Discovering My Great Uncle-in-Law

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Discovering My Great Uncle-in-Law

 

 

When he was ten, my husband was told to put on his Sunday best to meet his famous “Uncle Michael” at LAX: dark pants, white shirt, emerald green corduroy vest with brass buttons. His great uncle, Michael A. Musmanno, a judge and former Admiral, travelled to LA in 1962 to accept a Jewish award at a black-tie event in Beverly Hills. He had been a Nuremburg judge.

            Seeing the new jets at the airport was more exciting to my husband than meeting Uncle Michael. He knew his great-uncle only by the fancy Christmas cards he wrote every year with large, flowery cursive about the “good ship Merry Christmas getting ready to sail.” His flashy travelling attire reinforced the family’s notion he was not to be taken seriously: white pants and shoes, navy-blue double-breasted blazer, pastel silk shirt, and flamboyant ascot. Not serious clothes, like this 10-year-old had carefully put on.

I first heard about Uncle Michael on one of our early dates. We were struggling grad students in D.C in the 1980s and went to Arlington National Cemetery to find the grave of Uncle Michael, who was buried next to Bobby Kennedy. It wasn’t until one of my early visits to my future in-laws that I learned Uncle Michael had been a Nuremberg judge. That grabbed my attention, but everyone insisted this trial didn’t matter, because “it wasn’t one of the important ones.”   

I should have started asking my questions about Uncle Michael back then. But I grew up as a girl in the 1950s from a Midwest working class background, taught that asking was impolite.  I was taught to obey, not question; to wait to be offered, never ask. Even if a relative misstated a fact or a teacher misgraded my paper, I was not to question. I was still trying to unlearn this, with the help of my clinical psychology training. And I didn’t want to be rude to my new boyfriend’s family.

         Only decades later, when I found a copy of Musmanno’s book, Eichmann’s Commandos, did I learn that Uncle Michael—known to the world as Judge Musmanno—had been the presiding judge at the Nuremberg Einsatzgruppen Trial of Eichmann’s 24 henchmen who led the Gestapo death squads*. Musmanno had interviewed each carefully—an extremely controversial decision—knowing it was important to document their defense of blind obedience to authority.

Blind obedience. My husband and I both taught Social Psychology. We knew the famous Milgram Obedience studies and even had copies of the Milgram films. Had Musmanno’s legal work informed our psychology? Oh, what a conversation that might have been.

            Nearly ten years after reading Eichmann’s Commandos and during the early years of Trump and COVID, I became obsessed with stories about Nazis and courage. I learned that Judge Musmanno’s work was newly archived at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. I made plans for our first post-COVID vacation. 

I expected a closet with his sixteen books, a few important legal papers, and assorted memorabilia. But Musmanno wrote extensively and saved everything, including the old water pump from his family’s simple home. His archives consumed 1,000 linear feet. Books holding his 500+ dissenting judicial opinions were nearly as tall as he was. This exquisitely organized and curated collection seemed like that of someone to be taken very seriously. Why hadn’t my husband’s family?

I was hoping to stumble upon revealing family diaries or letters. But before the archivist turned us loose in the stacks, he casually stopped by his desk to show us photos he had been reviewing of Musmanno with JFK and Bobby Kennedy, campaigning in Musmanno’s unsuccessful runs for governor and US senator. I clarified that it was the Kennedy Brothers who had campaigned for Musmanno, not the other way around. It was. Then the archivist shared that prior to JFK’s assassination, Musmanno was thought to have been the next SCOTUS pick. Suddenly, both my husband and I wanted to know a lot more details about this man, and not just why his family had dismissed him.   

My husband and I walked through stack after stack of movable shelves. He pulled out boxes labeled “Sacco and Vanzetti” and hours later showed me a handwritten thank-you letter from Vanzetti, holding it out in reverence, like a communion wafer.

I lost myself first in his library of classic and modern books, and then in hundreds of neatly labeled boxes. I pulled several labeled “Interrogation of Hitler Associates,” which were filled with Musmanno’s interviews to verify Hitler’s death. I held the words of Hitler’s bodyguard describing the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun in their shallow grave, while a fireball flew over his shoulder and scorched their bodies. I put the page down, no longer wanting to touch it, feeling a little scorched from holding it.

I opened boxes labeled “Nuremberg War Crime Trial” and ran my fingers across files until I stopped on that of Margarete Himmler. Himmler’s wife. She told Musmanno she knew nothing of her husband's work as head of the Nazi SS, while then inadvertently saying she did. I imagined myself in the interrogation room with Musmanno and wondered if he had been as stunned as I was.

            I found shelves of boxes labeled “Eichmann Trial,” astonished to learn Musmanno was a witness. The personal transcript with his testimony began with an aggressive attack by the defense to discredit him, accusing him of being too much of a self-promoter to be taken seriously. I became excited at finding a possible clue to why my in-laws didn’t take him seriously.

     

The archivist explained that Musmanno understood Eichmann’s central role in the death squads from his Nuremburg trial; the defense had to try to discredit him. But the international community considered Musmanno’s testimony the most damaging in securing Eichmann’s conviction and execution. My husband’s great-uncle had been a star witness in a major piece 

of history. That was why he had traveled to LA in 1962, when my husband met him.

