ceedings of any kind, 13 and without statement of any reason therefor.14 The partisan political police were exempted from effective legal responsibility for their acts.15 With all administrative offices in Nazi control and with the Reichstag reduced to impotence; the judiciary remained the last obstacle to this reign of terror.16 But its independence was soon overcome and it was reorganized to dispense a venal justice.17 Judges were ousted for political or racial reasons and were spied upon and put under pressure to join the Nazi Party. 18 After the Supreme Court had acquitted three of the four men whom the Nazis accused of setting the Reichstag fire, its jurisdiction over treason cases was transferred to a newly established “People's Court" consisting of two judges and five party officials. 19 The German film of this "People's Court" in operation, which we showed in this chamber, revealed its presiding judge pouring partisan abuse upon speechless defendants.20 Special courts were created to try political crimes, only party members were appointed judges, 21 and "Judges' letters" instructed the puppet judges as to the "general lines" they must follow.22 The result was the removal of all peaceable means either to resist or to change the government. Having sneaked through the portals of power, the Nazis slammed the gate in the face of all others who might also aspire to enter. Since the law was what the Nazis said it was, every form of opposition was rooted out, and every dissenting voice throttled. Germany was in the clutch of a police state, which used the fear of the concentration camp as a means to enforce non-resistance. The Party was the State, the State was the Party, and terror by day and death by night were the policy of both. 2. THE PREPARATION AND WAGING OF WARS OF AGGRESSION. From the moment the Nazis seized power, they set about feverish but stealthy efforts, in defiance of the Versailles Treaty, to arm for war. In 1933 they found no airforce. By 1939 they had 21 squadrons, consisting of 240 echelons or about 2,400 first-line planes, together with trainers and transports. In 1933 they found an army of 3 infantry and 3 cavalry divisions. By 1939 they had raised and equipped an army of 51 divisions, four of which were fully motorized and four of which were panzer divisions. In 1933 they found a navy of one cruiser and 6 light cruisers. By 1939 they had built a navy of 4 battleships, 1 aircraft carrier, 6 cruisers, 22 destroyers, and 54 submarines. They had also built up in that period an armament industry as efficient as that of any country in the world.23 These new weapons were put to use, commencing in September 1939, in a series of undeclared wars against nations with which Germany had arbitration and non-aggression treaties, and in violation of repeated assurances.24 In September 1, 1939 this rearmed Germany attacked Poland. The following April witnessed the invasion and occupation of Denmark and Norway, and May saw the over-running of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. Another spring found Yugoslavia and Greece under attack, and in June 1941 came the invasion of Soviet Russia. Then Japan, which Germany had embraced as a partner, struck without warning at Pearl Harbor in December 1941, and four days later Germany declared war on the United States. We need not trouble ourselves about the many abstract difficulties that can be conjured up about what constitutes aggression in doubtful cases. I shall show you, in discussing the conspiracy, that by any test ever put forward by any responsible authority, by all the canons of plain sense, these were unlawful wars of aggression in breach of treaties and in violation of assurances. 3. WARFARE IN DISREGARD OF INTERNATIONAL LAW. It is unnecessary to labor this point on the facts. Goering asserts that the Rules of Land Warfare were obsolete, that no nation could fight a total war within their limits. He testified that the Nazis would have denounced the Conventions to which Germany was a party, but that General Jodl wanted captured German soldiers to continue to benefit from their observance by the Allies.26 It was, however, against the Soviet people and Soviet prisoners that Teutonic fury knew no bounds, in spite of a warning by Admiral Canaris that the treatment was in violation of International Law.27 We need not, therefore, for purposes of the Conspiracy count, recite the revolting details of starving, beating, murdering, freezing, and mass extermination admittedly used against the eastern soldiery. Also, we may take as established or admitted that lawless conduct such as shooting British and American airmen, mistreatment of Western prisoners of war, forcing French prisoners of war into German war work, and other deliberate violations of the Hague and Geneva Conventions, did occur, and in obedience to highest levels of authority.28 4. ENSLAVEMENT AND PLUNDER OF POPULATIONS The defendant Sauckel, Plenipotentiary General for the Utilization of Labor, 2o is authority for the statement that "out of five million foreign workers who arrived in Germany, not even 200,000 came voluntarily."30 It was officially reported to defendant Rosenberg that in his territory "recruiting methods were used which probably have their origin in the blackest period of the slave trade."31 Sauckel himself reported that male and female agents went hunting for men, got them drunk, and “shanghaied" them to Germany. These captives were shipped in trains without heat, food, or sanitary facilities. The dead were thrown out at stations, and the newborn were thrown out the windows of moving trains.33 Sauckel ordered that "all the men must be fed, sheltered and treated in such a way as to exploit them to the highest possible extent at the lowest conceivable degree of expenditure.”34 About two million of these were employed directly in the manufacture of armaments and munitions.5 The director of the Krupp Locomotive factory in Essen complained to the company that Russian forced laborers were so underfed that they were too weakened to do their work, and the Krupp doctor confirmed their pitiable condition.37 Soviet workers were put in camps under Gestapo guards, who were allowed to punish disobedience by confinement in a concentration camp or by hanging on the spot.38 Populations of occupied