Both the Higher SS and Police leader, and backing him, the Reichsfuehrer SS, attempted to bring as much as possible under their jurisdiction in connection with the new regulation of the competence of the State Secretariat; on the other hand, the Governor-General, in the interest of the maintenance of some sort of order in the administration, naturally tried to obtain control of at least certain departments of the order Police and the administration Police. There is no doubt at all that it was the Police that emerged the victor in these struggles. the transfer of offices to the State Secretary for Security - to declare himself willing to transfer to the State Secretary all the departments of the Security Police and the order Police. I have submitted this decree to the Tribunal (together with its two appendices A and B) in the course of the evidence as Exhibit Frank No. 4. The two appendices list all the departments of the order and security police that have ever existed in the German Police system. In Appendix A, which covers the departments of the order police, there are 26 numbers in which not only all the departments of the order police are transferred to the State Secretary for Security, but over and above that, almost all the departmental functions of the so-called administration police. I will only mention No. 18 as one example among many. This transfers to the order Police, and therewith to the Higher SS and Police leader, all matters connected with price control. What is true of the order Police is true in still greater measure of the departments of the Security Police. No change as compared with the earlier situation was brought about by placing under the jurisdiction of the Higher SS and Police leader the whole of the political and criminal police, political intelligence, Jewish affairs and similar departments; these competencies were already his as leader of the Security Police and the SD, and were made entirely independent of the administration of the Government-General under the secret decree of the year 1939. Departments were also transferred to the State Secretary for Security which had only the remotest connection with the tasks of the Security Police, i.e. matters such as the regulation of holidays and so on.
Of no inconsiderable importance are the twl last numbers in the appendix A and B, in which it is expressly provided that at conferences and meetings, particularly with the central Reich authorities, on all matters pertaining to the Order and security police, the Government-General -- not the Governor -should no represented by the Higher SS and Police Leader.
Therewith any competency possessed, by the Governor-General, even in regard to comparitively unimportant branches of the Administrative police, was transferred to the organs of Reichsfuehrer SS Himmler, and the Government-General was thus deprived of even the last remnants of an executive of its own. conditions obtaining between administration and police in the Government-General, is it possible to form an even approximately correct appreciation of the events in the Government-General which form part of the subject of the indictment in this trial. tions against the defendant Dr. Prank in the main, by quotations from the defendant's diary. In this connection I have the following basic observation to make: but was compiled by stenographers who were present at Government conferences and other meetings with the Governor-General. The diary consists of 42 volumes with not less than 10,000 to 12,000 pages of typescript. of ditation by the Defendant, but in the form, of stenographers' transcripts. For the greater part--and this is evident from the Diary itself--the authoris of this Diary did not record the various speeches and remarks word for word, but made a summarized version in their own words. The entries in the Diary were not cheeked by the defendant and--again with one single exception--were not signed by him. The attendance lists stapled into several volumes of the Diary--they are only contained in such, volumes as relate to Government conferences--cannot be looked upon as a substitue for a confirmatory note.
many entries in the diary were not made on the basis of personal observations, but came about throught the fact that the author was told, by the participatns, about the subject of government meetings or other conferences after they had taken place, and then expressed it in the diary in his own words. be determined that the entries cannot be considered complete. erial evidential value of this diary must not be overestimated. The evidential value of this diary stands in no way in comparison to the evidential value of entries, which have been made personally by the persons in question. the following: importance in so far as the document is investigated in its entirety. The diary of the Defendant Frank with its 10,000 to 12 ,000 ages is me uniform document. It is improper to put in as evidence certain simple entries without showing the context in which alone some of them can be understood. But it is particularly improper--and this infringes the principles of any presentation of evidence--to select from some uniform whole, such as a long speech, a few sentences and put them in as evidence. In Document Book No.II, I have listed a few examples of this, and hereby refer to them. witness-box, the diary is a uniform whole; only in its entirety can it be probative, and form part of the presentation of evidence. I have read through that diary of more than 10,000 pages, and can only confirm his opinion. And that was why I did not use single entries in presenting my evidence, but put in the whole diary.
