The "seizure of power" by the Nazi, the use of terror, the destruction of trade unions, the attack on Christian teaching and on churches, the persecution of the Jews, the regimentation of youth - all these are said to be steps deliberately taken to carry out the common plan. It found expression, so it is alleged, in secret rearmament, the withdrawal by Germany from the Disarmament Conference and the League of Nations, universal military service, and seizure of the Rhineland. Finally, according to the Indictment, aggressive action was planned and carried out against Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1936-1938, followed by the planning and waging of war against Poland; and, successively, against ten other countries. participation in the affairs of the Nazi Party or government is evidence of a participation in a conspiracy that is in itself criminal. Conspiracy is not defined in the Charter. But in the opinion of the Tribunal the conspiracy must be clearly outlined in its criminal purpose. It must not be too far removed from the time of decision and of action. The planning, to be criminal, must not rest merely on the declarations of a party program, such as are found in the twenty-five points of the Nazi Party, announced in 1920, or the political affirmations expressed in "Mein Kampf" in later years. The Tribunal must examine whether a concrete plan to wage war existed, and determine the participants in that concrete plan. conspiracy between the defendants has been established by the evidence. The seizure power by the Nazi Party, and the subsequent domination by the Nazi State of all spheres the later plans for waging war are examined.
That plans were of economic and social life must of course be remembered when made to wage wars, as early as November 5th 1937, and probably before that, is apparent.
And thereafter, such preparations continued in many directions, and against the peace of many countries. Indeed the threat of war - and war itself if necessary - was an integral part of the Nazi policy. But the evidence establishes with certainty the existence of many separate plans rather than a single conspiracy embracing them all. That Germany was rapidly moving to complete dictatorship from the moment that the Nazis seized power, and progressively in the direction of war, has been overwhelmingly shown in the ordered sequence of aggressive acts and wars already set out in this Judgment. the common planning to prepare and wage war by certain of the defendants. It is immaterial to consider whether a single conspiracy to the extent and over the time set out in the Indictment has been conclusively proved. Continued planning, with aggressive war as the objective, has been established beyond doubt. The truth of the situation was well stated by Paul Schmidt, official interpreter of the German Foreign Office, as follows:
"The general objectives of the Nazi leadership were slogan "Lebensraum."
The execution of these basic improvisation.
Each succeeding step was apparently sistent with the ultimate objectives mentioned above."
there is complete dictatorship is unsound. A plan in the execution of which a number of persons participate is still a plan, even though conceived by only one of that they acted under the direction of the man who conceived it.
Hitler them; and those who execute the plan do not avoid responsibility by showing could not make aggressive war by himself.
He had to have the co-operation of statesmen, military leaders, diplomats, and business men. when they, with knowledge of his aims, gave him their co-operation, they made themselve parties to the plan he had initiated. They are not to be deemed innocent because Hitler made use of them, if they knew what they were doing. That they were assigned to their tasks be a dictator does not absolve them from responsibility for their acts. The relation of leader and follower does not preclude responsibility here any more than it does in the comparable tyranny of organized domestic crime. aggressive war, but also to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity. But the Charter does not define as a separate crime any conspiracy except the one to commit acts of aggressive war. Article 6 of the Charter provides:
"Leaders, organizers, instigators and persons in execution of such plan."
separate crime to those already listed. The words are designed to establish the responsibility of persons participating in a common plan. The Tribunal will therefore disregard the charges in Count One that the defendants conspired to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity, and will consider only the common plan to prepare, initiate and wage aggressive war.
THE PRESIDENT: I now ask Judge Parker to continue the reading of the Judgment. JUDGE PARKER:
volume and its detail. It is impossible for this Judgment adequately to review it, or to record the mass of documentary and oral evidence that has been presented. The truth remains that War Crimes were committed on a vast scale, never before seen in the history of War. They were perpetrated in all the countries occupied by Germany, and on the High Seas, and were attended by every conceivable circumstance of cruelty and horror. There can be no doubt that the majority of them arose from the Nazi conception of "total war", with which the aggressive wars were waged. For in this conception of "total war", the moral ideas underlying the Conventions which seek to make war more humane are no longer regarded as having force or validity. Everything is made subordinate to the overmastering dictates of war. Rules, regulations, assurances and treaties all alike are of no moment; and so, freed from the restraining influence of international law, the aggressive war is conducted by the Nazi leaders in the most barbaric way. Accordingly, War Crimes were committed when and wherever the Fuehrer and his close associates thought them to be advantageous. They were for the most part the result of cold and criminal calculation. advance. In the case of the Soviet Union, the plunder of the territories to be occupied, and the ill-treatment of the civilian population, were settled in minute detail before the attack was begun. As early as the Autumn of 1940, the invasion of the territories of the Soviet Union was being considered. From that date onwards, the methods to be employed in destroy ing all possible opposition were continuously under discussion.
