Lord Shawcross, Britain's lead prosecutor of Nazi leaders at the World War Two war crimes trials in Nuremberg, died peacefully at home today aged 101, his wife said.
"He had been getting more and more frail in recent days and just faded away," Lady Shawcross said from the family home in Sussex south of London.
Born on February 4th, 1902, Hartley Shawcross leaped to public prominence with detailed and impassioned speeches at the 1945 trials that condemned all the Nazi leaders to death by hanging.
"The dictatorship behind which these men seek to shelter was of their own creation," he said in his concluding speech, dismissing the Nazi leaders' claim they had only been obeying orders in committing systematic mass murder in the use of slave labour and concentration camps.
All in the Nuremberg dock died on the gallows except Herman Goering - for whom Shawcross later admitted having a grudging respect - who poisoned himself with cyanide an hour before he was to have been hung.
Not a vindictive man, 45 years later Shawcross spoke passionately against war crimes trials with the death penalty.
Shawcross also prosecuted British World War Two traitor Lord Haw-Haw - whose real name was William Joyce - and Cold War era Soviet spy Klaus Fuchs among others.
A British representative at the United Nations, he was a Labour Party member of parliament from 1945 to 1958 including a spell as Attorney General in the post-War Labour government.