If I myself, in presenting evidence, have read certain single entries from the diary, and if in the course of my present address I shall quote a few more passages from it, then, just as in the case of the extracts put forward by the prosecution, their evidential value can certainly be gagued only within the framework of the whole diary.
established by the evidence: As the diaries show, and as is evident in particular from the testimony given by the witnesses Buehler, Boepple and Meidinger, the defendant Frank, in his capacity as Governor-General often made two or three improvised speeches in the course of one day. consist for the most part of single sentences from such speeches. If we take into consideration both the temperament of the defendant and his habit of expressing himself in an incisive manner, then that is another reason which tends to reduce the probative value of these extracts from the diary. And we actually do find many diary entries which flatly contradict other entries on the same subject occurring a little earlier or later. dant Frank, the following must not be left out of consideration--and this too may be looked up on as established by the evidence: It was a foregone conclusion that the defendant Frank, as open champion idea of a State resting on law and of the indepepdence of the judiciary, would come into increasingly sharp conflict with the representatives of the Police-State System; this developed to an even greater degree in the course of the war, both within the Reich territory and in occupied country. The representatives of the Police-State, however, were Reich Fuehrer SS Himmler and, for the area of the Government General, the Higher SS and Police Leader East, above all and in particular SS Ober gruppenfuehrer and General of Police Krueger.
The rela-
tions between the defendant Frank on the one hand, and Reich Fuehrer S S Himmler and his representative Obergruppenfuehrer Krueger on the other, had been extremely bad even at the time the Government-General was established. They detiriorated still more as the divergence of outlook concerning the tasks of the police came over more openly to the fore, and the defendant Frank was forced to make increasingly strong protests to the chief of the Reich Chancellery, Dr. Lammers, and to the Fuehrer himself, regarding the violent measures taken by the Security Police and the SD. an executive of his own, had on the other hand no choice but to make repeated attempts to co-ordinate the work of the general administration with that of the police, in order to be in a position to carry out any administrative work at all. Obviously, those objectives demanded--at least on the face of things-a degree of conciliation towards the general attitude of the Security Police and, above all, of the Higher SS and Police Leader East. Moreover, the evidence has further established that the tension existing between the Governor-General and the Higher SS and Police Leader often reached such, a degree that the defendant Frank could not but feel himself menaced and--to quote the words of the witness Buehler--was no longer a free agent and master of his own decisions.
The testimony of the witnesses Bach-Zelowsky and Dr. Albrecht leave no doubt on this point. Quite rightly, therefore, the witness Dr. Buehler also pointed out that the defendant Frank expressed himself with particular vehemence when the Higher SS and Police Leader, or the Commander in Chief of the Security Police and the SD were present at conferences and that his utterances were made on quite a different note when he was speaking to an audience composed only of members of the administration. Even a cursory inspection of the diary will confirm this. All these circumstances must be taken into consideration in assessing the substantive evidencial value of the defendant Frank's diary.
only personal property that Frank was able to rescue from the castle at Cracow. On his arrest, he handed all the diaries to the officers who took him into custody. It would have been an easy matter for him to destroy those diaries. brought against the defendant, and their legal aspects. The defendant Frank is accused of having approved, led and participated in war crimes, and crimes agains t humanity in the administration of occupied territory. sovereign state, not an individual, can be a subject of International Law. To make International Law binding on an individual, International Law itself would have to lay down that a certain set of facts constitutes a wrong and that the rule thereby established is applicable to an individual creating such a set of facts. Only in that way can individuals, who under the law as it stands, are subjected only to municipal criminal law, by way of exception be bound directly by International Law. exceptional cases only, permits a State to punish the national of an enemy State who has fallen into its power, if before his capture, he has been guilty of infringing the rules of war. But even no re punishment is excluded if the deed was not committed on the person's own initiative, but can only he atrributed to his s tate of allegiance, moreover, the conception of war crimes and their factual characteristics are the subject of great controversy both in judicial decisions and in legal literature. nex to the IVth Convention on the Laws and Customs of War on hand, and purport to be a codification of certain section of in assessing the substantive evidencial value of the defendant Frank's diary.
