Letters from Nuremberg

For seventy-five years, the Nuremberg trials have symbolized the principles of dispassionate justice and the rule of law. Thomas J. Dodd, a future U.S. Senator from Connecticut and the father of U.S. Senator Christopher J. Dodd, spent fifteen long months as part of the US legal team at the first and most significant trial in 1945-46, serving as the Executive Trial Counsel – the number two prosecutor in the U.S. contingent. During this time, he wrote hundreds of letters home to his wife Grace. Later these letters, along with an extensive collection of documents and photographs from the trial, were gifted to UConn Library Archives and Special Collections.

In 2021, a group of UConn students, including myself, in collaboration with the Archives and under the supervision of filmmaker and faculty member Catherine Masud, worked together to produce a short documentary on the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. This story is partly told through Dodd’s letters, and also features Christopher Dodd and others reflecting on Dodd’s role and the enduring significance of Nuremberg in today’s turbulent and challenging times.

While working on this film, I intensively collaborated with the whole group on creating and perfecting our script; I was responsible for organizing and setting up our project file with the large amount of archival sourced; I worked on the editing for the first half of the script; and I also contributed animation to the film.