Michael Angelo Musmanno (April 7, 1897 – October 12, 1968) was an American jurist, politician, and naval officer. Coming from an immigrant family, he started to work as a coal loader at the age of 14. After serving in the United States Army in World War I, he obtained a law degree from Georgetown University. In the 1920s, he defended Sacco and Vanzetti as an appellate attorney. For nearly two decades from the early 1930s, he served as a judge in courts of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. Entering the U.S. Navy during World War II, he served in the military justice system.
Following the war, in 1946, Musmanno served as military governor of an occupied district in Italy. Beginning in 1947, he served as a presiding judge for the Einsatzgruppen trial in U.S. military court at Nuremberg. In 1948, he conducted interviews with several people who had worked closely with Adolf Hitler. In 1950, he published a book based on his research, in which he argued that Hitler had indeed committed suicide in Berlin in 1945.
In 1951, Musmanno was elected as a justice of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, where he served until his death in 1968. He set a record for the number of dissenting opinions filed. In addition to his long judicial career and postwar contributions in Europe, he wrote 16 books and many articles related to his court cases and professional career. In his writing he expressed sympathy for working men and deep interest in Italian Americans, himself having Italian ancestry.
Musmanno was anti-Communist and supported civil rights. In 1966, in response to new evidence of the Norse colonization of North America (), he published a book in which he argued that Christopher Columbus was the first European to discover the Americas. He died on Columbus Day 1968.
Early life and education Musmanno was born in Stowe Township, in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, an industrial neighborhood a few miles west of Pittsburgh, into an ethnic Italian family originally from Noepoli, Basilicata. He worked with his father in the coal mines, began law school at Georgetown University in 1915, leaving to serve as an infantryman in World War Ifn 3 supra before returning to earn an LL.B. degree in 1918 at Georgetown. Afterwards, he earned B.A. and M.A. degrees at George Washington University, and two master of law degrees at the National University School of Law (later merged with George Washington University Law School). He became a labor lawyer and always kept a sympathy for the working man.
Career
Politics and judiciary After entering law practice in 1923 as a lawyer in his native Stowe Township, Musmanno got also involved in politics. In 1926, he ran for election to the Pennsylvania House of Representatives on the Republican ticket, but lost. As he was genuinely interested in the plight of the working man, and was sympathetic to the Italian Americans and other ethnic minorities who worked in great numbers in Pennsylvania industries, Musmanno volunteered to serve as an appellate attorney during the Sacco–Vanzetti case and moved to Boston. The men had been convicted and sentenced to death in 1921, in an atmosphere of anti-immigrant feeling. The appeals court upheld the lower court's decision and Sacco and Vanzetti were executed in 1927. Haunted by the conduct of the trial, Musmanno wrote After Twelve Years (1939),Michael Musmanno. After Twelve Years. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1939. a book about the case, as well as two articles in 1963, published in The New Republic and the Kansas Law Review.
After returning, Musmanno was elected in 1928 as a Republican state legislator for Pennsylvania serving in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives.Harold Cox-Wilkes University He was reelected in 1930–
When miner John Barkoski was beaten to death in Imperial, Pennsylvania, in 1929 by the Coal and Iron Police during a strike, Musmanno was outraged and, as a state legislator, introduced a bill to banish this private police force. The bill was vetoed by a Republican Pennsylvania governor, which led to Musmanno's resignation.LaGumina, Salvatore J. The Italian American Experience: An Encyclopedia. New York: Garland Pub, 2000. He published a short story about the case, entitled "Jan Volkanik." This was adapted in part as the basis of the film Black Fury (1935), starring Paul Muni as a coal miner, and with a screenplay written by Abem Finkel and Carl Erickson. It was directed by Michael Curtiz.
In 1931, Musmanno became the youngest judge in the county court of Allegheny County; he was nominated by both Democrats and Republicans and endorsed by the labor organizations. He switched to the Democratic Party in 1932 while canvassing for Franklin D. Roosevelt as a president. In 1933, he served as a judge of the Court of Common Pleas of Allegheny County. In 1935, he was a Democratic candidate for the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania. He was handedly beaten by interim appointee H. Edgar Barnes– 215,045 votes to 93,123.
In 1943 he took a leave from his judicial duties to take part in World War II. After returning to Pittsburgh in 1948, he was appointed as a judge in the common pleas court, where he served until 1951.
World War II In 1943, during World War II, Musmanno entered the United States Navy as a line officer assigned as a military attorney, since the navy had not yet formed its own Judge Advocate General's Corps (an action not taken until 1967). In this capacity, he eventually rose to the rank of rear admiral. He served as Allied Military Governor of the Sorrentine Peninsula in Italy.LaGumina, Salvatore J. The Humble and the Heroic: Wartime Italian Americans. Youngstown, NY: Cambria Press, 2006, p. 227.
