Dan Haywood was the Republican Judge of the United States District Court for the District of Maine until 1947 and Chief Judge of the Nuremberg Trials in 1948. In 1948, Haywood oversaw the conviction of ex-Nazi judges Ernst Janning, Emil Hahn, Werner Lampe, and Friedrich Hofstetter for their roles in sentencing innocent people to death, forced sterilizations of political dissidents, the deportation of Jews to concentration camps, and other crimes against humanity during World War II. Haywood's decision was criticized greatly both by anti-communist Americans and by the German public, but it was praised by Janning, who had testified to the guilt of himself and the other three judges during the trial.
Biography[]
Dan Haywood was born in rural Maine, and he served in the US Army on the Western Front of World War I before practicing law. Haywood was elected a district court judge as a Republican; he later remarked to fellow judge Curtiss Ives that he was "a rock-ribbed Republican who thought that Roosevelt was a great man," and that he had great respect for the moderate Republican Wendell Willkie. In 1947, Haywood lost re-election to his judgeship, but US Senator Edward Burkette appointed him chief judge for the trials of ex-Nazi judges Ernst Janning, Emil Hahn, Werner Lampe, and Friedrich Hofstetter in 1948. Haywood was an impartial judge, occasionally allowing defense counsel Hans Rolfe to make controversial insinuations and suppositions during the trial and overruling many of prosecutor Tad Lawson's objections. For his impartiality, Haywood acquired the respect of Janning, who once stood up to demand that Rolfe cease his cruel cross-examination of witness Irene Hoffmann.
During the trial, Haywood stayed at the former home of aristocrat Marlene Bertholt, where he was cared for by the husband and wife Hans and Christine Halbestadt, and had Captain Harrison Byers as his aide. Haywood briefly met Bertholt when she returned to her mansion to collect some of her belongings, and journalist Max Perkins later reintroduced Bertholt to Haywood, starting a brief friendship. Haywood was intrigued by the German people's differing stances on the legacy of Nazism: Christine Halbestadt believed that Adolf Hitler had done some good things such as building the Autobahn and giving jobs to millions of workers, while being horrified at his misdeeds and nervously denying that she or her husband had been NSDAP members; Byers had taken a German girlfriend, Elsa Scheffler, who had not been indoctrinated by the Nazis; Marlene Bertholt claimed that most Germans were entirely unaware of the Holocaust, and that the Americans should move on from the trials rather than continue to execute their justice against the German people; and prosecutor Tad Lawson wished to indict the whole German people if he could, as he held all of Germany responsible for aiding and abetting Hitler's rise to power and his murder of millions of innocents.
After hearing the testimonies of sterilization victim Rudolph Peterson, lawyer Heinrich Geuter (who had defended the Jewish businessman Lehman Feldenstein at his trial for "blood defilement"), Irene Hoffmann (who had been falsely accused of having an affair with the older Feldenstein in violation of the Nuremberg Laws), Elsa Lindnow (Feldenstein's housekeeper and a former Nazi Party member, who had made the accusations of an affair between Feldenstein and Hoffmann), Lawson (who had liberated the Dachau and Belsen concentration camps and showed footage he had taken of the horrors there), and even Janning (who testified to the guilt of himself and the other defendants, even while justifying his continued involvement in the judiciary under Nazism), Haywood had a difficult time issuing a ruling. His fellow judge Curtiss Ives attempted to find ways to declare that the defendants had acted according to German law and were thus not responsible for their actions, while even Lawson was pressured by Brigadier-General Matt Merrin to let the Nazis off easy to retain the support of the German people against the Soviets as the Cold War intensified. However, Haywood decided to deliver justice without letting Cold War considerations cloud his judgment. He and judge Kenneth Norris found the four defendants guilty and sentenced each of them to life imprisonment, causing Bertholt to ignore his phone calls after the trial, and angering millions of Germans who saw the trial as politically-motivated.
Before Haywood could leave Bertholt's mansion for the airport, Hans Rolfe visited Haywood on Janning's behalf and persuaded him to visit Janning in jail; he also told him that most of the defendants in the concurrent IG Farben case had been acquitted or given life sentences, and made a bet that all of the men Haywood had sentenced would be free within the next five years. Haywood responded that, while it would be politically logical for the criminals to be freed, the decision being logical would not make it right, and "nothing on God's earth would ever make it right." At the jail, Janning reassured Haywood that his verdict was just, and gifted him the tapes of his own trials for safekeeping. However, when Janning asked Haywood to believe that he never knew that his collaboration with the Nazis would lead to the murder of millions of people, Haywood responded that it came to that when Janning sentenced his first innocent man to death.