occupied countries for slave labor on the very greatest scale, the German Government conceived it as an integral part of the war economy, and planned and organized this particular War Crime down to the last elaborate detail.
escaped and been recaptured, or the murder of Commandos or captured airmen, or the destruction of the Soviet Commissars, were the result of direct orders circulated through the highest official channels. question of War Crimes, and to refer to them later when examining the responsibility of the individual defendants in relation to them. Prisoners of war were ill-treated and tortured and murdered, not only in defiance of the well-established rules of international law, but in complete disregard of the elementary dictates of humanity. Civilian populations in occupied territories suffered the same fate. Whole populations were deported to German for the purposes of slave labor upon defence works, armament production and similar tasks connected with the war effort. Hostages were taken in very large numbers from the civilian populations in all the occupied countries, and were shot as suited the German purposes. Public and private property was systematically plundered and pillaged in order to enlarge the resources of Germany at the expense of the rest of Europe. Cities and towns and villages were wantonly destroyed without military justification or necessity.
Article 6 (b) of the Charter defines War Crimes in these words:
"War Crimes: namely, violations of the laws or customs of war.
Such violations shall include, or devastation not justified by military necessity."
to the Germans were shot immediately, often as a matter of deliberate, calculated policy. On the 18th October 1942, the defendant Keitel circulated a directive authorized by Hitler, which ordered that all members of Allied "Commando" units, often when in uniform, and whether armed or not, were to be "slaughtered to the last man", even if they attempted to surrender. It was further provided that if such Allied troops came into the hands of the military authorities after being first captured by the local police, or in any other way, they should be handed over immediately to the SD. This order was supplemented from time to time, and was effective throughout the remainder of the war, although after the Allied landings in Normandy in 1944 it was made clear that the order did not apply to "Commandos" captured within the immediate battle area. Under the provisions of this order, Allied "Commando" troops, and other military units operating independently, lost their lives in Norway, France, Czechoslovakia and Italy. Many of them were killed on the spot, and in no case were those who were executed later in concentration camps ever given a trial of any kind. For example, an American military mission which landed behind the German front in the Balkans in January 1945, numbering about twelve to fifteen men and wearing according to the affidavit of Adolf Zutte, the adjutant of the Mauthausen uniform, were taken to Mauthausen under the authority of this order, and Concentration Camp all Of them were shot.
In March 1944 the OKH issued the "Kugel" or "Bullet" decree, which directed that every escaped officer and NCO prisoner of war who had not been put to work, with the exception of British and American prisoners of war, should on recapture he handed over to the SIPO and SD. This order was distributed by the SIPO and SD to their regional offices. These escaped officers and NCOs were to be sent to the concentration camp at Mauthausen, to be executed upon arrival, by means of a bullet shot in the neck. escaped from the camp at Sagan where they Were confined as prisoners, were shot on recapture, on the direct orders of Hitler. Their bodies were immediately cremated, and the urns containing their ashes were returned to the camp. It was not contended by the defendants that this was other than plain murder, in complete violation of international law. killed at once by the civilian population. The police were instructed not to interfere with these killings, and the Ministry of Justice was informed that no-one should be prosecuted for taking part in them. inhumanity. The death of so many of them was not due merely to the action of individual guards, or to the exigencies of life in the camps. It was the result of systematic plans to murder. More than a month before the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the OKW were making special plans for who might be captured.
One proposal was that "political Commissars of the dealing with political representatives serving with the Soviet armed forces Army are not recognized as Prisoners of War, and are to be liquidated at the latest in the transient prisoner of war camps."
The defendant Keitel gave evidence that instructions incorporating this proposal were issued to the German army. prisoners of war in all prisoner of war camps were issued, signed by General Reinecke, the head of the prisoner of war department of the High Command. These orders stated:
"The Bolshevist soldier has therefore lost all claim with the Geneva Convention.
