Whitney Harris

Two days into the prosecution case at the International Military Tribunal, on 22 November 1945, an American naval lieutenant named Whitney Harris took the affidavit of a former concentration camp commandant in a small interview room of the Nuremberg prison. The commandant was Rudolf Höss. He had run Auschwitz from May 1940 to November 1943 and had returned in May 1944 to oversee the killing of Hungarian Jewry. He had been captured by a British counter-intelligence unit in March 1946 disguised as a farm worker named Franz Lang, brought to Nuremberg, interrogated by British and American teams, and was now sitting at a small table in front of an American officer thirty-three years old who had been asked by Robert Jackson to take down what Höss had to say. Harris asked his questions through a German-language interpreter. Höss answered without prompting. The affidavit Harris obtained that morning, signed by Höss the same day and entered into evidence as Document PS-3868, became the single most damaging piece of evidence at the trial.

Harris had been on the prosecution staff since the summer of 1945. He had served in the United States Navy as a legal officer in the war and had been recruited to Nuremberg by Jackson on the recommendation of senior American counsel. He spent the first weeks of his Nuremberg work as one of the team that opened the captured German document caches. He was twenty-eight when he took the Höss affidavit. He was thirty when the trial closed. He spent the rest of his life writing about it.

The Höss affidavit

The affidavit Harris obtained ran to ten paragraphs in its final form. The most important paragraph, the second, has been quoted in every subsequent Holocaust history:

I commanded Auschwitz until 1 December 1943, and estimate that at least 2,500,000 victims were executed and exterminated there by gassing and burning, and at least another half million succumbed to starvation and disease, making a total dead of about 3,000,000. This figure represents about 70 per cent or 80 per cent of all persons sent to Auschwitz as prisoners, the remainder having been selected and used for slave labour in the concentration camp industries. Included among the executed and burned were approximately 20,000 Russian prisoners of war, who were brought to the camp from the Wehrmacht. Other inmates of the camp included approximately 100,000 German Jews, and great numbers of citizens, mostly Jewish, from Holland, France, Belgium, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Greece, or other countries. We executed about 400,000 Hungarian Jews alone at Auschwitz in the summer of 1944.

The figure of 2.5 million was, as Harris and Jackson both knew at the time, almost certainly an over-estimate. Höss appeared to be inflating the number for reasons of pride; he had run the most efficient killing operation in human history and wanted the record to show it. The figure has been brought down by subsequent historians to approximately 1.1 million dead at Auschwitz under all administrations. The over-estimate did not change the legal effect of the affidavit. It remained the first detailed admission, by a senior camp commandant in his own hand, of the scale, methods and victim categories of the killing operation.

Harris took a second affidavit from Höss on 5 April 1946, in preparation for Höss’s appearance as a defence witness in the case against Ernst Kaltenbrunner. The second affidavit was longer and more detailed. It described the technical operation of the gas chambers, the rate of killing, the design choices that distinguished Auschwitz from Treblinka, the disposal of bodies, the operation of the Sonderkommando. Harris produced the document for the bench when Höss took the stand on 15 April 1946. Höss confirmed it. The affidavit and the supporting testimony established, in the most direct possible form, the operational reality of the killing centres. It is the single most important documentary contribution Harris made to the trial.

The Kaltenbrunner case

Harris was the prosecution counsel on the case against Kaltenbrunner, the head of the Reich Security Main Office and Heydrich’s successor as chief of the SS security apparatus. Kaltenbrunner had been the senior surviving figure of the SS under Himmler. His office had run the Gestapo, the SD and the Einsatzgruppen; the Wannsee Conference had been chaired by his predecessor Heydrich and had reported to his desk. Harris built the case on the documents the office had generated and on the testimony of Höss, Otto Ohlendorf and other senior SS officers who had agreed to testify.

The cross-examination of Kaltenbrunner, conducted by Harris on 11 and 12 April 1946, had a particular technical difficulty. Kaltenbrunner had taken the position throughout pre-trial interrogation that he had not held the title of head of the Reich Security Main Office in any meaningful operational sense, that the killing operations had been Himmler’s direct responsibility through the Office of Adolf Eichmann, and that he himself had been a remote signatory of documents he had not read. Harris had to demonstrate, document by document, that Kaltenbrunner had read what he had signed and had operated within a chain of command that knew what was happening. He produced the Wannsee Protocol; Kaltenbrunner’s office had received and circulated it. He produced personnel files of Einsatzgruppen officers; Kaltenbrunner had signed off on their appointments and promotions. He produced inspection reports of the camps; Kaltenbrunner had read them, initialled them and filed them. The case was made over two days. Kaltenbrunner was sentenced to death and hanged on 16 October 1946.

The book

Harris stayed in Nuremberg until the trial closed in October 1946 and continued to work on the supporting documentation through the early Subsequent Proceedings. He returned to the United States in 1947 and over the following five years drafted what became the first comprehensive history of the IMT, Tyranny on Trial: The Evidence at Nuremberg, published by the Southern Methodist University Press in 1954. The book was based on his own working files, including notes he had taken during the proceedings, and his access to the prosecution document collections. It ran to over 600 pages. It is, alongside Telford Taylor’s later The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials, the principal first-hand history of the IMT in print. It has been continuously reprinted and is on every major reading list in international criminal law.

The book opens with a passage that has become Harris’s working motto:

Civilisation cannot survive a second time the impact of forces such as those that produced Auschwitz and Treblinka. The trial at Nuremberg was the necessary first response. It is on the foundation of that response that everything since has been built.

Afterwards

Harris practised law in St Louis, Missouri, for the next four decades. He served on the United States War Crimes Commission, on the United States delegations to several United Nations human rights conferences, and as a long-standing member of the executive committee of the American Bar Association’s International Law Section. He returned to academic life in his eighties as a Distinguished Professor of Law at Washington University in St Louis. He gave evidence at the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial in 1964 and at several subsequent war crimes proceedings. He delivered an address at the United Nations General Assembly in 2005 on the sixtieth anniversary of the IMT.

He died in St Louis in April 2010 at the age of ninety-seven. He was the second-to-last surviving prosecutor of the IMT; only Benjamin Ferencz outlived him, by thirteen years. The Höss affidavit Harris had taken on 22 November 1945 has, by some measures, been the single most cited document in Holocaust historiography. It is preserved in the original at the Nuremberg State Archives. A facsimile is on display at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. The young naval lieutenant who took it had not previously held a pen of historical importance. He held one for an hour on a November morning in 1945, and the text he obtained has been part of the public record of what was done at Auschwitz ever since.

See also

Sources

  • Whitney R. Harris, Tyranny on Trial: The Evidence at Nuremberg, Southern Methodist University Press, 1954, revised edition 1995
  • Affidavit of Rudolf Höss, 22 November 1945, Nuremberg Document PS-3868
  • International Military Tribunal, Trial of the Major War Criminals, vol XI (Höss testimony 15 April 1946), Nuremberg, 1947
  • Rudolf Höss, Commandant of Auschwitz: The Autobiography of Rudolf Hoess, ed Steven Paskuly, Da Capo, 1996
  • Telford Taylor, The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials, Knopf, 1992
  • Robert E. Conot, Justice at Nuremberg, Harper and Row, 1983