only personal property that Frank was able to rescue from the castle at Cracow. On his arrest, he handed all the diaries to the officers who took him into custody. It would have been an easy matter for him to destroy those diaries. brought against the defendant, and their legal aspects. The defendant Frank is accused of having approved, led and participated in war crimes, and crimes agains t humanity in the administration of occupied territory. sovereign state, not an individual, can be a subject of International Law. To make International Law binding on an individual, International Law itself would have to lay down that a certain set of facts constitutes a wrong and that the rule thereby established is applicable to an individual creating such a set of facts. Only in that way can individuals, who under the law as it stands, are subjected only to municipal criminal law, by way of exception be bound directly by International Law. exceptional cases only, permits a State to punish the national of an enemy State who has fallen into its power, if before his capture, he has been guilty of infringing the rules of war. But even here punishment is excluded if the deed was not committed on the person's own initiative, but can only he atrributed to his s tate of allegiance, Moreover, the conception of war crimes and their factual characteristics are the subject of great controversy both in judicial decisions and in legal literature. nex to the IVth Convention on the Laws and Customs of War on Land, and purport to be a codification of certain section of the law of war, list any sets of facts which could be inter-preted as a basis for the criminal liability of individuals.
In Article 3 of this Concention it is, on the contrary, expressly provided that not individuals but the State that has infringed the Rules, may, under certain circumstances, be liable to pay an indemnity and is also responsible for all acts done by persons belonging to its armed forces.
following should also be noted: of wars in the 19th Century. Those wars were confined in the main to the armed forces directly concerned in them. in respect of the geographical extent of the bellicose conflicts. On the contrary, the war became a struggle for extermination of the nations concerned, a struggle in which each belligerent party utilized the whole of its war potential and all its material and imponderable resources. War technique having been meanwhile brought to perfection point, the second World War was bound to destroy altogether the framework set up for the conduct of war by the Hague Rules for Land Warfare. That is easily shown by circumstantial evidence: the present condition of Europe today reveals this. If we remember in addition that in Germany alone the greater part of almost every city has been destroyed as a result of bombing raids; and not only that, but that considerably more than a million civilians thereby lost their lives and that in a single major raid on the city of Dresden almost 300,000 people were killed, then it will be possible to realize that the Hague Rules for Land Warfare (at any rate in respect of many activities coming under the rules of war) can no longer be an adequate expression of the laws and customs to be observed in waging war. But if any doubt should exist on this subject, then that doubt will certainly be removed on contemplation of the consequences of the two atom bombs which razed Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the ground and killed hundreds of thousands of people. adduce the provisions of the Hague Rules for Land Warfare, even indirectly and by way of analogy, to establish individual criminal Liability. give a clear, general definition of the factual characteristics of so-called war crimes. Referring to the fact that even Article 6 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal only purports to furnish a list of examples, it will be realized that the question as to whether a certain line of conduct amounts to the commission of a war crime or not, can only be answered on the merits of each particular case and then only if all the circumstances are taken into consideration.
responsibility of the defendant Frank, the Prosecution submitted as Exhibit USA 609 (864 PS) minutes of a conference held by the Fuehrer with the Chief of the OKW on the future form of Polish relations to Germany. This Conference took place on October 17, 1939. It is alleged that these minutes alone, in which the administrative goals of the defendant Frank in the Government-General are said to be established,reveal a plan or conspiracy at variance with the laws of warfare and humanity. This is an inadmissible conclusion, at least in so far as the defendant Frank is concerned. the defendant Frank with a task in conformity with the administrative aims demanded in that conference. Moreover, this seems very unlikely, because the directives laid down at that conference dealt mainly with measures which could only be carried out, not by the general administration, but alone by the Security Police, the SD and the other organs and offices under Reichsfuehrer SS Himmler. In this connection special mention should also be made of the powers entrusted to Reichsfuehrer SS Himmler ( before the date of that conference) in his capacity of Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of the German Nation. Actually, there is at the end of document USA-609, a reference to a commission with which Himmler was charged. In consideration of the fact that the defendant Frank, in the course of a short interview with Hitler, about the middle of September 1939, had been told to take over the civil administration of occupied Polish territory as Chief of Administration and had not seen Hitler for a very long time after that, it can safely be assumed that the directives laid down at the conference between Hitler and the Chief of the OKW were intended, not for the defendant Frank, but for Reichsfuehrer SS Himmler, who was the only person to have the necessary executive organs at his disposal.