...The order for ruthless of Bolshevist fanatics.
Insubordination, active or force of arms (bayonets, butts and firearms)...punishable.
.. Prisoners of war attempting escape are to be fired of without previous challenge.
No warning shot must ever be hired.
.. The use of arms against prisoners of war is as a rule legal."
The Soviet prisoners of war were left without suitable clothing. The wounded without medical care; they were starved, and in many cases left to die. the killing of all Soviet prisoners of war who were or might be dangerous to National Socialism. The order recited:
"The mission of the Commanders of the SIPO and SD 'treatment' (a) of all political, criminal or in some other way unbearable elements among them, (b) struction of the occupied territories.
... Further, to seek out among the prisoners elements which appear occupied territories also.
By use of such informers, " Above all, the following must be discovered:
professional revolutionaries... all People's Commissars immediate vicinity of the camp.
.. The prisoners are to former Soviet Russian territory."
The affidavit of Warlimont, deputy Chief of Staff of the Wehrmacht, and the the head of one of the sections of the Abwehr, the Wehrmacht's Intelligence The affidavit of Kurt Lindown, a former Gestapo official, states:
"... There existed in the prisoner of war camps on the Eastern Front small screehing teams (Einsatz commandos), headed by lower ranking members of the Secret Police (Gestapo). These teams were assigned and to report them to the office of the Secret Police."
tration camp reported to Mueller, chief of the Gestapo, a list of the Soviet prisoners of war who had been executed there on the previous day. of war during the first eight months after the German attack upon Russia was Keitel on the 28th February 1942:
given in a letter which the defendant Rosenberg sent to the defendant "The fate of the Soviet prisoners of war in Germany of the hazards of the weather.
Thousands also died " The camp commanders have forbidden the civilian " In many cases, when prisoners of war could no " In numerous camps, no shelter for the prisoners of war was provided at all.
They lay under the open sky during rain or snow.
Even tools were not make available to dig holes or caves."
permanent mark. There was put in evidence the OKW order dated the 20th July 1942 which laid down that:
"The brand is to take the shape of an acute angle buttock.
.. This brand is made with the aid of a lancet available in any military unit.
The coloring used is Chinese ink."
The carrying out of this order was the responsibility of the military authorities, though it was widely circulated by the Chief of the SIPO and the SD to German police officials for information. ments of the most cruel and inhuman kind. In July 1943 experimental work was begun in preparation for a campaign of bacteriological warfare; Soviet prisoners of war were used in these medical experiments, which more often than not proved fatal. In connection with this campaign for bacteriological warfare, preparations were also made for the spreading of bacterial emulsions consequent starvation.
These measures were never applied, possibly because from planes, with the object of producing widespread failures of crops and of the rapid deterioration of Germany's military position.
ill-treatment of Soviet prisoners of war, that the USSR was not a party to the Geneva Convention, it quite without foundation. On the 15th September 1941 Admiral Canaris protested against the regulations for the treatment of Soviet prisoners of war, signed by General Reinecke on the 8th September 1941. He then stated:
"The Geneva Convention for the treatment of ship between Germany and the USSR.
Therefore on the treatment of prisoners of war apply.
Since cipation in the war.
This principle was developed or injure helpless people.
.. The decrees for the based on a fundamentally different view-point."
This protest, which correctly stated the legal position, was ignored. The defendant Keitel made a note on this memorandum:
"The objections arise from the military concept of chivalrous warfare.
This is the destruction of an ideology.
Therefore I approve and back the measures."
Article 6(b) of the Charter provides that "ill-treatment... of civilian population of or in occupied territory ... killing of hostages ... wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages" shall he a war crime. In the main, these provisions are merely declaratory of the existing laws of war as expressed by the Hague Convention, Article 46, which stated:
"Family honor and rights, the lives of persons convictions and practice, must be respected."
the laws of war. The evidence is quite overwhelming of a systematic rule of violence, brutality and terror. On the 7th December 1941 Hitler issued the directive since known as the "Nacht und Nebel Erlass" (Night and Fog Decree), under which persons who committed offences against the Reich or the German forces in occupied territories, except where the death sentence was certain, were to be taken secretly to Germany and handed over to the SIPO and SD for trial or punishment in Germany. This decree was signed by the defendant Keitel. After these civilians arrived in Germany, no word of them was permitted to reach the country from which they came, or their relatives; even in cases when they died awaiting trial the families were not informed, the purpose being to create anxiety in the minds of the family of the arrested person. Hitler's purpose in issuing this decree was stated by the defendant Keitel in a covering letter, dated 12th December 1941, to be as follows:
"Efficient and enduring intimidation can only be criminal is transferred *---* Germany."
