Bernard D. Meltzer

Bernard D. Meltzer, 92, the labor law scholar who helped draft the charter of the United Nations and served as a prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crime trials after World War II, died Thursday at his Chicago home. The cause of death was not announced.

Dr. Meltzer was the Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago School of Law, where he taught from 1946 until 1985.

He was born in Philadelphia to Russian immigrant parents and spent four semesters at Temple University before transferring to the University of Chicago in 1934. He earned his undergraduate and law degrees there and later did postgraduate work at Harvard Law School.

Except for one year with a Chicago law firm, Dr. Meltzer spent 1938 to 1943 working for various federal agencies, including the Securities and Exchange Commission, the National Defense Advisory Commission, and the State Department.

In 1943, he was commissioned as a Navy officer and assigned to the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA. After work on the U.N. charter at the end of World War II, he joined the U.S. prosecution team at Nuremberg in 1946 and coordinated a specialized team of lawyers who focused on the economic crimes of Germany's Nazi regime.

Dr. Meltzer conducted the pretrial interrogation of Adolf Hitler's second-in-command, Luftwaffe Commander Hermann Goering, and presented the trial case against former German Economics Minister Walther Funk, who was sentenced to life in prison.

After Nuremberg, Dr. Meltzer joined the University of Chicago Law School, where he developed the nation's first law course on international organizations, the university said. He later specialized in labor law and retired in 1985. - AP