Whitney Harris, Nuremberg Prosecutor, Dies at 97
Whitney Harris, one of the last of the prosecutors who brought high-ranking Nazi war criminals to justice at the Nuremberg trials and who, a half-century later, was a significant voice in the creation of the International Criminal Court, died on April 21 at his home in St. Louis. He was 97.
The cause was cancer, his wife, Anna, said.
“Whitney was the last-surviving of the podium prosecutors, or in-court prosecutors, for the international tribunal,” John Q. Barrett, a law professor at St. John’s University and an expert on the Nuremberg trials, said Monday.
The International Military Tribunal, as the trials were officially known, was a joint effort by the Allied powers that formally opened in 1945, months after the end of World War II. Several prosecutors who worked behind the scenes survive, as do some who worked in the 12 subsequent war-crimes trials prosecuted solely by the United States.
Mr. Harris helped interrogate Rudolf Hoess, who had been the commandant of Auschwitz. “In those sessions, in a bloodless, unapologetic way, Hoess described the extermination system at Auschwitz,” Professor Barrett said, “and claimed that 2.5 million people had been exterminated.”
Those figures were exaggerated; the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that 1.1 million people were murdered at Auschwitz.
“There may have been a macabre twist to Hoess’s testimony,” Mr. Harris said in a speech at an international law conference in 2008. “Since he was to be labeled ‘the world’s supreme murderer’ in any case, he may have thought in his morbid mind to establish a record of mass killings never to be surpassed by any other man.”
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The cause was cancer, his wife, Anna, said.
“Whitney was the last-surviving of the podium prosecutors, or in-court prosecutors, for the international tribunal,” John Q. Barrett, a law professor at St. John’s University and an expert on the Nuremberg trials, said Monday.
The International Military Tribunal, as the trials were officially known, was a joint effort by the Allied powers that formally opened in 1945, months after the end of World War II. Several prosecutors who worked behind the scenes survive, as do some who worked in the 12 subsequent war-crimes trials prosecuted solely by the United States.
Mr. Harris helped interrogate Rudolf Hoess, who had been the commandant of Auschwitz. “In those sessions, in a bloodless, unapologetic way, Hoess described the extermination system at Auschwitz,” Professor Barrett said, “and claimed that 2.5 million people had been exterminated.”
Those figures were exaggerated; the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that 1.1 million people were murdered at Auschwitz.
“There may have been a macabre twist to Hoess’s testimony,” Mr. Harris said in a speech at an international law conference in 2008. “Since he was to be labeled ‘the world’s supreme murderer’ in any case, he may have thought in his morbid mind to establish a record of mass killings never to be surpassed by any other man.”