In the film version of Abby Mann’s fictionalized account of the trials of former Nazi officers in Nuremberg, Germany, after World War II, Spencer Tracy stars as a U.S. Chief Judge charged with presiding over the trial of four Nazi judges, supported by a high-profile cast featuring a powerful Burt Lancaster as one of the Nazi judges, Marlene Deitrich and a young William Shatner.
Eli Rosenbaum, the longest-serving prosecutor and investigator of Nazi criminals and other perpetrators of human rights violations joined FOLCS, along with professor Maria L. Marcus for a screening and discussion.
Eli Rosenbaum
Prosecutor & Investigator
Eli Rosenbaum is the longest-serving prosecutor and investigator of Nazi criminals and other perpetrators of human rights violations in world history, having worked on these cases at the U.S. Department of Justice for some thirty years. A graduate of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania (B.S. and MBA, Finance) and of the Harvard Law School, he served from 1994 to 2010 as Director of the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI), where he had previously served as a trial attorney and then as Deputy Director. OSI was created by Attorney General order to investigate and prosecute WWII-era Nazi criminals and, following the December 2004 expansion of its mission by the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, also investigated and prosecuted criminal and civil cases involving participants in post-World War II crimes of genocide, extrajudicial killing and torture committed abroad under color of foreign law. Under his leadership, OSI also performed crucial work for the federal government’s inter-agency efforts to trace gold, artwork and other assets looted by the Nazis from Holocaust victims and also to locate, declassify and disclose millions of pages of documents under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998. Rosenbaum has also worked as a corporate litigator in Manhattan with the law firm of Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, and as General Counsel of the World Jewish Congress, where he directed the investigation that resulted in the worldwide exposure of the Nazi past of former United Nations Secretary General Kurt Waldheim.
Rosenbaum’s published works include Betrayal: The Untold Story of the Kurt Waldheim Investigation and Cover-Up (St. Martin’s Press), which was selected for “Notable Books of 1993″ by The New York Times Book Review and “Best Books of 1993″ by The San Francisco Chronicle.
Maria L. Marcus
Professor
Professor Maria L. Marcus, a graduate of Yale Law School, is the author of Learning Together: Justice Marshall’s Desegregation Opinions, and served as an Assistant Attorney General of New York State and Chief of its Litigation bureau, arguing cases in federal courts, including several before the United States Supreme Court. She was Associate Counsel at the NAACP’s national office and participated in Supreme Court cases that dismantled segregation statutes throughout the South.