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.
Thus was the purpose to subjugate German labor accomplished. In the words of Ley, this accomplishment consisted "in eliminating the association character of the trade union and employees' associations, and in its places we have substituted the conception 'soldiers of work'." The productive manpower of the German nation was thus brought under Nazi control and discipline. By these steps the defendants won the battle to liquidate labor unions as potential opposition and were enabled to impose upon the working class the burdens of preparing for aggressive war. answered our indictment with suicide. Apparently he knew no better answer.
2. I take up the battle against the churches, the second in the described elements that must be defeated. ideology. But we who believe in freedom of conscience and of religion base no charge of criminality on anybody's ideology. It is not because the Nazi themselves were irreligious or pagan, but because they persecuted others of the Christian faith that they become guilty of crime, and it is because the persecution was a step in the preparation for aggressive warfare that the offense becomes one of international consequence. To remove every moderating influence among the German people and to put its population on a total war footing, the conspirators devised and carried out a systematic and relentless repression of all Christian sects and churches. point. Martin Bormann in June, 1941, issued a secret decree on the relation of Christianity and National Socialism. I quote from it. The decree provided: "With the Party, its components, and attached units, the Fuehrer has created for himself thereby the German Reich leadership, an instrument which makes him independent of the church. All influences which might impair or damage the leadership of the people exercised by the Fuehrer with the help of the National Socialist Party must be eliminated.
More and more the people must be separated from the churches and their organs and pastors. But never again must an influence on leadership of the people be yielded to the churches. This influence must be broken completely and finally. Only the Reich government, and by its direction the party, its components, and attached units have a right to leadership of the people. Just as the deleterious influence of astrologers, seers, and other fakirs are eliminated and suppressed by the State, so must the possibility of church influence also be totally removed. Not until this has happened does the state leadership have influence on the individual citizens. Not until then are the people and Reich secure in their existence for all time."
Christian influence will be proved by such items as this telegram from the Gestapo, Berlin, to the Gestapo, Nurnberg on July 24, 1938, which recites what was going on in Rottenburg. (Document No. 848-PS).
I got from the Gestapo a telegram signed by Dr. Best from the Berlin office of the 23rd of July 1938.
"In connection with my report (special delivery of 23 July 1938 subject: Bishop Dr. Sproll of Rottenburg, I further communicate that the following teletype from the Gestapo office in Stuttgart just came in here: The Party on 23 July 1939 from 2100 on carried out the third demonstration against Bishop Sproll. Participants, about 2,500-3,000, were brought in from outside by bus, etc. The Rottenburg populace again did not participate in the demonstrations. The town took rather a hostile attitude to the demonstrations. The action got completely out of hand of the Party Member responsible for it. The demonstrators stormed the palace and beat in the gates and doors. About 150 to 200 people forced their way into the palace, searched the rooms, threw files out of the windows, and rummaged through the beds in the rooms of the palace. One bed was ignited. Before the fire got to the other objects of equipment in the rooms and the palace, the flaming bed could be thrown from the window and the fire extinguished. The Bishop was with Archbishop Groeber of Freiburg, and the ladies and gentlemen of his menage in the chapel at prayer. About 25 to 30 people pressed into this chapel and molested those present. Bishop Groeber was taken for Bishop Sproll. He was grabbed by the robe and dragged back and forth. Finally the intruders realized that Bishop Groeber is not the one they are seeking. They *---* then be persuaded to leave the building. After the evacuation of the palace by the demonstrators I had an interview with Archbishop Groeber, who left Rottenburg in the night.
Groeber wants to turn to the Fuehrer and Reich Minister of the Interior Dr. Frick anew. On the course of the action, the damage done as well as the homage of the Rottenburg populace beginning today for the Bishop I shall immediately hand in a full report, after I am in the act of suppressing counter mass meetings. Gestapo Office Stuttgart. In case the Fuehrer has instructions to give in this matter, I request that these be transmitted most quickly, best by telephone to Gestapo Office, telephone Berlin 12 00 40 attention of Regierung Assistant Freytag, so that corresponding instructions can be forwarded to Stuttgart.
