They excited the German ambition to be a "master race," which of course implies serfdom for others. They led their people on a mad gamble for domination. They diverted social energies and resources to the creation of what they thought to be an invincible war machine. They overran their neighbors. To sustain the "master race" in its war-making, they enslaved millions of human beings and brought them into Germany, where these hapless creatures now wander as "displaced persons". At length bestiality and bad faith reached such excess that they aroused the sleeping forces of imperiled Civilization. Its united efforts have ground the German war machine to fragments. But the struggle has left Europe a liberated yet prostrate land where a demoralized society struggles to survive. These are the fruits of the sinister forces that sit with these defendants in the prisoners' dock.
tion, I must remind you of certain difficulties which may leave their mark on this case. Never before in legal history has an effort been made to bring within the scope of a single litigation the developments of a decade, covering a whole Continent, and involving a score of nations, countless individuals, and innumerable events. Despite the magnitude of the task, the world has demanded immediate action. This demand has had to be met, though perhaps at the cost of finished craftsmanship. In my country, established courts, following familiar procedures, applying well thumbed precedents, and dealing with the legal consequences of local and limited events seldom commence a trial within a year of the event in litigation. Yet less than eight months ago today the courtroom in which you sit was an enemy fortress in the hands of German SS troops. Less than eight months ago nearly all our witnesses and documents were in enemy hands. The law had not been codified, no procedures had been established, no Tribunal was in existence, no usable courthouse stood here, none of the hundreds of tons of official German documents had been examined, no prosecuting staff had been assembled, nearly all the present defendants were at large, and the four prosecuting powers had not yet joined in common cause to try them. I should be the last to deny that the case may well suffer from incomplete researches and quite likely will not be the example of professional work which any of the prosecuting nations would normally wish to sponsor. It is, however, a completely adequate case to the judgment we shall ask you to render, and its fuller development we shall be obliged to leave to historians because we have not had the time to examine all of the sources of evidence that might be available. eral considerations which may affect the credit of this trial in the eyes of the world should be candidly faced. There is a dramatic disparity between the circumstances of the accusers and of the accused that might discredit our work if we should falter, in even minor matters, in being fair and temperate. and judgment must be by victor nations over vanquished foes.
The worldwide scope of the aggressions carried out by these men has left but few real neutrals. Either the victors must judge the vanquished or we must leave the defeated to judge themselves. After the First World War, we learned the futility of the latter course. The former high station of those defendants, the notoriety of their acts, and the adaptability of their conduct to provoke retaliation make it hard to distinugish between the demand for a just and measured retribution, and the unthinking cry for vengeance which arises from the anguish of war. It is our task, so far as humanly possible, to draw the line between the two. We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. We must summon such detachment and intellectual integrity to our task that this trial will commend itself to posterity as fulfilling humanity's aspirations to do justice. these men to trial is to do them an injustice entitling them to some special consideration. These defendants may be hard pressed but they are not ill used. Let us see what alternative they would have to being tried. tracked down by forces of the United States of America, Could they expect us to make American custody a shelter for our enemies against the just wrath of our Allies? Did we spend American lives to capture them only to save them from punishment? Under the principles of the Moscow Declaration, those suspected war criminals who are not to be tried internationally must be turned over to individual governments for trial at the scene of their outrages. Many less responsible and less culpable American-held prisoners than these have been and will continue to be turned over to other United Nations for local trial. If these defendants should succeed, for any reason, in escaping the condemnation of this Tribunal, or if they obstruct or abort this trial, those who are Americanheld prisoners will be delivered up.
to our continental Allies. For these defendants, however, we have set up an International Tribunal and the United States has undertaken the burden of participating in a complicated effort to give them fair and dispassionate hearings. That is the best known protection to any man with a defense worthy of being heard. nation to be prosecuted in the name of the law, they are also the first to be given a chance to plead for their lives in the name of the law. Realistically, the Charter of this Tribunal, which gives them a hearing, is also the source of their only hope. It may be that these men of troubled conscience, whose only wish is that the world forget them, do not regard a trial as a favor. But they do have a fair opportunity to defend themselves, represented here by able counsel who have shown their capacity to handle their case with credit and who have acted with courage, and these men now enjoy a favor which, when in power, they rarely extended even to their fellow countrymen. Despite the fact that public opinion already condemns their acts, we agree that here they must be given a presumption of innocence, and we accept the burden of proving criminal acts and the responsibility of each of these defendants for their commission. do not mean mere technical or incidental transgression of international conventions. We charge guilt on planned and intended conduct that involves moral as well as legal wrong. And we do not mean conduct that is a natural and human, even if illegal, cutting of corners, such as many of us might well have committed had we been in the defendants' positions. It is not because they yielded to the normal frailties of human beings that we accuse them. It is their abnormal and inhuman conduct which brings them to this bar. foes. There is no count of the Indictment that cannot be proved by books and records. The Germans were always meticulous record keepers, and these defendant had their share of the Teutonic passion for thoroughness in putting things on paper. Nor were they without vanity. They arranged frequently to be photographed in action. We will show you their own films. You will see their own conduct and hear their own voices as these defendants reenact for you, from the screen, some of the events in the course of the conspiracy.
