Tad Lawson was a US Army colonel and the chief prosecutor at the 1948 Nuremberg Trials.
Biography[]
Tad Lawson was born in the United States, and he served in the US Army's Judge Advocate General's (JAG) Corps. Lawson was a personal protege of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and he had the reputation of a radical liberal. During World War II, Lawson oversaw the liberation of the Dachau and Belsen concentration camps and had his horrifying discoveries filmed for use as evidence against the Nazis responsible. This experience left Lawson with a desire to indict the German people for their complicity in the mass murder of millions during the Holocaust and World War II, and he oversaw the successful prosecution and sentencing to death of Wehrmacht general Karl Bertholt in 1946 before being appointed to prosecute the former judges Ernst Janning, Emil Hahn, Werner Lampe, and Friedrich Hofstetter in 1948. Lawson utilized his footage of the concentration camps to demonstrate the crimes that the Nazis were guilty of, and he often sparred with defense counsel Hans Rolfe over Rolfe's defense not just of the defendants, but of Nazism' sterilization program, the Third Reich's perceived work for the benefit of the people, and the myth that Irene Hoffmann had slept with the elderly Jewish man Lehmann Feldenstein, who was executed in 1935 for "blood defilement". Lawson's zealous prosecution was hampered by Brigadier-General Matt Merrin, who suggested that the Soviet blockade of Berlin and a potential Soviet invasion of West Germany meant that the Americans needed to have the German people on their side, and pressured Lawson to let the German defendants off easy. In his closing remarks before the court, Lawson noted the geopolitical ramifications of any verdict, but Chief Judge Dan Haywood decided to deliver unadulterated justice, sentencing all four men to life in prison. Within five years, all of them would be freed.