Donihi Recalls Role In Prosecuting Japanese
By STEVEN M. SWEENEY
CHAUTAUQUA — In life’s grand scheme some things just happen. Such was the case for Robert Donihi. He was the lead prosecutor for the 12-nation tribunals which indicted and convicted Japanese leaders at World War II’s end.
He told an audience of some 20 Bowling Green University students and Chautauquans at the Institution’s Hultquist Center that he happened upon the Japanese and Nazi trials almost by accident. He became fascinated with Japanese aggression — why the nation had turned against the United States and what caused war to erupt when the two had been friendly decades earlier.
‘‘When I went to Japan, the Japanese were a mystery to us. If they were in the neighborhood, they kept to themselves, running a laundry,’’ Donihi said. ‘‘We couldn’t comprehend them.’’
Donihi doesn’t pretend to be an expert in the Japanese psyche, but his interest at the time made him among the most knowledgeable in the U.S. Army to prosecute. In it, he became the lead trial attorney prosecuting Japanese officials in Tokyo, including the former prime minister, General Tojo.
He broke away from his role in the trials for months to tend to his wife in the States who had been badly burned and returned only because he needed money.
‘‘And I liked the adventure of being close to the action. I was 29 when I started in Tokyo and 31 when I arrived in Germany,’’ Donihi said.
His youth and family demands allowed him to continue on with trial work in Germany when the Japanese trials were mostly finished. He first wanted to work for Tilford Taylor, who had taken over from Robert H. Jackson in prosecuting Nazis at Nuremberg trials. Taylor refused to hire him, so Donihi went to prosecuting other alleged criminals throughout the occupied territories. This he did well, but he had mixed feelings.
‘‘It made me sick for a good old fashion murder trial back home,’’ Donihi said, noting too many strange things were involved in the war crimes trials. ‘‘Killing someone for his tattoo, the torture. I don’t know who ever managed to get a hold of a country with these ideals. Someone did.’’
In the end, one of his last trials in Germany he served as defense counsel for Hartmann Lauterbacher, a Nazi territorial governor and last leader of the Hitler Youth. Donihi got him an acquittal from the court.
‘‘I knew if I had prosecuted him, he would have hanged,’’ Donihi said. The small audience gathered at Chautauqua’s Hultquist Center Sunday afternoon chuckled because they thought the prosecutor was making a joke.
‘‘There’s nothing funny about hanging someone. The reason I mention it is because there’s something wrong with a system that is so imbalanced,’’ Donihi said. ‘‘Both sides should be afforded quality representation.’’
Bowling Green students and exchange students from Germany sat in for much of Donihi’s talk and were impressed with the ‘‘American’’ version of the trials at World War II’s end.
‘‘I think I liked his honesty, ‘I needed the money to take care of his wife,’ ’’ said Philina Wittke, of Kiel, Germany. ‘‘This is very human. He does not have to defend his role, defending National Socialists. In Germany, a lawyer would have said nothing. Society would not have allowed it.’’
In Germany, to this day, the citizens look at the Nuremberg trials differently — as though Americans were the great problems solvers — whose acts took away the Nazis altogether.
‘‘Yet none of the teachers, or scientists were ever Nazis — the families simply don’t speak of it,’’ Miss Wittke said.