criminal. This aim is achieved when the of the German occupation authorities were arrested, and on arrest were interrogated by the Gestapo and the SD in the most shameful manner. On the 12th June 1942 the Chief of the SIPO and SD published, through Mueller, the Gestapo Chief, an order authorizing the use of "third degree" methods of interrogation, where preliminary investigation had indicated that the person could give information on important matters, such as subversive activities, though not for the purpose of extorting confessions of the prisoner's own crimes. This order provided:
"...Third degree may, under this supposition, only be employed against Communists, Marxists, Jehovah's elements, Polish or Soviet Russian loafers or tramps;obtained.
..Third degree can, according to circum simple diet (bread and water), hard bunk, dark cell, flogging (for more than twenty strokes a doctor must be consulted)." not confined to severe measures against suspected members of resistance movements themselves, but was also extended to their families.
On the 19th July 1944, the Commander of the SIPO and SD in the district of Radom, in Poland, published an order, transmitted through the Higher SS and Police Leaders, to the effect that in all cases of assassination or attempted assassination of Germans, or where saboteurs had destroyed vital installations not only the guilty person, but also all his or her male relatives should be shot, and female relatives over sixteen years of age put into a concentration camp.
because they were relatives of deserters, and were therefore "expected to Lusemburg caused persons to be confined at Sachsenhausen concentration camp en danger the interest of the German Reich if allowed to go free."
civil disorder was resorted to by the Germans; an order issued by the defendant Keitel on the 16th September 1941 spoke in terms of fifty or a hundred lives from the occupied areas of the Soviet Union for one German life taken. The order stated that "it should be remembered that a human life in unsettled countries frequently counts for nothing, and a deterrent effect can be obtained only by unusual severity." The exact number of persons killed as a result of this policy is not known, but large numbers were killed in France and the other occupied territories in the West, while in the East the slaughter was on an even more extensive scale. In addition to the killing of hostages, entire towns were destroyed in some cases; such massacres as those of Oradour-sur-Glane in France and Lidice in Czechoslovakia, both of which were described to the Tribunal in detail, are examples of the organized use of terror by the occupying forces to beat down and destroy all opposition to their rule. territories was the use of concentration camps. They were first established in Germany at the moment of the seizure of power by the Nazi Government. Their original purpose was to imprison without, trial, all those persons who were opposed to the Government, or who were in any way obnoxious to German authority. With the aid of a secret police force, this practice was widely extended, and in course of time concentration camps became places of organized In the administration of the occupied territories the concentration and systematic murder, Where millions of people were destroyed.
camps were used to destroy all opposition groups. The persons arrested by the Gestapo were as a rule sent to concentration camps. They were conveyed to the camps in many cases without any care whatever being taken for them, and great numbers died on the way. Those who arrived at the camp were subject to systematic cruelty. They were given hard physical labor, inadequate food, clothes and shelter, and were subject at all times to the rigors of a soulless regime, and the private whims of individual guards. In the report of the War Crimes Branch of the Judge Advocate's Section of the 3rd U.S. Army, under date 21st June 1945, the conditions at the Flossenburg concentration camp were investigated, and one passage may be quoted:
"Flossenburg concentration camp can best be described as a factory dealing in death.
Although this camp in handling the prisoners.
Hunger and starvation cides, shooting etc.
all played a major role in ob taining their object.
Prisoners were murdered at random; spite killings against Jews were common, in everyday occurrences; epidemics of typhus and spotted eliminating prisoners; life in this camp meant nothing.
Killing became a common thing, so common ones."
chambers for the wholesale destruction of the inmates, and with furnaces for the burning of the bodies.