THE PRESIDENT: We will adjourn now.
(A recess was taken.)
also alleged to show the criminality of the administrative aims of the defendant Frank is USA Exhibit No, 297, which is EC 344-16. The content of this document is a discussion which the defendant Frank is said to have had on October 3, 1939 with a certain Captain Varain. The defendant Frank testified in the witness-box that he had never made any such or similar statements to an officer. Moreover, a comparison of the dates shows that this conversation, even if it should have taken place, can have no connection with the subject of the conference between the Fuehrer and the Chief of the OKW, the latter not having been hold till October 17, 1939; that is, at a later date. with the personal responsibility of the defendant Frank, but in connection with the accusation of so-called Germanization, a document was submitted with the number USA Exhibit 300, 661-PS. This is a memorandum entitled, "Legal aspects of German Policy towards the Poles from the ethno-political point of view". According to a note on the title page, the legal part of this was to serve as a model for the Committee of the Academy for German Law which dealt with legal nationality questions. This document can have no probative value in connection with the personal responsibility of there defendant Frank. He testified in the witness-box that he had given no instructions for the writing of that memorandum and that he was not aware of its content. Over and above this, it would seem thatno substantive evidential value can be attached to that document within the scope of this whole trial. instructions that should be written. Its whole form and content Would seem to show that it is not an official document, but rather the work of a private individual, It was stated to have been found at the Ministry of Justice in Cassel, But in actual fact there has been no Ministry of Justice at Cassel for many decades. All those circumstances would point to the material probative value of this document as being at least extremely small.
place in the year 1939 on the occasion of the establishment of the Government General, the following should be pointed-out: essential importance to know what Hitler, he himself, or other persons said on one occasion or another, but what policy the defendant Frank actually pursued towards the Polish and Ukrainian peoples. Aid here there can be-no no possible doubt -- on the basis both of the general result of the evidence and in particular of entries in the diary of the defendant himself -- that he repudiated all tendencies and measures designed to effect Germanization. That is shown with great clarity by the extracts from the diary which I have submitted to the Tribunal. Thus, on March 8, 1940, he declared at a meeting of department chiefs, i.e., to an audience of men who as leaders of the various main departments were deputed to put his directives into practice:
"I have been charged by the Fuehrer to look upon the Government-General as the hone of the Polish people. Accordingly no Germanization of any sort or kind is possible. In your departments you will please see that the twolanguage principle is strictly observed; you will also point out to district and provincial officers that no violence is to be used in opposing such safeguarding of separate Polish existence. We have in a certain sense herewith taken over on trust from the Fuehrer the responsibility for Polish national life." in the Conference between Hitler and the Chief of the OKW on October 17, 1939 and contained in document USA 609, 864-PS cannot possibly have been made the subject of the duties with which the defendant Frank was charged. On the other hand, in view of the entire work done by the Higher SS and PoliceLeader East from the first day of his appointment, it can safely be assumed that it was Reichsfuehrer SS Himmler whom Hitler charged with carrying out the directives laid down at his conference with the Chief of the OKW.
A diary entry of February 19, 1940 is on the same lines; in this the defendant Frank advocates the formation of a Polish government or regency Council.
and district and municipal commanders of the District of Radom, the defendant Frank gave out inprogramme form his directives regarding general administration. On this occasion the defendant Frank said among other things:
"1. The Government-General comprises that part of the occupied Polish area which is not a component part of the German Reich....
"2. The Fuehrer has decreed that this territory is to be the home of the Polish people. The Fuehrer and General Field-Marshal Goering have impressed on me over and over again that this territory is not to be subjected to Germanization.
"3. In accordance with the instructions we have received underthe Fuehrer's decree Polish laws will remain in force here."
