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IN AUGUST 1941, Lemberg and Galicia were incorporated into Germany’s General Government. As Hans Frank became the ruler, Lauterpacht planned a return to America, to lecture at Wellesley College and take up a small space to work at the Harvard Law Library.

The days before departure dragged, as the implications of the German occupation sank in. “You know all about Lwów,” he wrote to Rachel. “I do not like to express my sentiments, but the thing is constantly with me like a nightmare.” It was not possible to hide the fears, yet life went on, as though he had “split his personality.” He was “perfectly normal” in daily intercourse with people, going through the motions, helping colleagues at Trinity, entertaining generals. There was more political engagement: before leaving for America, he added his name to a list of Cambridge academics offering support to the Soviet Academy of Sciences for that country’s “heroic fights against the common foe.”

Lauterpacht arrived back in New York in August 1941 and spent the autumn term at Wellesley. He visited Harvard, spending weekends in New York with Rachel and Eli. In October, he traveled to Washington to meet Francis Biddle, Jackson’s successor as attorney general, who wanted legal arguments that would allow America to attack German submarines. Lauterpacht had stayed in touch with Jackson, sending congratulations to him on his appointment as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Jackson responded with a friendly note and an offprint of the Havana speech. Lauterpacht offered help with another speech, on ending “international lawlessness,” but by the time he passed on his ideas the war had taken a decisive turn: on December 7, Japan attacked U.S. naval forces at Pearl Harbor, causing the United States to declare war on Japan. Within days, Germany had declared war on America. The military and political situation was transformed when the two men met in Washington early in 1942.

Around that time, nine European governments in exile—including Poland and France—came together at St. James’s Palace in London to coordinate their response to reports of Germany’s “regime of terror.” Terrible stories were circulating, accounts of mass imprisonments and expulsions, of executions and massacres. These caused these governments in exile to issue a declaration, in January 1942, expressing a common desire to use the criminal law to punish those “guilty” of and “responsible” for atrocities. Perpetrators would be “sought for, handed over to justice and judged,” an idea that became an official aim of the war.

The nine governments established a commission on war crimes to collect information on atrocities and perpetrators, a body that would become the United Nations War Crimes Commission. Churchill authorized British government lawyers to investigate German war crimes under the direction of Solicitor General David Maxwell Fyfe. Within months, The New York Times reported that the Polish government in exile had identified ten leading criminals. The first name on the list was that of Hans Frank, just above Governor Otto von Wächter, Lauterpacht’s classmate from Vienna.

Against this background, Jackson delivered a speech titled “International Lawlessness” at the Waldorf Hotel in late January. Written with the assistance of Lauterpacht, who attended as a guest, the speech described war and atrocity and the need for law and courts, “the best instrumentalities…yet devised to subdue violence.” Lauterpacht now had a supporter for his ideas at the highest level of American government. What he and Jackson didn’t know was that the atrocities were about to go up the scale of horror: three days earlier, at a villa on the Wannsee, a lake near Berlin, a conference of senior Nazis had secretly agreed on the “Final Solution.”

Lauterpacht spent several weeks in New York, working with staff at the British embassy, attending conferences, meeting the governor of New York, Herbert Lehman. There was even time to relax with Rachel, to see films. Not much taken by Bette Davis in The Man Who Came to Dinner, the couple did enjoy Pimpernel Smith at the Rivoli Theater on Broadway.

I understood why, watching it seven decades later. The hero, a Cambridge academic played by the heartthrob actor Leslie Howard (who was killed a year later when his plane was shot down over the Atlantic by the Luftwaffe), takes on the “gutterals and brown shirts” and smuggles victims out of the Nazi terror, including his own daughter. “Singapore may fall,” the New York Times reviewer chirped, “but the British can still make melodramas to chill the veins.”