Up for sale "Baron Shawcross" Hartley Shawcross Hand Signed TLS Dated 1984. 

1959 as Sir Hartley Shawcross, was an who served as the lead British

prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crimes tribunal. He also served as Britain's

principal delegate to the United Nations immediately after World War II and as Attorney

General for England and Wales. Hartley William Shawcross was born

in Giessen, Germany, to British parents, John and Hilda Constance

(Asser) Shawcross,[ while his father was teaching English

at Giessen University. He

attended Dulwich College, the London School of Economics and

the University of Geneva[] and

read for the Bar at Gray's Inn, where he

won first-class honours. He

joined the Labour Party at a

young age and served as Member of 1945 to 1958, being appointed to

be Attorney

General in 1945 until 1951. It was in 1946 when debating

the repeal of laws against trade unions in

the House of

Commons that Shawcross allegedly said "We are the masters

now", a phrase that came to haunt him. He was knighted in 1945 upon his appointment as Attorney-General and

named Chief Prosecutor for the United Kingdom at the Nuremberg Trials. Shawcross's advocacy before the Nuremberg

Trial was passionate. His most famous line was: "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 avoided the crusading[] style of American, Soviet and French prosecutors. Shawcross's opening speech,

which lasted two days, the 26 and 27 July 1946, sought to undermine any belief

that the Nuremberg Trials were victor's justice (an exacted vengeance against defeated foes). Instead, he focused on

the rule of law and demonstrated that the laws that the

defendants had broken, expressed in international treaties and agreements, were

those to which prewar Germany had been a party. In his closing speech, he

ridiculed any notion that any of the defendants could have remained ignorant

of the thousands of Germans exterminated

because they were old or mentally ill. He used the same argument for

the millions of other people "annihilated in the gas chambers or by shooting" and maintained that

each of the 22 defendants was a party to "common murder in its most ruthless forms" As Attorney-General,

he prosecuted William Joyce ("Lord Haw-Haw") and John Amery for treason, Klaus Fuchs and Alan Nunn May for giving atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, and John George Haigh, known as 'the acid bath murderer'.[ From 1945 to 1949, he was

Britain's principal delegate to the United Nations and was involved in the official adoption

of the UN flag in 1946, but

he was recalled in 1948 to lead for the government's interest at the Lynskey tribunal. In 1951, he briefly served as President of the Board of

Trade until the Labour government's defeat in the election of

that year. Shawcross left his name to a Parliamentary principle, in a

defense of his conduct regarding an illegal strike, that the

Attorney-General "is not to be put, and is not put, under pressure by his

colleagues in the matter" of whether or not to establish criminal proceedings. 

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