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As US High Commissioner for Germany, McCloy reversed the largest share of Nuremberg's judgments — and the man who did it was the central node of the American establishment.

The clemencies and the career are documented fact. Only the motive is contested.

war criminals convicted across the twelve Nuremberg Military Tribunals — of whom McCloy granted clemency to a large majority in his single January 1951 Landsberg decision, the largest reversal of Nuremberg's judgments.

National WWII Museum; John J. McCloy record

In his January 31, 1951 Landsberg decision, McCloy granted clemency to a large majority of the Nuremberg war criminals — including men convicted in the Einsatzgruppen mass-shooting case.

He reduced prison terms and commuted death sentences. It is the single largest reversal of Nuremberg's judgments, and it was McCloy's alone to make.

He freed Alfried Krupp — convicted of plunder and of exploiting concentration-camp and forced labor — and, extraordinarily, restored his confiscated fortune.

In 1951 McCloy commuted Krupp's sentence to time served and returned his confiscated wealth. Krupp walked out of Landsberg one of the richest men in Europe. The man whose factories consumed slave laborers was made whole; the laborers were not.

McCloy was, by his biographer's title, 'Chairman of the American Establishment' — not rhetoric, a résumé.

Assistant Secretary of War; president of the World Bank; High Commissioner for Germany; chairman of Chase Manhattan; chairman of the Ford Foundation and of the Council on Foreign Relations; a member of the Warren Commission; adviser to presidents from Roosevelt to Reagan. Kai Bird's standard biography is literally titled 'The Chairman: John J. McCloy and the Making of the American Establishment.'

That the clemencies were driven by Cold War politics, not by justice.

By 1951 Washington wanted West Germany rearmed against the Soviets, and German public pressure for the Landsberg prisoners' release was intense; historians widely read the clemency as Cold War pragmatism buying German goodwill at the cost of Nuremberg's principle. Defenders counter that the reductions flowed from an advisory board's case-by-case legal review, not a political edict, and that some sentences (a handful of executions) were upheld. The effect is not disputed; the intent is argued.