Thomas J. Dodd: Nuremberg Prosecutor to First Censure Since McCarthy

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Thomas J. Dodd was born in 1907 in Connecticut to a political family of Irish descent. He joined the FBI in 1933 and took part in the raid on the Little Bohemia Lodge in Wisconsin aimed at John Dillinger. As a federal prosecutor under five attorneys general, he pursued Ku Klux Klan cases and in 1942 convicted a clergyman under the Espionage Act for serving as a link in a German spy network. Justice Robert H. Jackson brought him to Nuremberg, where he spent 15 months, rose to acting chief of counsel, and cross-examined Wilhelm Keitel and Alfred Rosenberg.

At Nuremberg Dodd showed how the Reichsbank under Walther Funk stored gold teeth taken from camp victims, and he pushed to have organizations like the SS and Gestapo declared criminal. In 1949 he refused Poland's Officer's Cross. Before joining the Senate he was paid $50,000 a year to lobby for Guatemala's Carlos Castillo Armas. As a senator he sought to prosecute Martin Luther King Jr. under the Logan Act, held hearings with Timothy Leary on LSD, and introduced the Gun Control Act of 1968. In 1967 the Senate censured him for converting campaign funds to personal use. He lost his 1970 race to Lowell Weicker and died in 1971 at 64.

• He presented a shrunken human head from Buchenwald that the camp commandant had used as a paperweight.
• He described the Nuremberg trials as an autopsy on history's most horrible catalog of human crime.
• After a 1955 visit to Guatemala, he pushed the House to approve $15 million in U.S. aid.
• Disgruntled staff copied his financial records and gave them to columnist Drew Pearson; Dodd's libel suit failed on appeal.
• The University of Connecticut's Thomas J. Dodd Research Center and the Dodd Prize in International Justice and Human Rights carry his name.