the whole German people. We know that the Nazi Party was not put in power by a majority of the German vote. We know it came to power by an evil alliance between the most extreme of the Nazi revolutionists, the most unrestrained of the German reactionaries, and the most aggressive of the German militarists. If the German populace had willingly accepted the Nazi program, no Stormtroopers would have been needed in the early days of the Party and there would have been no need for concentration camps or the Gestapo, both of which institutions were inaugurated as soon as the Nazis gained control of the German state. Only after these lawless innovations proved successful at home were they taken abroad. States hold them in no fear, and in no hate. It is true that the Germans have taught us the horrors of modern warfare, but the ruin that lies from the Rhine to the Danube shows that we, like our Allies, have not been dull pupils. If we are not awed by German fortitude and proficiency in war, and if we are not persuaded of their political maturity, we do respect their skill in the arts of peace, their technical competence, and the sober, industrious and self-disciplined character of the masses of the German people. In 1933, we saw the German people recovering prestige in the commercial, industrial and artistic world after the set-back of the last war. We beheld their progress neither with envy nor malice. The Nazi regime interrupted this advance. The recoil of the Nazi aggression has left Germany in ruins. The Nazi readiness to pledge the German word without hesitation and to break it without shame has fastened upon German diplomacy a reputation for duplicity that will handicap it for years. Nazi arrogance has made the boast of the "master race" a taunt that will be thrown at Germans the world over for generations. The Nazi nightmare has given the German name a new and sinister significance through out the world which will retard Germany a century.
The German, no less than the non-German world, has accounts to settle with these defendants. theme of our case, is history. From September 1st, 1939, when the German armies crossed the Polish frontiers, until September, 1941, when they met epic resistance at Stalingrad, German arms seemed invincible. Denmark and Norway, The Netherlands and France, Belgium and Luxembourg, the Balkans and Africa, Poland and the Baltic States, and parts of Russia, all had been overrun and conquered by swift, powerful, well-aimed blows. That attack upon the peace of the world is the crime against international society which brings into international cognizance crimes in its aid and preparation which otherwise might be only internal concerns. It was aggressive war, which the nations of the world had renounced. It was war in violation of treaties, by which the peace of the world was sought to be safeguarded. a long period of time and with no small skill and cunning. The world has perhaps never seen such a concentration and stimulation of the energies of any people as that which enabled Germany twenty years after it was defeated, disarmed, and dismmembered to come so near carrying out its plan to dominate Europe. Whatever else we may say of those who were the authors of this war, they did achieve a stupendous work in organization, and our first task is to examine the means by which these defendants and their fellow conspirators prepared and incited Germany to go to war. some time with the Nazi Party in a plan which they well knew could be accomplished only by an outbreak of war in Europe. Their seizure of the German state, their subjugation of the German people, their terrorism and extermination of dissident elements, their planning and waging of war, their calculated and planned ruthlessness in the conduct of warfare, their deliberate and planned criminality toward conquered peoples, - all these are ends for which they acted in concert; and all of these phases of the conspiracy were common ones to these defendants, and it was a conspiracy which reached one goal only to set out for another and more ambitious one.
