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My Father's Narrative of a Quest for Justice
Crown
September 2007
On Sale: September 11, 2007
Featuring: Thomas Dodd
384 pages ISBN: 0307381161 EAN: 9780307381163 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir | Non-Fiction
For some sixty years, the Nuremberg trials have demonstrated
the resolve of the United States and its fellow Allied
victors of the Second World War to uphold the principles of
dispassionate justice and the rule of law even when cries of
vengeance threatened to carry the day. In the summer of
1945, soon after the unconditional surrender of Nazi
Germany, Thomas J. Dodd, the father of U.S. Senator
Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, traveled to the
devastated city of Nuremberg to serve as a staff lawyer in
this unprecedented trial for crimes against humanity. Thanks
to his agile legal mind and especially to his skills at
interrogating the defendants—including such notorious
figures as Hermann Göring, Alfred Rosenberg, Albert Speer,
Joachim von Ribbentrop, and Rudolf Hess—he quickly rose to
become the number two prosecutor in the U.S. contingent. Over the course of fifteen months, Dodd described his
efforts and his impressions of the proceedings in nightly
letters to his wife, Grace. The letters remained in the Dodd
family archives, unexamined, for decades. When Christopher
Dodd, who followed his father’s path to the Senate, sat down
to read the letters, he was overwhelmed by their intimacy,
by the love story they unveil, by their power to paint vivid
portraits of the accused war criminals, and by their
insights into the historical importance of the trials. Along with Christopher Dodd’s reflections on his father’s
life and career, and on the inspiration that good people
across the world have long taken from the event that
unfolded in the courtroom at Nuremberg, where justice proved
to be stronger than the most unspeakable evil, these letters
give us a fresh, personal, and often unique perspective on a
true turning point in the history of our time. In today’s
world, with new global threats once again put-ting our
ideals to the test, Letters from Nuremberg reminds us that
fear and retribution are not the only bases for
confrontation. As Christopher Dodd says here, “Now, as in
the era of Nuremberg, this nation should never tailor its
eternal principles to the conflict of the moment, for if we
do so, we will be shadowing those we seek to overcome.â€
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