I am very sorry to report that Alma Soller McLay died earlier this week in California.
Alma McLay was the last surviving member of Justice Robert H. Jackson’s original team on what became the United States and the international prosecution at Nuremberg of Nazi war criminals following World War II.
In June 1945, Miss Alma Soller became a member of the Jackson team quite suddenly and unexpectedly. She was a War Department secretary, just back in Washington after two years of service in Alaska. At the Pentagon, she was assigned to be one of Secretary of War Henry Stimson’s stenographers.
Then a personnel supervisor asked Alma if she was willing to accept an overseas assignment. She said yes, and soon she was assigned to the War Crimes Branch, and to the Jackson project—the Office of United States Chief of Counsel for Prosecution of Axis Criminality.
Less than two weeks later, on June 18, 1945, Alma Soller flew from Washington to London with Justice Jackson and others who became his core team at the London Conference—the U.S., U.K., U.S.S.R., and French conference that, after weeks of negotiation, reached agreement that August and created the International Military Tribunal. They were:
Justice Jackson, U.S. Chief of Counsel
Sidney S. Alderman, attorney
Francis M. Shea, attorney
William D. Whitney, attorney
Colonel Murray C. Bernays
Major Lawrence A. Coleman
Captain Ralph L. Morgan
Lieutenant James B. Donovan
Lieutenant Gordon E. Dean
Ensign William E. Jackson, executive assistant to Justice Jackson (his father)
Elsie L. Douglas, Justice Jackson’s secretary
Miss Ruth M. Sternberg, Justice Jackson’s secretary
Helen G. Scott, secretary
Jean Torgerson, secretary
Miss Elizabeth Leonard, secretary
Miss Jean MacFetridge, secretary
Eleanor Waldo, secretary
Miss Alma Soller, secretary.
Alma Soller was, in London, and then in Nuremberg, and then back in Washington, a talented, very hard working, kind, and very well-liked member of the Jackson team.
In London, she was Col. Bernays’s principal secretary, and she also worked very closely with Gordon Dean, the attorney who was perhaps Jackson’s most trusted adviser.
In Nuremberg from September 1945 through the start of the trial in November, and then through the completion of the U.S. case in January 1946, Alma worked in the Documents Room. She worked closely with Lieutenant Roger W. Barrett, Jackson’s lead attorney with responsibility for the documentary evidence that was the backbone of the Allies’ prosecution case against the defendants.
In January 1946, Jackson sent Roger Barrett and Alma Soller back to Washington to work at the Pentagon. Over the next four years, Alma worked hard and meticulously, and fulltime, with Roger, Bill Jackson, and others, to assemble, to edit, and ultimately to publish ten U.S. Government Printing Office volumes of documentary evidence, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression. The world, which has learned from these vital books about the Third Reich, the War, and the Holocaust ever since, knows them as the Nuremberg “Red Set” or “Red Series.”
Beginning in 1948, Justice Jackson also arranged for the War Department to permit Alma to work in his Supreme Court chambers. She was not a Court employee or working on Court business. She was a War Department “Editor,” working to transcribe Elsie Douglas’s many notebooks, filled with shorthand notes, of the 1945 London Conference. Alma completed this huge task, making possible the 1949 U.S. Department of State publication of the historic London Conference sessions.
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For a fuller understanding of Alma Soller McLay and her “Nuremberg” work, and for direct exposure to her smarts and charm, click here to watch excerpts from a 2004 interview.
Alma also published that year, in the Albany Law Review, a tribute to Justice Jackson, “That Twinkle in His Eyes”—click here to read it.
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In the late 1940s, as Alma worked in Justice Jackson’s chambers, transcribing from many, many notebooks filled with shorthand notes the extensive London Conference sessions, she got to know, a little bit, Jackson’s colleague and friend Justice Felix Frankfurter.
About one time every week, Frankfurter would come to talk with Jackson in his chambers. On his way out of Jackson’s office, Frankfurter, always smiling, would stop at Alma’s desk to talk briefly. Every time, he would look into the box of notebooks next to her and ask, “And now how much do you have to do?” It became their little joke.
And Justice Frankfurter also said something serious to Alma: “Bob told me what you are doing. I just can’t imagine. You are doing such a service for our country. The whole world should be thankful for you.”
Indeed it should be. And I think that it is. I know that I, like many of you, am thankful that I get to study and learn from Alma’s, and from every Nuremberger’s, work.
I was very lucky to know Alma Soller McLay in recent years, and to benefit from her great kindness.
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This post was emailed to the Jackson List, a private but entirely non-selective email list that reaches many thousands of subscribers around the world. I write to it periodically about Justice Robert H. Jackson, the Supreme Court, Nuremberg and related topics. The Jackson List archive site is http://thejacksonlist.com/. To subscribe, email me at barrettj@stjohns.edu. Thank you for your interest, and for spreading the word.