Nuremberg prosecutor speaks

Whitney Harris, who served as a prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, spoke to an audience of more than 500 people Sunday evening at Temple Bat Yahm in Newport Beach.

In a voice resonant with emotion, Harris, 94, recalled his experiences as a young naval officer and attorney who was asked by Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, the chief prosecutor, to be his principal assistant during the trials.

As audience members absorbed the details of the horrors that Harris was recounting, there was absolute silence and an air of reverence in the room. When he was finished, he was greeted with a standing ovation.

The trials began in November 1945, and Harris, at age 33, made his first appearance in the courtroom at Nuremberg in January 1946.

He was assigned to the case of Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who had been in charge of tens of thousands of Gestapo agents, police and security forces. Kaltenbrunner was under direct authority of Heinrich Himmler, who was head of the SS ? a personal bodyguard formed by Adolf Hitler for himself. .

The collection of evidence had already been completed when Harris discovered that Rudolf Hess, former commander at Auschwitz, had been captured by the British. Harris requested that Hess be handed over to the Nuremberg court, and he was given the responsibility of questioning him for a period of three days.

The turning point in the trials came with Hess’ admission under interrogation that in 1941 a high-ranking Nazi official had ordered him to convert Auschwitz into a mass extermination camp. Hess testified that he had ordered that gas chambers and crematoriums be constructed at Birkenau. This was among the first testimonies confirming the existence of the Holocaust.

Hess provided detailed information about Nazi atrocities and stated that in his estimation 2.5 million people, including Jews, gypsies and prisoners of war, had been killed.

In his talk at Temple Bat Yahm, Harris said it was his job to ask the questions and record the facts, and not to become caught up in the emotion of what he was hearing.

All eyes in the temple audience were on Harris as he read testimony from the trials in which Hess described in detail the process by which Jews were transported to the camps and sent to their death.

As he sat across the defendants’ table from Hess, listening to him speak in a voice without emotion, Harris said he was focused on only one thing ? securing the punishment of those responsible.

On Oct. 16, 1946, Harris was present when the defendants sentenced to death were hanged. Their bodies were then sent to Dachau to be incinerated in the same ovens that had been used in the extermination of millions of Jews.

After the trials, Harris stayed on in Germany to serve as chief of legal advice during the blockade of Berlin. Upon completion of his military service, he joined the faculty of the Southern Methodist University Law School.

In addition to teaching law, he has served as director of the Hoover Commission’s Legal Services Task Force; first executive director of the American Bar Assn.; and solicitor general of Southwestern Bell in St. Louis, where he practiced law until his retirement.

In 1998, Harris was a delegate to the United Nations-sponsored conference in Rome that resulted in the treaty that will create the International Criminal Court.

He is the author of several books, including “Tyranny on Trial, the Evidence at Nuremberg.” In December 2001 Washington University named its Institute for Global Legal Studies in his honor.