The Robert H. Jackson Center is honored to welcome David Gill, Consul General of Germany in New York as our featured speaker for “Cold War Secrets Revealed” on Thursday, October 21, 2021.
This free seminar will explore the compelling stories that swirled behind-the-scenes during the tense Cold War period following World War II. The panelists will share fascinating details about the players and tensions that gripped nations in acts of espionage, international policy challenges, and crises of which the world was woefully unaware.
Renowned experts will include Professor Arthur Downey, author Nancy Thorndike Greenspan, and Eli Rosenbaum, Director of Human Rights Enforcement Strategy and Policy for the U.S. Department of Justice. Jackson Center co-founder Gregory L. Peterson, Esq. will moderate the program. The seminar will be hosted in person and accessible as a live webinar. Advance registration is required for both in-person and virtual attendees.
The seminar program:
- 8:00 am – Continental Breakfast
- 8:30 am – Welcome remarks
- 8:50 am – 9:40 am – Professor Arthur T. Downey, author of The Cold War: Law, Lawyers, Spies and Crises He is former Director of the Bureau of East-West Trade at the Commerce Department, a State Department lawyer, diplomat, and government official who served on the National Security Council staff under Henry Kissinger. He graduated from Saint Vincent in 1959 with a BA degree in history. He continued his education at the Villanova University Law School, where he earned a JD, before going on to receive an LL.M. degree from Georgetown University Law Center.
- 9:50 am – 10:40 am – Nancy Thorndike Greenspan, author of Atomic Spy: The Dark Lives of Klaus Fuchs, the gripping biography of a notorious Cold War villain–the German-born British scientist who handed the Soviets top-secret American plans for the plutonium bomb. Greenspan is an American author specializing in biographies. She is best known for writing the biography of notable physicist Max Born, The End of the Certain World: The Life and Science of Max Born: The Nobel Physicist Who Ignited the Quantum Revolution. Education: Mount Holyoke College, B.A.; University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill, M.A
- Break
- 11:00 am – 11:50 am – Eli Rosenbaum, Director of Human Rights Enforcement Strategy and Policy, U.S. Department of Justice. Rosenbaum will discuss his involvement in the decades long prosecution case against John Demjanjuk, who the U.S. deported to Germany in 2009. Two years later, a German court convicted Demjanjuk of acting as an accessory to murder as a former concentration camp guard. Interviews of Rosenbaum are in the recently released Netflix documentary film “The Devil Next Door.” He received his B.A. from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and his J.D. from
Harvard Law School. - 12:00 pm – 12:50 pm – David Gill, Consul General of Germany, will discuss “East German Resistance.” Gill was in East Germany when the Berlin Wall fell and collected numerous files kept by the Stasi, East Germany’s infamous State Security Service. Gill has served as German Consul General in New York since October 2017 serving. Previously, he was appointed on 19 March 2012 by President Joachim Gauck to Secretary of State and head of the Bundespräsidialamt, the administration of the President of Germany and stayed in office until February 2017. He is a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. Gill is the 1991 recipient of the Theodor Heuss Medal for the promotion of political education and culture in Germany and Europe. He received his Baccalaureate at the Protestant High School, Potsdam in 1988.
- Break
- 1:00 pm – Luncheon: My Personal Journey Q& A with Consul General Gill
- 2:00 pm – End