Early Life and Education
Woetzel’s parents were German, his mother Jewish. The family left Germany because of its growing anti-Semitism, but before Hitler was in power. Woetzel was born in Shanghai, where his father was a chemical engineer. Following the conclusion of the Second World War, Woetzel moved to New York City. After receiving an A. B. degree from Columbia University (1952), Woetzel served in the American army (1954–1956), earned a Ph. D. at Oxford (1955) and a law degree at Bonn University (1959). He also served as a legislative assistant for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1956, and was a personal aid to Adlai Stevenson during the 1956 Democratic Convention, where Stevenson became the Party’s nominee for President. At Oxford, he became close friends with A. N. R. Robinson, who in 1989, as Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, reintroduced a proposal for an International Criminal Court to the United Nations General Assembly. An earlier UN effort to create an international criminal court had failed in the early 1950s due to the Cold War.
Woetzel’s doctoral dissertation, on the legality of the Nuremberg trials, was published as The Nuremberg Trials in International Law. His main purpose in The Nuremberg Trials was to defend the basis of the Nuremberg trials in international law, opposing legal scholars who had argued that the trials were ex post facto and illegal. However, he also expressed the hope that the Nuremberg trials would eventually lead to the establishment of an international criminal court.
Read more about this topic: Robert Kurt Woetzel
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“Early education can only promise to help make the third and fourth and fifth years of life good ones. It cannot insure without fail that any tomorrow will be successful. Nothing “fixes” a child for life, no matter what happens next. But exciting, pleasing early experiences are seldom sloughed off. They go with the child, on into first grade, on into the child’s long life ahead.”
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“By degrees we may come to know the primitive sense of the permanent objects of nature, so that the world shall be to us an open book, and every form significant of its hidden life and final cause.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Nature has taken more care than the fondest parent for the education and refinement of her children. Consider the silent influence which flowers exert, no less upon the ditcher in the meadow than the lady in the bower. When I walk in the woods, I am reminded that a wise purveyor has been there before me; my most delicate experience is typified there.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)