      The archivist told me of a forthcoming Musmanno biography but warned me the Judge was controversial and not always on the right side of history. Months later, I was highlighting my way through Michael A. Musmanno: Lawyer, Legislator, Judge, Showman, by historian John S. Haller, Jr., learning more about this man who had shaped so many 20th-century events. And who was described as both a “selfless hero” and a “preening nuisance.” He seemed a cautionary tale about the impact of high ideals and big ego on the road to success.

I learned that Musmanno grew up poor, the bright and ambitious son of Italian immigrants who settled around Pittsburgh. He witnessed mistreatment and murder when he worked in the mines and mills to earn money to study law to protect workers and immigrants. He read Lincoln and Emerson to erase the “germ of failure” in his character. He believed he could eliminate self-doubt by cleansing rituals and fasting down to nearly100 pounds. He maintained similarly extreme habits regarding spending, work, and justice. These views and his ideals about purity, love, and women often left him exhausted, vexed, physically ill and lonely. Musmanno seemed to understand humanity far better than he understood humans. But I wondered if these same ideals and absolutes had given him moral clarity after WWII, when strong voices with a clear sense of right and wrong were needed. But, I thought, I wouldn’t want to get on his wrong side.  

His early law career suffered because he wasn’t seen as an American. He was so incensed by the unsubstantiated murder accusations against Italian immigrants Sacco and Vanzetti that he closed his law practice and moved to Boston to volunteer on their appeals. He was devastated when after all his efforts, they were executed. He became determined to change the laws. But after two terms in the Pennsylvania legislature, these efforts, too, were thwarted by wealth and political power.

He thought a judgeship would be a more effective means to “rid society of the poison weeds of poverty, crime, and inequality” (p. 94), but found his work on the lower courts mundane. He thought he could do more on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, but lost his first bid and began to act out on the bench. His “Musmanntics” were so annoying that his fellow jurists removed him as the presiding judge of the Criminal Court: he wrote legal decisions as limericks, officially declared the reality of Santa Claus and Jack Frost, sentenced drunk drivers to crimes they could have committed and ordered them to attend funerals where he popped up to give the sermon.

            WWII may have saved him from himself. His enormous talents and growing ego were rewarded with an appointment as a military governor in Italy, although his insistence on compassionate treatment for war-impoverished Italians angered the British Military Police. When a British General attempted to take possession of Musmanno’s palatial gubernatorial villa, Musmanno confronted him with a gun. The Brits were pissed. When he refused to properly fly the Russia flag, the Russians were pissed. He lost his Governorship.

As punishment, he was reassigned to oversee undesirable tasks in post-war Germany: investigating Hitler’s death, adjudicating the forced and fatal repatriations of Russian civilians living in Germany (saving thousands of Russian lives), and serving as a judge on three of the Nuremberg Military Trials at a time when the world was weary of hearing about Nuremberg.  

His world must have seemed so small when he returned home, even though he was finally elected to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. He wanted a bigger voice and found his megaphone as Pennsylvania’s version of Senator Joe McCarthy, using his power to go after real and perceived communists and personal critics. My heart sank as I read how he denied his “enemies” legitimate services and rights. This from a man who spent his life fighting against injustice and inequality.   

Musmanno’s fiery testimony at the 1961 Eichmann trial briefly returned him to the world stage (see footage at: https://www.ushmm.org). Once home, he created a firestorm in the New York media by attacking historian Hannah Arendt for using the term “banality of evil” to explain Nazi atrocities. Musmanno insisted that Nazi evil was hardly “banal.” History is divided over whether Musmanno was fueled by his high ideals or an attempt to court the Jewish vote for his upcoming US Senate run. But by then, Musmanno was increasingly losing his place in a rapidly changing world. His hoped-for platform to fight injustice and inequality never returned, although this fight is evident in his judicial rulings and writings. I was reassured to read of his active involvement in the Civil Rights Movement and learn that he had been invited to march in the South with civil rights leaders.

I still don’t know how to make sense of the man, more interesting and complicated than most. I no longer care why my in-laws disliked him. Over his life, much of the world disliked him. The Philadelphia Trial Lawyers still give an award in his name to honor his spirit and ideals. I choose to believe this means the sum of his life falls in the positive column. He’s still on my top ten list of dinner party guests.

            Judge Musmanno matters to me. Even as a young man, he sought out world figures he admired and wanted to meet. He wrote to them and asked. As a result, he was invited to personal meetings with Clarence Darrow, William Jennings Bryan, socially conscious Pope Pius XI, and Mussolini. Mussolini!

I wish I would have discovered my great uncle-in-law earlier in my life. He gives me courage to ask. 

__________

*Video clips of Judge Musmanno can be seen in Ordinary Men: The Forgotten Holocaust, a 2023 Netflix documentary about the Einsatzgruppen Trial and in his digital archives in The Honorable Michael A. Musmanno Collection at Duquesne University: https://guides.library.duq.edu/musmanno

 

Rebecca Petersen

Rebecca Petersen is a psychologist living in Sacramento and working in a neuroscience research lab in Boston. Her short story “Eroica” appeared in Gargoyle Online. She writes fiction, creative nonfiction, mental health essays, and therapeutic haikus to make sense of life’s contractions. She often explores themes of who and what we save and discard. Her husband is the great-nephew of Judge Musmanno.