A few nights ago, I watched the Netflix film, Nuremberg, featuring actor Russell Crowe in the role of Nazi Reichsmarshall, Herman Goering, on trial for genocide at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal in 1947-48.
This was the first-ever war crimes tribunal and established the basic principles of international law that outlaw war crimes and crimes against humanity. It enshrined the “Nuremberg Principle” that if a person engages in acts of genocide, we cannot plead that we were just lowly subordinates “obeying orders” given to us by someone above. Everyone is responsible to stand up against genocide.
A name popped into my head as I watched this film: Mary Kaufman. I knew her. I heard Mary Kaufman speak more than once at meetings in New York of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). Mary Metlay Kaufman was a prosecutor at the Nuremberg Tribunal in 1947-1948.
She was a founder of the National Lawyers Guild, a lawyer who defended leaders of the CPUSA in the Cold War anti-communist witch hunt trials of the 1950s. Her clients were Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Claudia Jones, and Betty Gannett, all leaders of the CPUSA, tried and convicted under the infamous Smith Act, incarcerated for years at Alderson Federal Women’s Penitentiary in remote southeast West Virginia. Mary Kaufman made the arduous trip down to visit her clients at Alderson many times, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn painted a loving portrait of Kaufman, Claudia Jones, Betty Gannett, and other inmates in her book, Alderson Story: My Life as a Political Prisoner.
Mary Kaufman defended women and men arrested for protesting the military draft and the war in Vietnam—which included my wife, Joyce, arrested along with about twenty other women in a sit-down protest against the Vietnam War and military conscription in front of the Whitehall Induction Center in New York City. Mary Kaufman was also one of the main organizers of the National Committee to Free Angela Davis, and it was in that role that I heard her speak.
Kaufman, born poor in Atlanta, Georgia, to Jewish refugees from Czarist Russia, was a prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, one of six or seven women on the prosecution team led by Brigadier General Telford Taylor and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson. Kaufman was assigned to prepare the indictment of top executives of the I.G. Farben Chemical Trust, one of the richest corporations in Germany that poured millions of Reichsmarks into Nazi coffers, bankrolling Adolph Hitler’s “Thousand-Year-Third-Reich.”
Her research helped expose the hundreds of millions of Reichsmarks squeezed from millions of Jewish, Russian, Polish, French, Dutch, Belgian, French, and Italian “prisoners of war” by these Nazi banks and corporations during World War II. It was a system of outright slavery, one of the defining characteristics of Nazi rule, along with mass extermination, with a cost in lives of sixty million.
The task assigned to her had a title: “De-Nazification.” The aim was to dismantle the Nazi-infested banks and corporations that put Hitler and the Nazis in power. Later, this principle was embraced by Josef Stalin, Winston Churchill, and Harry Truman at the Potsdam Summit. Yet within months of the end of the Nuremberg Tribunal, Cold War anti-communists were plotting the return to power of these very same banks and corporations that squeezed billions in profits from slave labor and extermination in Nazi Germany.
Kaufman returned from Nuremberg burning with the conviction that never again must we sit idly by while fascists, funded by billionaire banks and corporations, scheme to seize power in a fascist coup d’etat. She looked around her and saw mean, cunning lawmakers like Rep Martin Dies instigating their fascist-like witchhunt against the Communist Party, against the labor movement, against the Civil Rights movement, and against people of color. It smelled to her like a repeat of the Nazi rise to power in Germany.
She had just completed an assignment revealing the role of giant German banks and corporations in the rise of fascism. Her life motto was, “FASCISM NEVER AGAIN!” She plunged into the fightback and gave every ounce of her energy to the defense of these women and men who, like her, were fighting against the fascist threat to our freedoms.
Kaufman was an anti-fascist hero. She should be honored and revered for her lifelong struggle to defend democracy, the rights of workers, the poor, and the oppressed. Yet I look around me: Where is the statue dedicated to Mary Metlay Kaufman? And why not books celebrating her life and explaining the principles she stood for? There is mostly silence. Even the film, Nuremberg, a worthy effort to expose the fascist danger, has not a single line about Mary Kaufman and the case against I.G. Farben, Alfried Krupp of Kruppstahl, and the other Nazi billionaires. There is a concerted effort to hide this central truth about fascism enunciated by the great anti-fascist, Georgi Dimitroff, who defined fascism as the “open terrorist dictatorship of the most chauvinist warlike sections of finance capital.”
I am now gathering background information for a biography of Kaufman. Her papers are at the Sophia Smith Archives at Smith College in Northampton, MA, with the papers on the Nuremberg tribunal forwarded to the Lillian Goodman Law Library at Yale. I am reading the transcript of the I.G. Farben trial online at the Harvard Law School Nuremberg Trials Project.
It is chilling to read the thousands of pages in this document that expose just how gruesome the Nazis were in their greed for profits. I am already pondering the title of the book: MARY METLAY KAUFMAN: ANTI-FASCIST HERO.
Dear Reader, if you have read this story and have information about Mary Metlay Kaufman, please share it with me. It will go in my book. Send it to greenpastures164@gmail.com.
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