Whiney Harris was born in August 1912 in Seattle, Washington. He attended the University of Washington and the University of California at Berkley Law School, after which he joined a small law practice in Los Angeles, California. The senior partner of the firm called and told him of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor [Annotator's Note: Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on 7 December 1941], and Harris knew that the United States was going to be in the war. Harris immediately sought a place where he could be of service. He joined the Navy as an ensign and worked on the Pacific Coast all during the war. When the war ended, Harris was transferred to the OSS [Annotator's Note: Office of Strategic Services]. He went to Washington for "cloak and dagger training," and was then assigned to the investigation of war crimes in the European Theater. He set up offices in London, England near British intelligence headquarters, reasoning that he would have ready access to documents needed by OSS. Shortly thereafter, President Truman [Annotator's Note: Harry S. Truman, 33rd President of the United States] appointed Associate Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson as Chief of Counsel for United States in the forthcoming trial of German war criminals, and from time to time Harris provided copies of documents to the prosecution team. In September 1945, Harris was invited to join the prosecution's staff. Harris said he was anxious to do so; the trial work would be more exciting than the investigative work he was doing. Harris transferred with the first group of American prosecutors to Nuremberg, which was practically demolished by the American bombings, and at the time was populated mostly by old ladies picking up bricks and taking them away in push carts. There was, however, the large Palace of Justice somewhat intact, and although the Russians wanted to put the court in Berlin, Jackson persuaded them to use the Nuremberg facility because the prisoners could be held in its basement jail. Two new courtrooms were constructed for the proceedings. Since Harris had worked for the OSS in German intelligence, the case assigned to him was against Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of RSHA [Annotator's Note: Reichssicherheitshauptamt: Reich Security Main Office], including the Gestapo [Annotator's Note: German Geheime Staatspolizei or Secret State Police; abbreviated Gestapo], and the SD [Annotator's Note: German Sicherheitsdienst des Reichsführers-SS or Security Service of the Reichsführer-SS; abbreviated SD]. The case emerged at the heart the concept now known as the Holocaust, and fell into Harris' hands with some dramatic effect.

A collective document center was established by Whiney Harris and his colleagues in the Nuremberg Palace of Justice. During his research, Harris discovered a letter from a German office in the field to the officials in Berlin [Annotator's Note: Berlin, Germany] wherein a complaint was filed about the malfunctioning of gas wagons, and the need for correction in their production. Meanwhile, the British captured Otto Ohlendorf, and Harris interviewed him in hopes of getting information from him on the Reich Security Main Office. Ohlendorf admitted to heading, for a year, Einsatzgruppen [Annotator's Note: paramilitary death suads] units sent out behind the German advancing armies to round up and destroy Jews and other undesirables. Asked how many people his group killed in that year, Ohlendorf replied 90,000. It was the first confession of the murder of civilians, and led to the breakdown of the German defense. Ohlendorf's cross examination by the Soviet judge constituted the most dramatic moment of the entire trial, because it gave indisputable proof of the actuality of the Holocaust. Asked if the murders included Jewish children, Ohlendorf responded, "Yes, our orders were to kill everyone." It had all spilled out of the documentation Harris had unearthed, facts completely unknown to him beforehand. Harris went on to all kinds of other assignments, personally assisting Justice Jackson [Annotator's Note: Robert H. Jackson] in some instances.

In all of the investigations, Whitney Harris said, survivors of the concentration camp at Auschwitz came forward with harrowing tales of their experiences, and Harris was anxious to find its commandant, Rudolf Hoess. The British discovered him hiding out as a farmer, and Harris asked that he be sent to Nuremberg to give a statement. Harris spent three days talking to Hoess through an interpreter, and in the course of the discussion, Hoess described the complete story of Auschwitz and what happened there. Hoess was assigned to develop a new camp in Poland and establish facilities to eliminate prisoners sent there by Adolph Eichmann. Hoess said it was his "war duty" to execute them, and confessed to the murder of 2.5 million men, women and children. Hoess was sent back to Poland to be tried in Warsaw, where he complained that the number he had given in Nuremberg had been exaggerated. Harris said he could testify that Hoess made that admission while sitting across the table from him. Heoss was convicted and hung on the gallows at Auschwitz. That evidence constituted another highly dramatic event in the war crimes trials. According to Harris, it led to the final judgment [Annotator's Note: on 1 October 1946], and Harris was among the prosecutors present when the tribunal handed down its decision and sentences.

After the Nuremberg trials, Whitney Harris went to Berlin as head of the legal advice branch on General Clay's [Annotator's Note: US Army General Lucius D. Clay, military governor of occupied Germany after World War 2] staff. He worked there until the Berlin blockade was laid down in 1948, then returned to the United States. Revisiting recollections of his early work with the Navy, Harris said he was stationed at the Naval operating base at Long Beach, California, and did training duty on the USS Nevada (BB-36), but never saw action in the Pacific. He was transferred to the OSS [Annotator’s Note: Office of Strategic Services, pre-runner of the Central Intelligence Agency or CIA] within two years of his induction. In London, England, he spent a good part of his time working with British intelligence agents sifting through documents. He was the only American in this position at the time, and reported to OSS in Washington D.C. In all, Harris was in the Navy for 20 years. He was on active duty during the war, and afterward in the naval reserves. He received the Legion on Merit award for his work in Nuremberg.

