Before he served as a Superior Court judge in Washington state's King County for more than three decades, Wilkins was on the four-member panel that convicted several German industrialists who had helped finance and arm the Nazis, including Alfried Krupp.

Krupp, Hitler's main supplier of weapons, was convicted of plunder, but his sentence was cut short in 1951, along with those of many other Nazis, The New York Times said.

Wilkins reportedly once wrote: "Imagine my surprise one day in February 1951 to read in the newspaper that John J. McCloy, the high commissioner to Germany, had restored all the Krupp properties that had been ordered confiscated. At the time of his death in 1968, Krupp was reputed to be the richest man in Europe."