Telford Taylor

Telford Taylor (February 24, 1908 – May 23, 1998) was an American lawyer and professor. Taylor was known for his role as lead counsel in the prosecution of war criminals after World War II, his opposition to McCarthyism in the 1950s, and his outspoken criticism of American actions during the Vietnam War. With the US Army, Taylor served with the Military Intelligence Corps during WWII, and reached the rank of brigadier general in 1946, following the war. 

During the prosecution of Axis war criminals, he served as lead counsel for the prosecution in the 12 subsequent Nuremberg trials before US military courts, after serving as assistant to Robert H. Jackson in the initial trial before the International Military Tribunal. Following the Nuremberg trials, Taylor opened a private law practice, but remained politically active. Taylor was born on February 24, 1908, in Schenectady, New York. 

His parents were John Bellamy Taylor (a relative of Edward Bellamy) and Marcia Estabrook Jones. He attended Williams College and Harvard Law School, where he received his law degree in 1932. During the 1930s, Taylor worked for several government agencies. By 1935, he provided legal counsel (assisted by Max Lowenthal among others) to a subcommittee of the Senate Interstate Commerce Committee chaired by Burton K. Wheeler and whose members included the newly elected Harry S. Truman. In 1940, he became general counsel for the Federal Communications Commission.

Following the outbreak of World War II, Taylor joined Army Intelligence as a Major on October 5, 1942, leading the American group at Bletchley Park that was responsible for analyzing information obtained from intercepted German communications using ULTRA encryption. He was promoted to lieutenant colonel in 1943 and visited England, where he helped negotiate the 1943 BRUSA Agreement. 

He was promoted to full colonel in 1944, and was assigned to the team of Robert H. Jackson, which helped work out the London Charter of the International Military Tribunal (IMT), the legal basis for the Nuremberg Trials. At the Nuremberg Trials, he initially served as an assistant to Chief Counsel Robert H. Jackson and, in that function, was the US prosecutor in the High Command case. 

The indictment in that case called for the General Staff of the Army and the High Command of the German Armed Forces to be considered criminal organizations; the witnesses were several of the surviving German field marshals. Both organizations were acquitted. When Jackson resigned his position as prosecutor after the first (and only) trial before the IMT and returned to the US, Taylor was promoted to brigadier general and succeeded him on October 17, 1946, as Chief Counsel for the remaining twelve trials before the US Nuremberg Military Tribunals. 

In these trials at Nuremberg, 163 of the 200 defendants who were tried were found guilty in some or all of the charges of the indictments. While Taylor was not wholly satisfied with the outcomes of the Nuremberg Trials, he considered them a success because they set a precedent and defined a legal base for crimes against peace and humanity. In 1950, the United Nations codified the most important statements from these trials in the seven Nuremberg Principles.