Drexel A. Sprecher, who put his Harvard law degree to good use as a leading prosecutor of Nazi war criminals, died of a heart attack on March 18.

Following an "oversight" that kept them in the dark for almost two full months, the New York Times has at long last taken note of Mr. Sprecher's death. Sprecher was an OSS agent who trained Germans to spy on the Nazi government, The Washington Post reports that Sprecher was initially opposed to the death penalty, but, upon learning the extent of Nazi war crimes, he consistently demanded that those he prosecuted be executed. His rationale, as he explained it to the Philadelphia Inquirer fifty years later, had little to do with the Nazi war criminals themselves. By publicly punishing those who were truly responsable, he aimed to alleviate the burden of collective guilt and shame felt by civilian German citizens, for whom he felt no small measure of sympathy.

Although Sprecher went on to hold many other professional positions in the half-century since Nuremberg, his career was largely defined by the post-World War II trials of Nazi leaders, due in no small part to the fact that, in addition to serving as the editor of the trials' official report, he published his own two-volume memoir on the topic.