On June 7, 1942 the defendant Frank stated word for word as follows:
"It is not as rulers by violence that we come and go in this country. We have no terroristic or oppressive intentions. Welded into the interests of Greater Germany, the living rights of the Poles and Ukrainians in this territory are also safeguarded by us. We have not taken away from the Poles and Ukrainians either their churches, their schools or their education. The German does not wish to de-nationalize by violent means. We are sufficient unto ourselves, and we know that people mist be born into our community and that it is a distinction to belong to it. And that is why we can look their world in the face with this our work." End of quote. that the measures taken, at any rate by Frank, were intended to care for the Polish nation and that, he repudiated any terror policy.
I come now to the so-called "peace-enforcing action". When their campaign against Poland had ended in September 1939, that did not mean that all resistance had ceased. Very soon afterwards now centres of resistance sprang up, and when on April 9, 194 0 German troops occupied Denmark and Norway and on May 10, 1940, the German Western Army had begun their attack, the leaders of the Polish resistance movement believed that -- in consideration of the general political and military situation -- the time for action had come. This resistance movement was all the more dangerous because scattered but not inconsiderable remnants of the former Polish Army were active in it.
A large number of entries in the diary of the defendant Frank show that the security situation worsened from day to day during that period, Here for instance is on entry for May 16, 1940:
"The general war situation requires that the most serious consideration be given to the internal security situation of the government General. A large number of signs and actions lead one to the conclusion that there exists a widely-organized wave of resistance on the part of the Poles in the country, and that we are on the threshold of violent happenings on a large scale. Thousands of Poles are already organized in secret circles; they are armed and are being incited in the most seditious manner to commit all kinds of violence." given - as the diary shows, by the Fuehrer himself - that in the interest of the maintenance of public security, all measures were to be taken to suppress the imminent revolt.
That order was given through Himmler to the Higher SS and Police Leader. The witness-box, and the evidence given by the witness Dr. Luehler, have shown introduced by a decree issued in the year 1939; and moreover, the decisions don which in many cases modified, the sentence .. The Chairman of the Pardon -- the defendant Dr. Seyss-Inquart.
As his testimony revealed, no less than prisonment by the Pardon Board.
For the rest, as regards the so-called ex Commissioner for the Consolidation of the German nation (Himmler) and of having thereby also committed, a war crime.
There is no question but that hardship for those who are affected by them; in many cases a resettlement means the destruction of a person's economic existence.
Nevertheless, it crime or a crime against humanity, for the following reasons :world.
Among other things they said :
"Some weeks ago we found occasion to comment on the outrageous happenings in the East of Germany, particularly in Silesia and Sudetenland, where more than ten millions Germans have been driven from their ancestral homes in brutal fashion, no investigation having been made to ascertain whether or not there was any question of personal guilt. No pen can describe the unspeakable misery there imposed in contravention of all consideration of humanity and justice. All these people are being crammed together in the rump of Germany without means to found an existence there. It cannot be foreseen how these masses of people who have been driven from their homes can become other than peace-lacking and peace-disturbing elements." dangers connected with such measures, dangers which must arises alone out of the fact that in view of her envisaged deprivations of territory, Germany -- with an area reduced by 22 % as compared with 1919 - will have to feed a population increased by 18 % and that in future there will be 200 inhabitants to the square kilometer. I am, further, not pointing to this state of affairs to show that if the present economic policy is continued and the so-called industrial plan is maintained, Germany is heading for a catastrophe the consequences of which cannot be confined to the German people. The evidential relevance of these facts is however shown by the following: dance with a resolution taken at Potsdam on August 2, 1945 by President Truman, Generalissimo Stalin and Prime Minister Attlee.
GENERAL RUDENKO: Mr. President, excuse me for interrupting the defendant's counsel, but it seems to me the considerations of the law and the critique of the decisions taken at Potsdam have no relation to the present case.
DR. SEIDL: Mr. President, may I briefly define my attitude on this ? the conference at Potsdam. However, I am anxious to find out whether, employing the rules of the Charter, a certain conduct which has been alleged on against humanity. It is only within the framework of investigating that question that I find myself forced to go into the decisions of the so-called Potsdam conference and bring them up in my argument.