countries were otherwise exploited and oppressed unmercifully. Terrorism was the order of the day. Civilians were arrested without charges, committed without counsel, executed without hearing. Villages were destroyed, the male inhabitants shot or sent to concentration camps, the women sent to forced labor, and the children scattered abroad.39 The extent of the slaughter in Poland alone was indicated by Frank, who reported: "If I wanted to have a poster put up for every seven Poles who were shot, the forests of Poland would not suffice for producing the paper for such posters.”40 Those who will enslave men cannot be expected to refrain from plundering them. Boastful reports show how thoroughly and scientifically the resources of occupied lands were sucked into the German war economy, inflicting shortage, hunger, and inflation upon the inhabitants.41 Besides this grand plan to aid the German war effort there were the sordid activities of the Rosenberg Einsatzstab, which pillaged art treasures for Goering and his fellow-bandits. It is hard to say whether the spectacle of Germany's No. 2 leader urging his people to give up every comfort and strain every sinew on essential war work while he rushed around confiscating art by the trainload should be cast as tragedy or comedy. In either case it was a crime. International Law at all times before and during this war spoke with precision and authority respecting the protection due civilians of an occupied country, 43 and the slave trade and plunder of occupied countries was at all times flagrantly unlawful. 5. PERSECUTION AND EXTERMINATION OF JEWS The Nazi movement will be of evil memory in history because of its persecution of the Jews, the most far-flung and terrible racial persecution of all time. Although the Nazi party neither invented nor monopolized anti-Semitism, its leaders from the very beginning embraced it, incited it, and exploited it. They used it as "the psychological spark that ignites the mob." After the seizure of power, it became an official state policy. The persecution began in a series of discriminatory laws eliminating the Jews from the civil service, the professions, and economic life. As it became more intense it included segregation of Jews in ghettos, and exile. Riots were organized by party leaders to loot Jewish business places and to burn synagogues. Jewish property was confiscated and a collective fine of a billion marks was imposed upon German Jewry. The program progressed in fury and irresponsibility to the "final solution." This consisted of sending all Jews who were fit to work to concentration camps as slave laborers, and all who were not fit, which included children under 12 and people over 50, as well as any others judged unfit by an SS doctor, to concentration camps for extermination.44 Adolf Eichmann, the sinister figure who had charge of the extermination program, has estimated that the anti-Jewish activities resulted in the killing of six million Jews. Of these, four million were killed in extermination institutions, and two million were killed by Einsatzgruppen, mobile units of the Security Police and SD which pursued Jews in the ghettos and in their homes and slaughtered them by gas wagons, by mass shooting in antitank ditches, and by every device which Nazi ingenuity could conceive. So thorough and uncompromising was this program that the Jews of Europe as à race no longer exist, thus fulfilling the diabolic "prophecy" of Adolf Hitler at the beginning of the war.45 Of course, any such program must reckon with the opposition of the Christian Church. This was recognized from the very beginning. Defendant Bormann wrote all Gauleiters in 1941 that "National Socialism and Christian concepts are irreconcilable," and that the people must be separated from the Churches and the influence of the Churches totally removed.46 Defendant Rosenberg even wrote dreary treatises advocating a new and weird Nazi religion.47 The Gestapo appointed "Church specialists" who were instructed that the ultimate aim was "destruction of the confessional Churches."48 The record is full of specific instances of the persecution of clergymen, the confiscation of Church property, 50 interference with religious publications,1 disruption of religious education,52 and suppression of religious organizations.53 The chief instrumentality for persecution and extermination was the concentration camp, sired by defendant Goering and nurtured under the overall authority of defendants Frick and Kaltenbrunner. The horrors of these iniquitous places have been vividly disclosed by documents and testified to by witnesses.55 The Tribunal must be satiated with ghastly verbal and pictorial portrayals. From your records it is clear that the concentration camps were the first and worst weapons of oppression used by the National Socialist State, and that they were the primary means utilized for the persecution of the Christian Church and the extermination of the Jewish race. This has been admitted to you by some of the defendants from the witness stand.56 In the words of defendant Frank: "A thousand years will pass and this guilt of Germany will still not be erased."57 These, then, were the five great substantive crimes of the Nazi regime. Their commission, which cannot be denied, stands admitted. The defendant Keitel, who is in a position to know the facts, has given the Tribunal what seems to be a fair summation of the case on these facts: "The defendant has declared that he admits the contents of the general indictment to be proved from the objective and factual point of view (that is to say, not every individual case) and this in consideration of the law of procedure governing this trial. It would be senseless, despite the possibility of refuting several documents or individual facts to attempt to shake the indictment as a whole."58 I pass now to the inquiry whether these groups of criminal acts were integrated in a common plan or conspiracy. THE COMMON PLAN OR CONSPIRACY The prosecution submits that these five categories of premeditated crimes were not separate and independent phenomena but that all were committed pursuant to a common plan or conspiracy. The defense admits that these classes of crimes were committed but denies that they are connected one with another as parts of a single program. |