Nuremberg War Crimes Prosecutor Henry King Dies at 89

Henry King Jr., one of the last Nuremberg war crimes prosecutors still alive, has died at the age of 89.

The cause of death was cancer, King’s son, Dave, told the New York Times.

A Yale Law School graduate, King became bored with practice at a New York law firm, according to the obituary. He became a Nuremberg prosecutor, deciding when he stepped off the train to begin his new assignment in the war-ravaged German city that he would dedicate his life to preventing similar travesties.

In a 1997 memoir, The Two Worlds of Albert Speer, King commented on how the minister of war production was able to turn a blind eye to the world of humanity. “In a technological world, the magic concoction for evil consists of blind technocrats such as Speer led by an evil and aggressive leader such as Hitler,” he wrote.

King was one of three Nuremberg prosecutors still alive, the story says. He teamed with the two others, Whitney Harris and Benjamin Ferencz, to lobby to include wars of aggression within the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. The court, created in 1998, was originally limited to the prosecution of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.

King taught law at Case Western Reserve and was a member of the ABA Task Force on War Crimes in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, according to the story.