Prosecuting Nazis at Nuremberg | War Crimes Trial Participant Jane Lester | USC Shoah Foundation

In 1945, American Jane Lester flew to the city of Nuremberg, Germany, to participate in the trials against Nazi war criminals.

Then 29, the native New Yorker had been recruited by American attorneys for her rare German fluency, which she’d picked up at a Catholic college in Rochester. During the trials, she worked as a research analyst.
Jane and other members of the prosecution were put up in the Grand Hotel in Nuremberg – previously where Hitler had held his party meetings. Her command of the English and German languages made her an invaluable resource to the prosecution, for which she translated evidence and pored over documents.

In her testimony, Lester remembers the pressure of the world’s eyes on Nuremberg: “The world watched, because we had been in the paws of this man Hitler – we still thought he might be alive at that time – we had been in his hands and now, here were, these people who supposedly had caused all this trouble."

Jane’s devotion to exposing the truth was instrumental in convicting many accused of war crimes after World War II.

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