Whitney R. Harris, prosecuted Nazis

ST. LOUIS - Whitney R. Harris, the last of the original prosecutors of Nazi crimes after World War II, died yesterday of complications of cancer at his home in Frontenac, Mo. He was 97.

Harris was part of the team, led by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, that began the prosecution of war criminals in Nuremberg, Germany, shortly after the war's end. In 1945, Harris led the team's first case, that of Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the highest-ranking leader of the Nazi Security Police to face trial.

In concentrating on the secret services, or SS, Harris interrogated Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Hoess, former commander of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

"Mr. Hoess told me, as unemotionally as if he were talking at the breakfast table, that 2.5 million people were killed at Auschwitz," Harris said in Nuremberg in 1996, during the 50th anniversary commemoration of the trials.

Harris moved to St. Louis in 1963 as general solicitor of the former Southwestern Bell Telephone Co.

Harris' family said he had been ill from cancer for three years.

In an interview in April 2008, Harris spoke of the institutional evil of the Nazi regime in Germany - and its ageless warning to all people.

"Society lays the groundwork, and we develop in that society," he said. "We become part of that society, we're captivated by it and we might do evil, too. It makes you wonder about where is the future of mankind - is evil going to triumph ultimately, or is good going to triumph?

"You have to find the good instincts that are in all of us."

Harris won a conviction of Kaltenbrunner for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including his roles in running the Gestapo, the Nazi concentration camps and the massacre of Jews in the Warsaw ghetto in 1943. Kaltenbrunner was executed by hanging. Harris' three-day interview of Hoess in April 1946 helped a Polish tribunal convict him and order his execution. Harris said he and other lawyers and investigators gathered an abundance of evidence from German files.

"We were really surprised at the documentation we were able to come up with," he said. "I went through Gestapo offices and dug through rubbish and found documents ordering the extermination of Jews. We scurried all over Europe getting documentary evidence."

Harris was born in Seattle, the son of a car dealer, and graduated from the University of Washington. He received his law degree from the University of California, Berkeley. He was a lawyer in the Navy at the rank of captain when he was selected to work with Jackson.

About 200 lawyers took part in the trials. Benjamin Ferencz of New York, who joined the prosecution team in 1946, is its last surviving member.

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