Drexel Sprecher
Born: 1913, Independence, Wisconsin
Describes a witness at the Nuremberg trials [Interview: 1990]
There were some incredible German witnesses as you may know from reading the judgment. One was a man by the name of Graebe, G-R-A-E-B-E, who had been the leader of a German factory that was established in Russia. I forget the name of the town at this point. But he talked about how he was required to release Jews who were working in this factory and that he heard about how they were being exterminated and so on. So one day he just went out to where he heard they were being shot and put into trenches actually, and buried in trenches. And he went out there and before the SS prevented him, he was able to watch a whole sequence of this go on. So he became a witness and testified at Nuremberg and quite a bit of his testimony is reproduced in the actual judgment of the Tribunal, as indicating how these Einsatzgruppen worked in Russia.
There were some incredible German witnesses as you may know from reading the judgment. One was a man by the name of Graebe, G-R-A-E-B-E, who had been the leader of a German factory that was established in Russia. I forget the name of the town at this point. But he talked about how he was required to release Jews who were working in this factory and that he heard about how they were being exterminated and so on. So one day he just went out to where he heard they were being shot and put into trenches actually, and buried in trenches. And he went out there and before the SS prevented him, he was able to watch a whole sequence of this go on. So he became a witness and testified at Nuremberg and quite a bit of his testimony is reproduced in the actual judgment of the Tribunal, as indicating how these Einsatzgruppen worked in Russia.
Drexel Sprecher was educated at the University of Wisconsin, the London School of Economics, and at the Harvard School of Law before receiving a position at the U.S. Government's Labor Board in 1938. He enlisted in the American military after the United States declared war on Germany, and was posted to London. After the war, Sprecher served as a prosecutor of Nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg trials.
— US Holocaust Memorial Museum
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