We shall also trace for you the intricate web of organizations which these men formed and utilized to accomplish these ends. We will show how the entire structure of offices and officials was dedicated to the criminal purposes and committed to use of the criminal methods planned by these defendants and their co-conspirators, many of whom war and suicide have put beyond reach. the Indictment, and to deal with the common plan or conspiracy to achieve ends possible only by resort to crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. My emphasis will not be on individual barbarities and perversions which may have occurred independently of any central plan. One of the dangers ever present is that this trial may be protracted by details of particular wrongs and that we will become lost in a "wilderness of single instances". Nor will I now dwell on the activity of individual defendants except as it may contribute to exposition of the common plan. brains and authority back of all the crimes. These defendants were men of a station and rank which does not soil its own hands with blood. They were men who knew how to use lesser folk as tools. We want to reach the planners and designers, the inciters and leaders without whose evil architecture the world would not have been for so long scourged with the violence and lawlessness, and wracked with the agonies and convulsions, of this terrible war. possess the power which they have so used. The chief instrumentality of cohesion in plan and action was the National Socialist German Workers Party, known as the Nazi Party. Some of the defendants were with it from the beginning. Others joined only after success seemed to have validated its lawlessness or power had invested it with immunity from the processes of the law. Adolf Hitler became its supreme leader or "fuehrer" in 1921.
On the 24th of February, 1920, at Munich, it publicly had proclaimed its program.
I cannot undertake to read it in full. Some of its purposes would commend themselves to many good citizens, such as the demands for "profit-sharing in the great industries," "generous development of provision for old age," "creation and maintenance of a healthy middle class," "a land reform suitable to our national requirements," and "raising the standard of health." It also made a strong appeal to that sort of nationalism which in ourselves we call patriotism and in our rivals chauvinism. It demanded "equality of rights for the German people in its dealing with other nations and the evolution of the peace treaties of Versailles and St Germaine." It demanded the "union of all Germans on the basis of the right of self-determination of peoples to form a Great Germany." It demanded "land and territory (colonies) for the enrichment of our people and the settlement of our surplus population." All these, of course, were legitimate objectives if they were to be attained without resort to aggressive warfare. It demanded "the abolition of mercenary troops and the formation of a national army." It proclaimed that "In view of the enormous sacrifice of life and property demanded of a nation by every war, personal enrichment through war must be regarded as a crime against the nation. We demand, therefore, the ruthless confiscation of all war profits." I do not criticise this policy. Indeed, I wish it were universal. I merely point out that in a time of peace, in 1920, war was a preoccupation of the Party, and it started the work of making war less offensive to the masses of the people. With this it combined a program of physical training and sports for youth that became, as we shall see, the clak for a secret program of military training. anti-Semitic program. It declared that no Jew or any person of nonGerman blood could be a member of the nation. Such persons were to be disfranchised, disqualified for office, subject to the alien laws, and entitled to nourishment only after the German population had first been provided for. All who had entiered Germany after August 2, 1914 were to be required forthwith to depart, and all non-German immigration was to be prohibited.
We have not sought to include every person who may, at some time, have supported the Nazi Party but only the leadership core which pledged itself to achieve its ends at the risk of their lives.
pledge to proceed regardless of consequences. Obviously, their foreign objectives, which were nothing less than to undo international treaties and to wrest territory from foreign control, as well as most of their internal program, could be accomplished only by possession of the machinery of the German State. The first effort, accordingly, was to subvert the Weimar Republic by violent revolution. An abortive putsch at Munich in 1923 landed many of them in jail. The period of meditation which followed produced "Mein Kampf", henceforth the source of law for the Party workers and a source of considerable revenue to its supreme leader. The Nazi plans for the violent overthrow of the feeble Republic then turned to plans for its capture. in terms of the loose organizations which we of the western world call "political parties." In discipline, structure, and method the Nazi Party was not adapted to the democratic process of persuasion. It was an instrument of conspiracy and of coercion. The Party was not organized to take over power in the German State by winning support of a majority of the German people. It was organized to seize power in defiance of the will of the people.
The Nazi Party, under the "Fuehrerprinzip," was bound by an iron discipline into a pyramid, with the Fuehrer, Adolf Hitler, at the top and broadening into a numerous Leadership Corps, composed of overlords of a very extensive Party membership at the base. By no means all of those who may have supported the movement in one way or another were actual Party members. The membership took the Party oath which in effect, amounted to an abdication of personal intelligence and moral responsibility. This was the oath: "I vow inviolable fidelity to Adolf Hitler; I vow absolute obedience to him and to the leaders he designates for me." The membership in daily practice followed its leaders with an idolatry and selfsurrender more Oriental than Western.
The significance of this early declaration is that it became the publicly known and avowed policy of this party, that every man who joined in forwarding its purposes knew and understood.
