William Wilkins, one of the judges who convicted leading Nazi industrialists during the Nuremberg war crimes trials, died Sept. 9 at his home in Bellevue, Wash.
Wilkins, who was born in Ironwood, Mich., was 98 years old.
He is believed to have been the last survivor of the 32 judges appointed to the Nuremberg trials by President Harry S. Truman, The New York Times reported.
Before he served as a Superior Court judge in Washington state’s King County for more than three decades, Wilkins was on the four-member panel that convicted several German industrialists who had helped finance and arm and Nazis, including Alfried Krupp, it was reported.
Krupp, Hitler’s main supplier of weapons, was convicted of plunder, but his sentence was cut short in 1951, along with those of many other Nazis, The New York Times said.
Wilkins reportedly once wrote: “Imagine my surprise one day in February 1951 to read in the newspaper that John J. McCloy, the high commissioner to Germany, had restored all the Krupp properties that had been ordered confiscated. At the time of his death in 1968, Krupp was reputed to be the richest man in Europe.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
