“acts of state,” and asked for acquittal on that ground—a strategy Dr. Servatius had already tried unsuccessfully at Nuremberg, where he defended Fritz Sauckel, Plenipotentiary for Labor Allocation in Goring’s Office of the Four-Year Plan, who had been responsible for the extermination of tens of thousands of Jewish workers in Poland and who was duly hanged in 1946. “Acts of state,” which German jurisprudence even more tellingly calls gerichisfreie or justizlose Hoheitsakte, rest on “an exercise of sovereign power” [E. C. S. Wade in the British Year Book for International Law, 1934] and hence
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