In 1946, he was appointed head of the three-person Board of Soviet Repatriation of Displaced Persons in Austria. He opposed the forcible repatriation to the Soviet Union of Cossacks and refugees, many of whom did not want to be repatriated. He was successful in aiding some of these people. Later it was learned that Stalin's government persecuted many of these returnees, condemning many to internal exile or the harsh labor camps of the gulag in Siberia, where they died.
Beginning in 1947, Musmanno was presiding judge at the Einsatzgruppen trial of the U.S. Nuremberg Military Tribunal, held in Nuremberg for men charged with killing more than a million people behind the front lines, including Jews, Poles, and minorities.See: Earl, Hilary C. The Nuremberg SS–Einsatzgruppen Trial, 1945–1958: Atrocity, Law, and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. He also served as a member of the court during the military trials of Milch and Pohl. In 1961, Musmanno testified as a prosecution witness in Jerusalem in the Israeli trial of Adolf Eichmann.
In 1948, Musmanno conducted interviews with several people who had worked closely with Adolf Hitler in the last days of World War II, in an attempt to disprove claims of Hitler's escape despite his presumed suicide at the end of the Battle of Berlin. These interviews, conducted with the help of a simultaneous interpreter named Elisabeth Billig, served as the basis of a 1948 article Musmanno wrote for The Pittsburgh Press, as well as his 1950 book, Ten Days to Die. In both, he cites as evidence that Hitler could not have survived: the death of his "right-hand man" Joseph Goebbels, the testimony of several eyewitnesses who saw Hitler dead (allegedly by a gunshot through the mouth, but accounts later changed) and Nazis who claimed Hitler used no doubles during his lifetime (despite an apparent Hitler body double being found near the Führerbunker), as well as a "jawbone" identified by Hitler's dental assistants (which was revealed in a 1968 Soviet book to have been sundered around the alveolar process). Musmanno's argument that Hitler's body was never found because it was burnt to near-ashes has been echoed by mainstream historians such as Anton Joachimsthaler and Ian Kershaw. Contrarily, British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who also investigated Hitler's death, argued (in agreement with later scientific analyses)Multiple sources:
that bones survive even indoor cremations. Trevor-Roper stated in 1966 that he was "disinclined to believe anything that is stated by that flatulent ass Musmanno". In his 2019 book, British historian Luke Daly-Groves defends Trevor-Roper's criticism as being somewhat just, while pointing out that evidence was limited in 1950 and ultimately praising Musmanno's refutations of Hitler's purported survival. Musmanno's book also contains some possible propaganda, such as claiming without sources that Hitler's chef Constanze Manziarly (who disappeared during the Fall of Berlin) was dragged into a house to be raped by a 2-meter-tall Russian soldier as a group of smiling Asians looked on.
Additionally, Musmanno wrote a screenplay about Hitler's fate, which he hoped Alfred Hitchcock would direct. In 1980, Musmanno's relatives donated his archives to Duquesne University; in 2007, the school digitized the footage of the interviews for a 2010 German TV documentary, with an American version airing in 2015.
Post-war career Musmanno tried to re-enter politics, running unsuccessfully for Lieutenant Governor in 1950. He resumed his judicial career.
A strong anti-Communist in the postwar years, Musmanno was an unofficial spokesman for the local Americans Battling Communism. He was noted for testifying for the prosecution in the 1950 anti-Communist sedition case against Steve Nelson, who was leading a regional branch of the American Communist Party.Korea gunfire started raid on reds here, Musmanno tells court, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, February 17, 1951 The Communists had sold political tracts (available at any library) for $5.75 to Musmanno, who declared their store "the equivalent of an advance post of the Red Army". Nelson initially was sentenced to 20-years in prison, $10,000 in fines and $13,000 in prosecution costs. The Supreme Court of the United States ultimately threw out the case and the Pennsylvania and other state anti-sedition laws, saying federal law superseded the state law under which Nelson was prosecuted.Pennsylvania v. Nelson, 350 U.S. 497 (1956).Chris Potter, You Had to Ask: "I recently read an obituary of John McTernan...", Pittsburgh City Paper, 18 August 2005, 12 September 2013
Perhaps the most blatant example of Musmanno's misconduct came when he launched into a tirade against an attorney appearing before him in a civil case. Musmanno demanded that the attorney state whether he was a communist, and when the attorney declined to answer, Musmanno held him in contempt and forbade the attorney from practicing in his court. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court reversed Musmanno's order and described Musmanno's methods as "detestable." Schlesinger Petition, 367 Pa 476, 483 (Pa. 1951).
Musmanno gained name recognition from his part in the Nelson trial. He was elected in 1951 as justice to the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania,Philip Jenkins. The Cold War at Home: The Red Scare in Pennsylvania, 1945–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 1999. Quote: "Party leaders were facing long prison terms ... Musmanno was [elected to] the state supreme court." serving from 1952 to his death in 1968. During his long career on the bench, he "became known as an advocate for the underdog."