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Chronicle Shows How Revenge, Justice Differ

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By AL HUTCHISON

Published: November 11, 2007

"Letters from Nuremberg: My Father's Narrative of a Quest For Justice," by Sen. Christopher Dodd (Crown, $25.95)

Millions of Americans watched the recent seven-part PBS series by Ken Burns, "The War," and this is the ideal book for those who need to know how the Nazis responsible for launching World War II and for many of its evils fared after the fighting stopped.

Of course, Hitler - the darkest villain of them all - avoided capture by committing suicide. But most of the other major Nazi leaders were tried at Nuremberg in late 1945 and early 1946.

Thomas Dodd, who later served in the United States Senate, was one of the principal prosecutors, and it is fortunate that on an almost daily basis he wrote letters to his wife back in Connecticut and that Grace Dodd saved them all.

Dodd's youngest son, who followed his father into the Senate and is now a long-shot candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, arranged to have the letters published in the hope that readers might gain a deeper understanding that Nuremberg represented the triumph of justice over revenge.

His letters also conveyed Dodd's repeated expressions of his love for his wife, so much so that some readers may become impatient and skip ahead to the more interesting parts of his correspondence. Many of his letters also addressed Dodd's political aspirations, which he was at pains to deny, even though he was clearly intrigued by the idea of running for office back home.

One thread that resonates throughout Dodd's correspondence is his deep distrust of the Soviet Union, which, along with Britain and France, shared in the prosecution.

While listening to other prosecutors, he writes at one point, "I was thinking of the Russians and it was ever in my mind that all of the crimes which the Nazis have committed have also been committed by the Russians, and from what I hear may still be committed by the Russians."

But Dodd also exhibited contempt toward the behavior of several American military officers who'd contrived to be assigned to participate in the trial. He concluded they were more interested in earning promotion and their reputations than in being successful prosecutors. And there were others on the Nuremberg stage he found unbearable.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Dodd's correspondence comes when he describes his mixed feelings toward some of the defendants, particularly those he was expressly responsible for interrogating. He acknowledges their guilt, yet he also finds them personable and even pleasant. One can imagine how torn he must have felt when a Nazi officer he had come to rather like was sentenced to hang for his war crimes.

The principal lesson of this book, though, is the reminder that at the end of World War II, the victors wisely - even nobly - promised and, importantly, delivered justice rather than revenge. It's a lesson that we cannot afford to forget and one that Christopher Dodd wisely stresses as he introduces this remarkable collection of letters from his father to his mother.

Al Hutchison is a freelance writer who lives in Inverness.

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