents and studied at Temple University before transferring to the University of Chicago in 1934. He earned his undergraduate and law degrees there and later did postgraduate work at Harvard Law School.

After working for various federal agencies, he was commissioned as a Navy officer in 1943 and assigned to the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency. After work on the U.N. charter at the end of World War II, Meltzer joined the U.S. prosecution team at Nuremberg in 1946 and coordinated a specialized team of lawyers who focused on the economic crimes of Germany’s Nazi regime.

Meltzer conducted the pretrial interrogation of Adolf Hitler’s second-in-command, Luftwaffe commander Hermann Goering, and presented the trial case against former German Economics Minister Walther Funk.

After Nuremberg, Meltzer joined the University of Chicago Law School, developing a specialty in labor law, and retired in 1985.