Asked if any of the Nuremberg defendants showed any remorse, Whitney Harris said that in his opinion, the only one who showed any real reflection on his role was Albert Spear. All the others defended their actions as having carried out the orders of the state, and denied any criminality. Harris said that at the end of the war, Speer had opposed Hitler's [Annotator's Note: German dictator Adolf Hitler] "scorched earth" policy as the German Army withdrew. Speer showed some concern, and tried to analyze how he got caught up in what he eventually recognized was a criminal conspiracy. Defendants at the Nuremberg trials were allowed to choose their defense counsels, including members of the Nazi Party. Harris felt the defense counselors, for the most part, behaved properly in the court setting, and offered their clients the best defense they could. Harris' opposing counsel in the trial of Ernst Kaltenbrunner was Kurt Kaufman, and their relationship was good. Harris noted "a funny thing happened" in his dealings with Kaufman. Harris had already rested his case against Kaltenbrunner when he conducted the interrogation of Hoess. Harris reduced Hoess' statement to a signed affidavit and immediately turned it over to Kaltenbrunner's defense counsel, so Kaufmann knew that as head of RHSA [Annotator's Note: Reichssicherheitshauptamt or Reich Security Main Office] Kaltenbrunner was ultimately responsible for the deaths at Auschwitz. In order to get Hoess' testimony into the record, it would have been necessary for Harris to file a motion to reopen his arguments, and Harris had no reason to believe the court would entertain the request and delay the trial. Kaufman unexpectedly made the decision to introduce that confession himself, thereby admitting to the true facts of the case, and presumably offer an explanation. Harris said it was a truly amazing event of the trial.

There had been no specific time frame to complete the Nuremberg trail, but Whitney Harris said everyone tried to expedite the proceedings. He noted that the Chief of Counsel, Associate Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, was away from the Supreme Court for over a year, and it might have cost him the Chief Justiceship. During the trials, Harris worked alone with a German secretary, but the entire American prosecution team included about 20 lawyers, and was the largest contingent among the French, British and Soviet prosecutors. After the trial ended, Harris went on to work in occupied Berlin; when the time came for the execution of the 12 convicted defendants, Justice Jackson asked Harris serve as his representative. However, since none of the other prosecutors asked to be represented at the executions, the officials conducting the proceedings decided Harris should not be allowed into the execution chamber. He waited without, and noted that the only dramatic moment of the event was when word came that Hermann Goering had committed suicide. The other executions proceeded as scheduled. On the following morning their bodies were put into boxes and trucked to Dachau, where they were burned in the gas chambers constructed for those they victimized. The ashes were cast into the Isar River that flows into the Danube, and ultimately into the sea. Harris said the Nuremberg trials addressed the most massive case of crimes against humanity in the world. Since then, there has been no effort to deny the facts of Hitler's [Annotator's Note: German dictator Adolf Hitler] crimes or of German aggression. Harris feels their great contribution is that they produced the evidence, and established the facts, and they have already stood the test of critical history. Harris thinks they can never be denied, due to this trial.

Asked to comment on other post World War 2 trails and tribunals, Whitney Harris brought up the war crimes trial held in Tokyo [Annotator's Note: the International Military Tribunal for the Far East held in Tokyo, Japan]. Although it didn't receive the publicity of the Nuremberg Trials, Harris said it was a significant proceeding in his view, and followed the legal principles initiated at Nuremberg. He noted that after World War 2 there were other, independent trials by countries, and a large number of military tribunals. Harris contended that Nuremberg established the principle that at the end of any war, those responsible for crimes against humanity should be brought to trial and punished. Asked about the Russians' demeanor at Nuremberg, Harris said they were never in favor of anything less than conviction. Chief Counsel Robert Jackson had some reservations about prosecution for the Katyn Forest Massacre, which the Germans vehemently refuted. After numerous interrogations, it became apparent that the massacre was probably the responsibility of Russian troops controlling the territory at the time the murders were committed. Soviets demurred from that finding [Annotator's Note: but finally admitted to the allegations in the 1990s]. Harris said the German defense team did Germany a great service in their rebuttal, and the truth came out through judicial process. Commenting on the conduct of the interrogations, Harris said they were handled in a straightforward, non-oppressive manner. Harris found it interesting that once they had the facts, unknown to most of the rest of the world, the witnesses did not deny them. When the trial started, Harris said, the prosecution didn't have very much evidence; the task was sure to be difficult, and they were not ready. But shortly after then cases began, the team put together a motion picture from footage the Army had taken as the concentration camps were discovered. Up to that time, the German accused and their counsels were jovial, and not too concerned. But once the film was presented, depicting earthmoving equipment pushing piles of bodies into mass graves, their posture changed. They realized there was actual proof of the terrible crimes, and they were on trial for their lives.

Every trial draws criticism, according to Whitney Harris, but he knows of no significant criticisms of the conduct of the Nuremberg trails as it unfolded or of the judgments, not even by the Germans; Harris said the German people accepted the validity of the trial. Harris has published works on the subject, and as far as he knows, Harris is the last living participant from the Nuremberg Trials.