(signed) Dr. Best. " the proposal of Kerrl as Church Minister to place the Protestant Church under State tutelage and proclaim Hitler its Supreme head. Rosenberg was opposed, hinting that Naziism was to suppress the Christian Church completely after the war. such as Jehovah's Witnesses and the Pentecostal Association, was peculiarly relentless and cruel. The policy toward the Evangelical Churches, however, was to use their influence for the Nazis' own purposes. In September, 1933, Mueller was appointed the Fuehrer's representative with power to deal with the "affairs of the Evangelical Church" in its relations to the State. Eventually, steps were taken to create a Reich Bishop vested with power to control this Church. A long conflict followed, Paster Niemoeller was sent to concentration camp, and extended interference with the internal discipline and administration of the Churches occurred.
Catholic Church. After a strategic concordat with the Holy See, signed in July, 1933 in Rome, which never was observed by the Nazi Party, a long and persistent persecution of the Catholic Church, its priesthood and its members, was carried out. Church Schools and educational institutions were suppressed or subjected to requirements of Nazi teaching inconsistent with the Christian faith.
THE PRESIDENT: We shall now take our noon recess.
(Whereupon at 12:30 o'clock the adjournment was made)
THE PRESIDENT: The Tribunal will adjourn for fifteen minutes at half past three and then continue until half past four.
JUSTICE JACKSON: I was about to take up CRIMES COMMITTED AGAINST THE JEWS. the Nazis were those against the Jews. Those in Germany, in 1933, numbered about 500,000. In the aggregate, they had made for themselves positions which excited envy, and had accumulated properties which excited the avarice of the Nazis. They were few enough to be helpless and numerous enough to be held up as a menace. ting Jews. What we charge against these defendants is not those arrogances and pretensions which frequently accompany the intermingling of different races and peoples and which are likely, despite the honest efforts of Government, to produce regrettable crimes and convulsions. It is our purpose to show plans and designs to which all Nazis were fanatically committed, to annihilate all Jewish people. These crimes were organized and promoted by the Party Leadership, executed and protected by the Nazi officials, as we shall convince you by written orders of the Secret State Police itself. policy. It was a policy directed against other nations as well as against the Jews themselves. Anti-Semitism was promoted to divide and embitter the democratic peoples and to soften their resistance to the Nazi aggression.
As Robert Ley himself declared, "The second German secret weapon is Anti-Semitism because if it is constantly pursued by Germany, it will become a universal problem which all nations will be forced to consider."
Anti-Semitism also has been aptly credited with being a "spearhead of terror." The ghetto was the laboratory for testing repressive measures. Jewish property was the first to be expropriated, but the custom grew and included similar measures against Anti-Nazi Germans, Poles, Czechs, Frenchman, and Belgians. Extermination of the Jews enabled the Nazis to bring a practiced hand to similar measures against Poles, Serbs, and Greeks. The plight of the Jew was a constant threat to opposition and discontent among other elements of Europe's population -- pacifists, conservatives, communists, Catholics, Protestants, socialists. It was in fact, a threat to every dissenting opinion and to every non-Nazi's life. violent measures, such as disfranchisement and discriminations against their religion, and the placing of impediments in the way of success in economic life. It moved rapidly to organized mass violence against them, physical isolation in ghettos, deportation, forced labor, mass starvation, and extermination. The Government, the Party formations indicted before you as criminal organizations, the Secret State Police, the Army, private and semi-public associations, and "spontaneous" mobs that were carefully inspired from official sources, were all agencies that were concerned in this persecution. Nor was it directed against individual Jews for personal bad citizenship or unpopularity. The avowed purpose was the destruction of the Jewish people as a whole, an end in itself; a measure of preparation for war, and a discipline for conquered peoples. methodically and thoroughly pursued that despite German defeat and Nazi prostration, this Nazi aim largely has succeeded. Only remnants of the European Jewish population remain in Germany, in the countries which Germany occupied, and in those which were her satellites or collaborators.
