Robert Kempner

Robert Max Wasilii Kempner was a German lawyer who played a prominent role during the Weimar Republic and who later served as assistant U.S. chief counsel during the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. Kempner studied law at the University of Freiburg and served as a public prosecutor in Berlin during the 1920s. In 1928 he was appointed chief legal adviser in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior. In this role he sought to prosecute Adolf Hitler for high treason and to ban the Nazi Party.

After the Nazi Party's rise to power in 1933, Kempner was dismissed from the ministry and had his citizenship revoked because he was Jewish. He fled Germany in 1935. He settled in Italy, where he taught law, and moved to the United States in 1939.