Nuremberg Remembered Biography: Ernest Michel

Ernest Michel was born to a Jewish family in Mannheim, Germany. After the Nazis came to power, he was not able to attend school and in 1939 he was forced to separate from his family, whom he never again saw. During the war years he was also forced to serve in a variety of Nazi labor camps. After almost six years as a slave laborer, he escaped in 1945 from the camp of Berga in Germany.

Seven months after his escape, he arrived at Nuremberg as a 22-year-old correspondent for the German news agency Dana. As a journalist, he was to report the trials in an objective fashion despite the emotions that surged in him when he recognized leading Nazis such as Hermann Goering. Sixty years after the trials, recalling his arrival at Nuremberg, he still thinks of how incongruous it was for him to be a reporter for German news after five and a half years of suffering Nazi persecution in labor camps. The byline on his articles read "Auschwitz survivor #104995."

"Sometimes I lost myself, and I wanted to jump down and grab them. ‘Why did you do this? Why did you kill my parents?'"

Yet he knew as a recently licensed reporter in postwar Germany that he needed to retain his objectivity. He concurred with the chief American prosecutor Robert Jackson, who maintained that the essence of the trials was not revenge but the preservation of and respect for the rule of law.

For Michel the involvement in the Nuremberg trials was the "single most important of my life." Nuremberg, as he explains, was not a perfect trial procedure and there were many kinks to work out of the system. But it was the beginning of international war crimes trials and it has set the precedent for the recent international courts for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. "Genocide is a product of evil, of hate, of indifference, or moral bankruptcy," he maintains. "It's up to us, in whatever way we can, to do something about it."

Today, Michel is a retired executive vice president of the United Jewish Appeal-Federation of New York. After a successful career in fundraising, he now devotes his time to speaking about Nuremberg and its lessons.