Of the 9,600,000 Jews who lived in Nazi dominated Europe, 60 percent are authoritatively estimated to have perished. 5,700,000 Jews are missing from the countries in which they formerly lived, and over 4,500,000 cannot be accounted for by the normal death rate nor by immigration; nor are they included among displaced persons. History does not record a crime perpetrated against so many victims or ever carried out with such calculated cruelty. these defendants and believe that in this Twentieth Century human beings could inflict such sufferings as will be proved here on their own countrymen as well as upon their so-called "inferior" enemies. Particular crimes, and the responsibility of defendants for them, are to be dealt with by the Soviet Government's Counsel, when committed in the East, and by Counsel for the Republic of France when committed in the West. I advert to them now only to show their magnitude as evidence of a purpose and a knowledge common to all defendants, of an official plan rather than of a capricious policy of some individual commander, and to show a continuity of Jewish persecution from the rise of the Nazi conspiracy to its collapse which forbids us to believe that any person could be identified with any part of Nazi action without approving this most conspicious item in their program. persecutions. The defendant Streicher led the Nazis in anti-Semitic bitterness and extremism. In March of 1942 he complained that Christian teachings have stood in the way of "radical solution of the Jewish question in Europe", and quoted enthusiastically as the Twentieth Century solution the fuehrer's proclamation of February 24, 1942 that "the Jew will be exterminated". (Document No. 1957PS). And on November 4, 1943, Streicher declared that the Jews, and I quote his words, "have disappeared from Europe and that the Jewish 'Reservoir of the East' from which the Jewish plague has for centuries beset the people of Europe, has ceased to exist." (Document No. 1965-PS, Nov. 4, 1943). Streicher now the effrontery to tell us he is "only a Zionist" and he only wants to return the Jews to Palestine.
But on May, 1, 1942 (Document No. 1979-PS) he wrote:
"It is also not only an European problem! The Jewish question is a world question! Not only is Germany not safe long as Jews live in the rest of the world."
say, summarized in his Diary in 1944 the Nazi policy thus: "The Jews are a race which has to be eliminated; whenever we catch one, it is his end." (Document No. 2233-PS, Vol. 1944, P. 26.) And earlier, speaking of his function as Governor General of Poland, Hans Frank confided to his diary this sentiment: "Of course I cannot eliminate all lice and Jews in only a year's time." (Document No. 2233-PS, Vol. IV, 1940, p. 1158.) I could multiply endlessly this kind of Nazi ranting but I will leave it to the evidence and turn to the fruit of this perverted thinking. law, but the law itself was employed to some extent. There were the infamous Nurnberg decrees of September 15, 1935. (R. 613-L.I., P. 1146.) The Jews were segregated into ghettos and put into forced labor; they were expelled from their professions; their property was expropriated; all cultural life, the press, the theatre, and schools were prohibited them; and the SD was made responsible for them. (Documents Nos. 112-PS, 212-PS, 069-PS.) This was an ominous guardianship.
It was ordered that "An eventual act by the civilian population against the Jews is not to be prevented as long as this is compatible with the maintenance of order and security in the rear of fighting troops." And again, "The first main goal of the German measures must be the strict segregation of Jewry from the rest of the population. In the execution of this, first of all, is the seizing of the Jewish populace by the introduction of a registration order and similiar, appropriate measures. Then immediately, the wearing of the recognition sign, consisting of a yellow Jewish star, is to be brought about and all rights of freedom for Jews are to be withdrawn. They are to be placed in ghettos, and, at the same time, are to be separated according to sexes. The entire Jewish property is to be seized and confiscated, with the exception of that which is necessary for a bare existence."