The Party also avowed, even in those early days, an authoritarian and totalitarian program for Germany. It demanded creation of a strong central power with unconditional authority, nationalization of all businesses which had been "amalgamated," and a "reconstruction" of the national system of education which "must aim at teaching the pupil to understand the idea of the State (state sociology)." Its hostility to civil liberties and freedom of the press was distinctly announced in these words: "It must be forbidden to publish newpapers which do not conduce to the national welfare. We demand the legal prosecution of all tendencies in art or literature of a kind likely to disintegrate our life as a nation and the suppression of institutions which might militate against the above requirements," of course, as interpreted by the Nazis. guage of religious liberty, for the Nazi program stated, "We demand liberty for all religious denominations in the State." But, it continues with the limitation, "so far as they are not a danger to it and do not militate against the morality and moral sense of the German race." Of course, again according to their conception.
The Party program foreshadowed the campaign of terrorism. It announced, "We demand ruthless war upon those whose activities are injurious to the common interests", and it demanded that such offenses be punished with death. this program as a belligerent one certain to precipitate conflict. The Party platform concluded, "The leaders of the Party swear to proceed regardless of consequences - if necessary, at the sacrifice of their lives toward the fulfillment of the foregoing points." It is this Leadership Corps of the Party, not its entire membership, that stands accused as a criminal organization.
Party. The immediate aim was to undermine the Weimar Republic. The the original (Document 047-PS.
from Rosenberg file.) Captured film screen will himself tell you the story.
The SA practised violent interference with elections.
We have here the reports of the SD des elections in order to identify those who opposed them.
(Document No. R-142). (Report from files of S. D. Kochem). The report of 7 political contest, took on the aspect of a rehearsal for warfare.
It utilized a Party formation, "DIE STURMABTEILUNGEN", commonly known as the SA.
This was a voluntary organization of youthful and fanatical rapidly expanded from defensive to offensive tactics.
They became the terrorization of adversaries.
They boasted that their task was to make the Nazi Party "master of the streets". The SA was the members.
Then there was the SD, and the Secret State Police, the to power.
A glance at the chart - and we shall offer to you in not take time to point out more than those things significant at this point in the argument, is enough to show how completely it differed from the political parties we know.
It had its own source of law in the fuehrer and sub-fuehrers. It had its own courts and its own police. The conspirators set up a government within the Party to exercise outside the law every sanction that any legitimate state could exercise and many that it could not. Its chain of command was military, and its formations were martial in name as well as in function. They were composed of battalions set up to bear arms under military discipline, motorized corps, flying corps, and the infamous "Death Head Corps", which was not misnamed. The Party had its own secret police, its security units, its intelligence and espionage division, its raiding forces, and its youth forces. It established elaborate administrative mechanisms to identify and liquidate spies and informers, to manage concentration camps, to operate death vans, and to finance the whole movement. Through these concentric circles of authority, the Nazi Party, as its leadership later boasted, eventually organized and dominated every phase of German life - but not until they had waged a bitter internal struggle characterized by brutal criminality, we charge here. In preparation for this phase of their struggle, they created a party police system. This became the pattern and the instrument of the police state, which was the first goal in their plans. the SD, the SS, the SA and the infamous Secret State Police, or Gestapo, -- all these stand accused before you as criminal organizations; organizations which, as we will prove from their own documents, were recruited only from recklessly devoted Nazis, ready in conviction and temperament to do the most violant of deeds to advance the common program. They terrorized and silenced democratic opposition and were able at length to combine with political opportunists, militarists, industrialists, monarchists, and political reactionaries.
German Republic. An evil combination, represented in the prisoner's docks by its most eminent survivors, had succeeded in possessing itself of the machinery of the German Government, a facade behind which they thenceforth would operate to make a reality of the war of conquest they so long had plotted. The conspiracy had passed into its second phase.
of crimes against humanity, to which the conspirators resorted in perfecting control of the German State and in preparing Germany for the aggressive war indispensable to their ends.
