Nuremberg Prosecutor Whitney Harris dies.

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Simon H
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Nuremberg Prosecutor Whitney Harris dies.

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This seemed a most appopriate place to post the obit to another leading figure in the original prosecution team who brought leading Nazi figures to trial.

By Tim O'Neil
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
04/22/2010

Whitney R. Harris, a prosecutor at the Nuremberg war-crime trials after World War II, an author and public speaker on human rights and a longtime advocate of charitable causes in St. Louis, died Wednesday night of complications from cancer. He was 97 and lived in Frontenac.

Mr. Harris died at home about 11:15 p.m. His family said he had been ill from cancer for about three years, and suffered a debilitating fall at home six months ago. He had been in and out of the hospital in recent months.


Mr. Harris was the last of the original team that prosecuted Nazis in 1945 and 1946 after the war. In 1945, he was lead prosecutor in the first of the trials, that of Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the senior surviving leader of the Nazi Security Police, including the Gestapo. Kaltenbrunner was convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including his roles in running Nazi concentration camps and the massacre of Jews in the Warsaw ghetto in 1943. He was executed by hanging.

Mr. Harris worked primarily in the investigations of Nazi secret services, and he interrogated Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Hoess, former commander of the concentration camp at Auschwitz, Poland. Mr. Harris’ affidavit of that three-day interview in April 1946 helped a Polish tribunal convict Hoess and order his execution.

Mr. Harris was born in Seattle, the son of a car dealer, and graduated from the University of Washington in Seattle and received his law degree from the University of California at Berkeley. He was a lawyer in the Navy at the rank of captain when he was selected to work with the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, who was chief prosecutor for the Allied military tribunal in Nuremberg.

The special international court tried 22 high-ranking Nazis, convicted 19 and sentenced 12 to death. For his work there, Mr. Harris was decorated with the Legion of Merit.

In 1963, Mr. Harris came to St. Louis to be general solicitor for Southwestern Bell Telephone Co.

In 1964, Mr. Harris married Jane Freund Foster of Ladue. Over the years, the Harrises served on the local boards of the Heart Association, Children’s Hospital, the Multiple Sclerosis Society and other charities. They also worked to raise money for those causes. In 1983, they received a joint award for outstanding volunteer fundraising from the National Society of Fundraising Executives. She died in 1999.

The following year, he married Anna Galakatos of Frontenac.

In 1980, Mr. Harris donated his papers from the Nuremberg trials to Washington University’s Olin Library, which keeps the papers in the Janes and Whitney Harris Reading Room.

Throughout his adult life, Mr. Harris spoke about the Nuremberg trials and his belief that the United Nations should create a permanent international war-crimes tribunal. In 2005, he spoke at a Holocaust Observance Day ceremony in Richmond Heights, where he read a poem that he had written only a few years before on what he called "the gravest inhumanities and killings that man has ever perpetrated on man."

The poem says in part: "A thousand years have passed. What was the number killed at Auschwitz? It matters not. ‘Twas but a trifle in the history of massacre of man by man."

In addition to his wife, Mr. Harris is survived by a son, Eugene Harris of Olivette; three stepsons, Charles Foster Jr. of Denver, Greg Galakatos of Town and Country and Christopher Galakatos of Des Peres; a stepdaughter, Theresa Galakatos of Richmond Heights; four grandchildren and nine step-grandchildren.

A memorial service will be May 23 in Graham Chapel at Washington University. His remains were cremated.
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Re: Nuremberg Prosecutor Whitney Harris dies.

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Thanks for the info Simon.
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