BRITAIN: William Shawcross, Britain's lead prosecutor of Nazi leaders at the second World War war crimes trials in Nuremberg, died peacefully at home on Thursday aged 101.
"He had been getting more and more frail in recent days and just faded away," said his wife, Lady Shawcross. Shawcross was made a life peer by Harold Macmillan.
Born on February 4, 1902, he leaped to public prominence with detailed and impassioned speeches at the 1945 trials that condemned all the Nazi leaders to death by hanging.
"The dictatorship behind which these men seek to shelter was of their own creation," he said in his concluding speech, dismissing the Nazi leaders' claim they had only been obeying orders in committing systematic mass murder in the use of slave labour and concentration camps.
Not a vindictive man, 45 years later Shawcross spoke passionately against war crimes trials with the death penalty.
He also prosecuted William Joyce, the American-born Irishman who supported fascism and, as Lord Haw Haw, betrayed Britain in the war by broadcasting pro-Nazi propaganda from Berlin. Joyce was subsequently hanged.
Lord Shawcross had an illustrious career, both at the Bar and in the Palace of Westminster, which spanned more than 50 years. Although he revoked socialism in his later years, he said shortly before his death: "I am just a nobody. Whatever I am, my wife made me."
In court he had a smooth but pitiless talent and was justifiably regarded as the most devastating cross-examining counsel in the entire legal profession.
At Nuremberg he spoke continuously for two days and was drawing to the end of his 50,000-word indictment when Hans Frank, the former Nazi Governor-General of Poland, screamed from the dock: "Schwein! Schwein!" Shawcross shrugged his shoulders and proceeded.
But at his 90th birthday party he was disarmingly casual about Nuremberg, probably the most momentous and horrific trial of the century.
"Oh, Nuremberg. I have forgotten most of it. It was just another case from my point of view, with historical and political interest." - (Reuters/PA)