The Germans of the 1920's were a frustrated and baffled people as a result of defeat and the disintegration of their traditional government. The democratic elements, which were trying to govern Germany through the new and feeble machinery of the Weimar Republic, got inadequate support from the democratic forces of the rest of the world including my country. It is not to be denied that Germany, when worldwide depression was added to her other problems, was faced with urgent and intricate pressures in her economic and political life which necessitated bold measures. problems are ordinarily of no concern to other nations. But the Nazi program from the first was recognized as a desperate program for a people still suffering the effects of an unsuccessful war. The Nazi policy embraced ends always recognized as attainable only by a renewal and a more successful outcome of war in Europe. The conspirators' answer to Germany's problems was nothing less than to plot the regaining of territories lost in the First World War and the acquisition of other fertile lands of Central Europe by dispossessing or exterminating those who inhabited them. They also contemplated - and I want to emphasize this point for it runs through the whole Nazi history - destroying or permanently weakening all other neighboring peoples so as to win virtual domination of Europe and probably of the world. The precise limits of their ambition we need not define for it was and is as illegal to wage aggressive war for small stakes as for large ones. the ostensible. The forms of the German Republic were maintained for a time, and it was the outward and visible government. But the real authority in the State was outside of and above the law and rested in the Leadership Corps of the Nazi Party.
cellor, the Reichstag building was set on fire. The burning of this symbol of free parliamentary government was so providential for the Nazis that it was believed they staged the fire themselves. Certainly when we contemplate their known crimes, we cannot believe they would shrink from mere arson. It is not necessary, however, to resolve the controversy as to who set the fire. The significant point is in the use that was made of the fire and of the state of public mind it produced. The Nazis immediately accused the Communist Party of instigating and commiting the crime, and turned every effort to portray this single act of arson as the beginning of a communist revolution. Then, taking advantage of the hysteria, the Nazis met this phantom revolution with a real one. In the following December, the Supreme Court with commendable courage and independence acquitted the accused communists, but it was too late to influence the tragic course of events which the Nazi conspirators had set rushing forward. and ailing President von Hindenburg a Presidential decree suspending the extensive guarantees of individual liberty contained in the constitution of the Weimar Republic. That decree provides in Article 1 that Sections 114, 115, 117, 118, 123, 124, and 153 of the constitution of the German Reich are suspended until further notice. It goes on: Thus restrictions on personal liberty, on the right of free expression of opinion, including freedom of the press, on the right of assembly and the right of association, and violations of the privacy of postal, telegram, and telephonic communications and warrants for house searches, orders for confiscation as well as restrictions on property are permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed. Now the Weimar constitution contained extensive guarantees of personal freedom.
freedom of the person is invoilable. Curtailment or deprecation of personal freedom by public authority is only permissible on a legal basis. Persons who have been deprived of their freedom must be informed at the latest on the following day by whose authority and for what reasons the deprecations of freedom were ordered. Opportunity shall be afforded them without delay of submitting objection to their deprecations to freedom.
Article 115 provided that every German's home is his sanctuary and is invoilable. Exceptions may be made as provided by law. have been applicable in any of our countries. and without special permission. for purposes not contrary to criminal law.
Article 153 guaranteed their rights of property. All of these guarantees of the Weimar constitution were swept away by the HitlerHindenburg decree the morning after the fire. tution itself authorized him temporarily to suspend these fundamental rights "if the public safety and order in the German Reich are considerably disturbed or endangered." It must also be acknowledged that President Ebert previously had invoked this power. terms of the Hitler-Hindenburg decree departed from all previous ones in which the power of suspension had been invoked. Whenever President Ebert had suspended constitutional guarantees of individual rights, his decree had expressly revived the Protective Custody Act adopted by the Reichstag in 1916 during the previous war. This Act guaranteed a judicial hearing within 24 hours of arrest, gave a right to have counsel and to inspect all relevant records, provided for appeal, and authorized compensation from Treasury funds for erroneous arrests.
minate peoples and institutions which might serve as a focus or instrument for overturning their "new world order" at any time or place. We consider these crimes against humanity in this opening address as manifestations of the one Nazi plan and I propose to unfold to you our proof according to General von Fritsch's classification.
1. THE BATTLE AGAINST THE WORKING CLASS. trade unions. The General German Trade Union Confederation (ADGB) with twenty-eight affiliated unions, and the General Independent Employees Confederation (AFA) with thirteen federated unions together numbered more than 4,500,000 members. The Christian Trade Union had over 1,250,000 members. nations, had little to gain personally by war. While labor is usually brought around to the support of the nation at war, labor by and large is a pacific, though by no means a pacifist force in the world. The working people of Germany had not forgotten in 1933 how heavy the yoke of the war lord can be. Moreover, the German working people were identified in the minds of the militarists with the revolution of 1918, when the workers joined with the revolting seamen and soldiers against a continuance of the first World War, an act for which German labor was never forgiven by the military crowd. The Nazi program required that this part of the German population not only be stripped of power to resist diversion of its scanty comforts to armament, but also be wheedled or whipped into new and unheard of sacrifices as part of the Nazi war preparation. Labor must be cowed, and that meant its organizations and means of cohesion and defense must be destroyed. Robert Ley in a speech to workers on May 2, 1933 in which he said this:
"You may say what else do you want, you have the absolute power.
