Whitney Harris

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Whitney R. Harris (born August 12, 1912 in Seattle , † April 21, 2010 in St. Louis ) was an American lawyer. He was one of the prosecutors in the Nuremberg trial of the major war criminals . After his time in Germany, he taught law at Southern Methodist University . He worked as a legal advisor and published on the Nuremberg Trials and the International Criminal Court .

life and work

Whitney Harris studied at the University of Washington in his hometown of Seattle, where he received his BA in 1933 . He graduated from Berkeley Law School in 1936 with a JD . In the same year he was transferred to a test (exam bar) to practice law in California approved. From 1936 to 1942 he practiced as a lawyer in Los Angeles .

In early 1942 - after the attack on Pearl Harbor - Harris joined the US Navy as an Ensign . where he served as an officer (line officer) until 1945 . Shortly before the end of the war, the Navy posted him on a special assignment at the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Harris now had the rank of 1st Lieutenant, his task in the OSS was the investigation of war crimes committed by the Axis powers in the European theater of war. The OSS under Bill Donovan , like the organization of Robert H. Jackson ( Office of the US Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality , OUSCCPAC from October 1946 Office of Chief of Counsel for War Crimes , OCCWC) was responsible for the investigation and prosecution deals with the crimes of the "major war criminals". This created an institutional rivalry between Donovan and Jackson in the preparation of the indictment for the Nuremberg Trial, which, as the trial approached, was largely in favor of Jackson, who was recruiting a large part of his staff from the OSS. In August 1945 Harris moved to the staff of Robert H. Jackson, where he worked until October 1, 1946 as a prosecutor. His area of ​​responsibility in the Nuremberg trial of major war criminals was the indictment against Ernst Kaltenbrunner , the Gestapo and the SD .

After completing his military service, Harris returned to the States and taught at the Law School of Southern Methodist University . After serving interim as Staff Director for the Second Hoover Commission in Washington DC, he was named the first Executive Director of the American Bar Association in 1954 . Harris then worked as a legal counsel for the Southwestern Bell telephone company and ran his own law firm in St. Louis . In 1998 he took part as a delegate at the conference of states in Rome, which adopted the Rome Statute , the basis for the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Harris was awarded the high American Legion of Merit for his work in Nuremberg . The Federal President (Germany) awarded him the Federal Cross of Merit 1st Class on October 30, 1984 . Harris died at the age of 97 at his home in Fontenac, a suburb of St. Louis. Cancer had been diagnosed for the first time three years earlier .

Publications

  • Tyranny on Trial: the Evidence at Nuremberg . Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas 1954. (Expanded new edition 1999, ISBN 0-87074-437-2 .)
    • Tyrants in court: the trial of the main German war criminals after the Second World War in Nuremberg, 1945–1946 . Translation by Christoph Safferling and Ulrike Seeberger. Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, Berlin: BWV, 2008, ISBN 978-3-8305-1593-7
  • The Tragedy of War . Robert H. Jackson Center, Jamestown (NY) 2004.
  • Murder by the Millions: Rudolf Höß at Auschwitz . Robert H. Jackson Center, Jamestown (NY) 2005.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e Speaker Bios: Whitney R. Harris . In: Sixty Years After the Nuremberg Trials: Crimes Against Humanity and Peace - A Conference Commemorating the Living Legacy of Robert H. Jackson . September 27-29, 2005, SUNY Fredonia.
  2. ↑ Michael Salter: Nazi war crimes, US intelligence and selective prosecution at Nuremberg . Routledge, London 2007, ISBN 1-904385-80-X , pp. 327-334.
  3. ^ Whitney Harris Named . In: "The Washington Post and Times Herald", July 6, 1954, p. 40.
  4. ^ Whitney Harris: Tyrants in Court . Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, Berlin 2008, p. XV.
  5. ↑ Office of the Federal President
  6. ^ Whitney Harris, Nuremberg Prosecutor, Dies at 97 . In: "New York Times" of April 22, 2010. (AP)
  7. ↑ a b Description of The Tragedy of War and Murder by the Millions ( Memento of May 12, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) at the Robert H. Jackson Center.
personal data
SURNAME Harris, Whitney
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Harris, Whitney R.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American lawyer
DATE OF BIRTH August 12, 1912
PLACE OF BIRTH Seattle , Washington (State)
DATE OF DEATH April 21, 2010
Place of death St. Louis , Missouri