Some of them were in fact used for the extermination of Jews as part of the "final solution" of the Jewish problem. Most of the non-Jewish inmates were used for labor, although the conditions under which they worked made labor and death almost synonymous terms. Those inmates who became ill and were unable to work were either destroyed in the gas chambers or sent to special infirmaries, where they were given entirely inadequate medical treatment, worse food if possible than the working inmates, and left to die. in the treatment of the citizens of the Soviet Union and Poland. Some four weeks before the invasion of Russia began, special task forces of the SIPO and SD, called Einsatz Groups, were formed on the orders of Himmler for the purpose of following the German armies into Russia, combating partisans and members of Resistance Groups, and exterminating the Jews and communist leaders and other sections of the population. In the beginning, four such Einsatz Groups were formed, one operating in the Baltic States, one towards Moscow, one towards Kiev, and one operating in the south of Russia. Ohlendorf, former chief of Amt III of the RSHA, who led the fourth group, stated in his affidavit "When the German army invaded Russia, I was leader 90,000 men, women and children.
The majority of among them some communist functionaries."
drafted by the defendant Jodl, it was stated that "in view of the vast size of the occupied areas in applying suitable draconian measures."
the territory of the Soviet Union and in Poland. A significant illustration of the measures actually applied occurs in the document which was sent in 1943 to the defendant Rosenberg by the Reich Commissar for Eastern Territories, who wrote:
"It should be possible to avoid atrocities and to bury those who have been liquidated.
To lock exterminate the population.
This method is reputation severely."
10th November 1945, describing the immense mass murders which he witnessed. He was the manager and engineer in charge of the branch of the Solingen firm of Josef Jung in Spolbu now, Ukraine, from September 1941 to January 1944. He first of all described the attack upon the Jewish ghetto at Rowno:
"...Then the electric floodlights which had been Where the doors and windows were closed, and the dwelling.
The owners were driven on to the ... Car after car was filled.
Over it hung the whips and rifle shots."
which he witnessed on the 5th October 1942, was carried out:
"...Now we heard shots in quick succession from behind one of the earth mounds.
The people who also with a whip in his hand.
.. At that moment his comrade.
The latter counted off about 20 earth mound.
.. I walked around the mound and stood in front of a tremendous grave; closely visible.
The excavation was already two-thirds full; I estimated that it contained about a thousand people.
.. Now already the next group were shot."
are sufficiently appalling, and yet the evidence shows that at any rate in the East, the mass murders and cruelties were not committed solely for the purpose of stamping out opposition or resistance to the German occupying forces.
In Poland and the Soviet Union these crimes were part of a plan to get rid of whole native populations by expulsion and annihilation, in order that their territory could be used for colonization by Germans. Hitler had written in "Mein Kampf" on these lines, and the plan was clearly stated by Himmler in July 1942, when he wrote:
"It is not our task to Germanize the East in the in the East."
as laid down by Bormann was summarized by a subordinate of Rosenberg as follows:
"The Slavs are to work for us. In so far as we do not need them, they may die.
Therefore, com are superfluous.
The fertility of the Slavs is undesirable."
It was Himmler again who stated in October 1943;
"What happens to a Russian, a Czech, does not interest me in the slightest.
What the nations will take.
If necessary, by kidnapping their chil dren and raising them here with us.
Whether interest to me."
extermination as early as September 1939, and in May 1940 the defendant Frank wrote in his diary of "taking advantage of the focussing of world interest on the Western first leading representatives of the Polish intelligentsia."
Front, by wholesale liquidation of thousands of Poles, Earlier, Frank had been directed to reduce the "entire Polish economy to absolute minimum necessary for bare existence. The Poles shall be the slaves of the Greater German World Empire." In January 1940 he recorded in his diary that "cheap labor must be removed from the General Government by hundreds of thousands. This will hamper the native biological propagation." So successfully did the Germans carry out this policy in Poland that by the end of the war one third of the population had been killed, and the whole of the country devastated. Union. At the time of the launching of the German attack in June 1941 Rosenberg told his collaborators:
"The object of feeding the German people stands of Germany's claims on the East, and there the of the German people.
.. A very extensive evac years in store for the Russians."
Three or four weeks later Hitler discussed with Rosenberg, Goering, Keitel and others his plan for the exploitation of the Soviet population a nd territory, which included among other things the evacuation of the inhabitants of the Crimea and its settlement by Germans. by the defendant von Neurath, in August 1940; the intelligentsia were to be "expelled," but the rest of the population was to be Germanized rather than expelled or exterminated, since there was a shortage of Germans to replace them. of a German 105,000 Alsatians were either deported from their homes "expulsion action."