Women at Nuremberg

A public lecture by Diane Marie Amann (University of Georgia School of Law & PhD candidate in Law, Universiteit Leiden, the Netherlands)
2017-2018 Breslauer, Rutman and Anderson Research Fellow

“There is nothing exceptional about me,” 30-year-old Cecelia Goetz told a reporter. Little could be further from the truth. For the year was 1948, and New York-born Goetz was one of a small yet multinational group of women at the war crimes trials in Nuremberg. In addition to prosecutors like her, the group included defense counsel, journalists and court reporters, staffers and translators, victims and witnesses, and even a few defendants. Drawing on USC Shoah Foundation oral history videos, personal papers, and other sources, this lecture situates stories of these women in the context of the Nuremberg trials, international law, and the postwar global society.

Diane Marie Amann is the Emily & Ernest Woodruff Chair in International Law and Faculty Co-Director of the Dean Rusk International Law Center at the University of Georgia School of Law. An expert in international criminal law, international humanitarian law, and international human rights law, she has served since 2012 as the International Criminal Court Prosecutor’s Special Adviser on Children in & affected by Armed Conflict. While in residence as the inaugural Breslauer, Rutman and Anderson Research Fellow at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, she is examining the many roles women played in the post-World War II trials at Nuremberg. Amann will continue her research this spring, first at the Max Planck Institute Luxembourg and then at Oxford University, where she will be a Research Visitor at the law faculty’s Bonavero Institute of Human Rights and a Visiting Fellow at Mansfield College.