Up for sale "Baron Shawcross" Hartley Shawcross Hand Signed 2.25X2.5 Color Photo. 

ES-4095E

Hartley William Shawcross, Baron Shawcross, GBE, PC, QC (4 February 1902 – 10 July 2003), known from 1945 to 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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