* APRIL 22, 2010, 10:22 P.M. ET
Whitney Harris : 1912-2010
Prosecutor of Nazis at Nuremberg Tribunals
By STEPHEN MILLER
Whitney Harris prosecuted Nazi war criminals at the postwar Nuremberg tribunals and represented the prosecution at the hanging of 10 convicted war criminals on Oct. 16, 1946.
Mr. Harris, who died Wednesday at age 97, was one of the last surviving members of the team of Nuremberg prosecutors. He later wrote a legal history of the tribunal, "Tyranny on Trial." The trials broke new legal ground by establishing categories of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Washington University in St. Louis
At Nuremberg, Germany, in 1945, Mr. Harris investigated crimes against humanity by high-ranking Nazis. He elicited from Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess an estimate that "at least 2.5 million" victims had been murdered in the concentration camp, mostly Jews. (Most historians accept a lower number.)
"Hoess was a very unimpressive individual, he looked like a clerk at a grocery store, he didn't look like a big Nazi or murderer or anything like that, but he was responsive to my questions," Mr. Harris said during a 1995 visit to the Nuremberg courtroom, on the 50th anniversary of the trials. Among other atrocities, Hoess under interrogation took credit for introducing Zyklon B, normally a pesticide, as the killing agent in gas chambers.
Described by author Joseph Persico as a "Navy officer and lawyer whose film-star handsomeness belied a serious character," Mr. Harris was raised in Seattle and said he attended law school because jobs were scarce during the Depression. After practicing law in Los Angeles for a few years, he joined the Navy as an officer during World War II.
After the German surrender, he was posted to Europe, where he became assistant to Robert Jackson, the chief U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg and an associate justice on the Supreme Court. It was Mr. Jackson who in his opening statement called the Nuremberg tribunal "one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason."
Working in the Palace of Justice at Nuremberg, Mr. Harris set to work collecting documentary evidence against Erst Kaltenbrunner, the head of Reich security, including the Gestapo secret police, at the end of the war.
"I did not have the slightest idea of the scale of the genocide," Mr. Harris told Der Spiegel magazine in 2005. "We didn't have much solid evidence when we started."
In the course of his investigation, Mr. Harris discovered and interrogated SS Gen. Otto Ohlendorf, head of Einsatzgruppen D, who admitted on the stand that his soldiers had conducted 90,000 executions of men, women and children, mostly Jews, in the Ukraine and Crimea.
Mr. Harris also assisted in Mr. Jackson's cross-examination of German air force chief Hermann Goering, who was sentenced to death but managed to take cyanide in his cell the night before the execution. Mr. Harris attended the executions of Mr. Kaltenbrunner and nine others as the representative of Mr. Jackson.
After the war, Mr. Harris taught law at Southern Methodist University and then became a corporate attorney for Southwestern Bell Telephone Co. He also had a private practice and was a member of the Supreme Court bar.
He was a founder of the Committee of Former Nuremberg Prosecutors for a Permanent International Criminal Court.
"These were evil men, and what they did was our task to expose, and we did get the evidence, and we were able to do so," Mr. Harris said during the 1995 Nuremberg trip.
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