WAR CRIMES: Naivete & Skill

Captain Sam Harris, 33, of New York, a handsome, uniformed, confident figure, stepped to the microphone in Nürnberg's courtroom last week and read seriously from the first page of his brief: "The noise you hear is my knees knocking. They haven't knocked like this since the day I asked my wife to marry me." To cover their embarrassment, the British lawyers smiled. The Russians shrugged; such naiveté was just one more thing they did not understand about Americans. But the Russians were not surprised when Harris went on to make a highly effective argument. They have be come openly enthusiastic about the way Prosecutor Robert H. Jackson and his assistants are conducting the U.S. case against the Nazis.

Individual defendants were inexorably linked to definite crimes against humanity. Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel was not always engrossed in high strategy; he assisted in rounding up slave labor by order ing Polish homes burned. Alfred Rosenberg, the philosopher, was involved in an order that babies born to Russian women on slave-labor trains be thrown from the windows. Albert Speer, Director of War Production, urged more SS brutality to accelerate the working pace of the slaves.

Bald Fritz Sauckel had preserved an air of head-shaking detachment from his fellow criminals. But when a document was introduced showing that even Rosenberg had asked Sauckel to use restraint in his treatment of the slaves, he bowed his bullet head.

Earlier in the week the defendants enjoyed themselves, nudging each other and laughing as documents and films recount ed their days of power. Rudolf Hess applauded Hitler on the screen. Former Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop wept, watching Hitler in a screaming speech and in an aside to U.S. Army Major Douglas Kelley, court psychiatrist, said: "Can't you just feel Hitler's tremendous personality? For us it was the most fearfully stimulating thing that has ever happened in our lifetime."

But as Captain Sam Harris of New York presented document after document, their confidence faded and some became as nervous as Harris had said he was.