True we have the power, but we do not have the whole people, we do not have you workers 100%, and it is you whom we want; we will not let you be until you stand with us in com such safeguards.
The omission may not have been noted by von Hindenburg. Certainly he did not appreciate its effect. It left the Nazi police and party formations, already existing and functioning under Hitler, completely unrestrained and irresponsible. Secret arrest and indefinite detention, without charges, without evidence, without hearing, without counsel, became the method of inflicting inhuman punishment on any whom the Nazi police suspected or disliked. No court could issue an injunction, or writ of habeas corpus, or certiorari. The German people were in the hands of the police, the police were in the hands of the Nazi Party, and the Party was in the hands of a ring of evil men, of whom the defendants here before you are surviving and representative leaders. merely overcoming current opposition but contemplated exterminating elements which could not be reconciled with the Nazi philosophy of the state. It not only sought to establish the Nazi "new order" but to secure its sway, as Hitler predicted, "for a thousand years." Nazis were never in doubt or disagreement as to what these dissident elements were. They were concisely described by one of them, Col. General von Fritsch, on December 11, 1938, in these words. (Document No. 1947-PS.) I emphasize this because it identifies so clearly the object of the Nazi program of extermination. He writes in a document which will be proved to you:
to become powerful again: 1. The battle against the working class -- Hitler has won this (this is 1938). 2. Against the 3. Against the Jews."
The warfare against these elements was continuous. The battle in Germany was but a practice skirmish for the worldwide drive against them. Here in point of geography and of time are two groups of crimes against humanity -- one within Germany before and during the war, and one in occupied territory during the war. But these two are not separated in Nazi planning. They are a continuous unfolding of the Nazi plan to exter plete, genuine acknowledgment," The first Nazi attack was upon the two larger unions.
On April 21, 1933 an order not even in the name of the Government, but in the name of the Nazi Party was issued by the conspirator Robert Ley who described himself therein as "Chief of Staff of the political organization of the NSDAP." This order was applicable to the Trade Union Confederation and the Independent Employees Confederation, the two largest of the German Unions. It directed seizure of their properties and arrest of the principal leaders.
The party order directed party organs which we here denounce as criminal associations, the SA and SS "to be employed for the occupation of the trade union properties, and for the taking into custody of personalities who come into question." And it directed taking into "protective custody" of all chairmen and district secretaries of such unions and branch directors of the labor bank.
These orders were carried out on May 2, 1933. All funds of the labor unions, including pension and benefit funds, were seized. Union leaders were sent to concentration camps. A few days later, on May 10, 1933 Hitler appointed Robert Ley leader of the German Labor Front (DEUTSCHE ARBEITSFRONT), which succeeded to all the confiscated union funds. The German Labor Front, a Nazi controlled labor bureau, was then set up under Ley to teach the Nazi philosophy to German workers and to weed out from industrial employment all who were backward in their lessons. "Factory Troops" as they were called, were organized as an "ideological shock squad within the factory." The Party order provided that "outside of the German Labor Front, no other organization (whether of workers or of employees) is to exist." On June 24, 1933 the remaining Christian Trade Unions were seized pursuant to an order, again of the Nazi Party, signed by Ley. that "trustees" of labor, and I quote the word "trustees" of labor, appointed by Hitler, should regulate the conditions of all labor contracts, replacing the former process of collective bargaining. On November 30, 1934 a decree "regulating national labor" introduced the fuehrer principle into industrial relations. It provided that the owners of enterprises should be the leaders or fuehrers and the workers should be the followers, and it authorized the owner-fuehrers to "make decisions for employees and laborers in all matters concerning the enterprise."
It was by such bait that the great German industrialists were induced to support the Nazi cause, to their own ultimate ruin. they forced the youth into the ranks of the laboring people they had thus led into chains. Under a compulsory labor service decree on 26 June, 1935, young men and women between the ages of 18 and 25 were conscripted for labor.