THE PRESIDENT: Dr. Seidl, the Tribunal considers that your references to the Potsdam declaration are irrelevant, and the objection of General Rudenko is therefore sustained. You are directed to go on to some other part of your argument.
DR. SEIDL: Mr. President, I presume that the Tribunal have the translation of my presentation at hand. I am not quite clear about the question as to whether the final conclusion, which appears at page 38, is also affected by the decision of the Tribunal which you have just announced.
THE PRESIDENT: It is affected by that, and I think you can pass on to page 40, where you begin to deal with the subject of the Jews. That is the second paragraph on page 40.
DR. SEIDL: Very well, Mr. President. a program for the extermination of Jews of Polish nationality, thereby infringing upon the laws of war and humanity. in his capacity as Governor-General, he revealed his point of view on the Jewish question. The extracts from the diary submitted by the Prosecution in connection with this matter comprise practically everything relevant there to in the defendant Frank's diary of ten to 12,000 typed pages. Nevertheless it shall not be denied that the defendant Frank made no secret of his antiSemitic views. He spoke in detail on this question when giving his testimony in the witness-box. submitted by the Prosecution is quite another matter, almost all of them consist of statements made by the defendant Frank in speeches, but there has not even been an attempt by the Prosecution to prove the existence of a cause connection between these statements and the measures carried out against the Jews by the Security Police. witnesses Dr. Bilfinger and Dr. Buehler, it can be looked upon as certain -in connection with the secret Decree concerning the jurisdiction of the Security Police and the SD of the year 1939, and the Decree concerning the transger of certain tasks to the State Secretary for Security- that all the measures concerning Jews in the Government-General were carried out exclusively by Reich Fuehrer SS Himmler and his organs.
That is true for both the initiation and the organization of the so-called final solution of the Jewish question. timony given by the witnesses Wisliceny and Hoess and of the documents presented by the Prosecution, that these measures were undertaken on Hitler' s express orders and that only a small circle of persons was concerned in their execution. This small circle was confined in the main to a few SS leaders of Department IV-a-4-b of the RSHA and the personnel of the concentration camps that had been selected for the purpose. these measures. The above facts also show that the antisemitic statements by the defendant Frank submitted by the Prosecution have no causal connection with the so-called final solution of the Jewish question.
Since a casual link must be established before the question of illegality and guilt can even be considered, it does not seem necessary to well further on the matter.
All the less because the factual elements of many punishable offenses can only be said to exist if at least an attempt has been made, that is, if the commission of the offense has at least been begun. Under the principles derived from the criminal law of all civilized nations, the statements contained in the diary of the defendant Frank do not even constitute preparatory acts.. In consideration of the tense and sometimes extremely frangible relationship between the Government General on the one hand and the Reichsfuehrer SS Himmler and the Higher SS and Police -Leader Krueger on the other, it would also seem to be impossible to look upon the statements of the defendant Frank as acts of incitement or complicity. The evidence has shown on the contrary that all the efforts of the defendant Frank to investigate successfully the rumours about the elimination of the Jews, at least within his own administrative district, failed of their purpose. Only to complete the picture need it be mentioned that the concentration camp of Auschwitz was not in the Government General, but in that part of Poland which was annexed to Upper Silesia. For the rest, it cannot be clearly seen whether the erection of concentration camps is in itself to be looked on as fulfilling the requirements of a war crime or a crime against humanity, or whether the Prosecution considers the establishment of such camps solely as part of the so-called common plan. Setting aside the crimes committed in the concentration camps, and considering the nature of concentration camps to be that in which people areconfined forreasons of state and police security on account of their political opinions and without an opportunity of defending themselves in an ordinary court of law, it appears at least doubtful whether an occupying Power should not have the right to take such necessary steps as this in order to maintain public order and security. Apart from the fact that it was not National Socialists and not Germans at all who first established such camps, the following must be mentioned. D. Clay, Deputy Commander of the zone in Germany occupied by American troops, 250,000 to 300,000 people in that zone were at that time being detained on account of their political opinions.
DR. KEMPNER: Mr. President, this chapter is completely irrelevant.
THE PRESIDENT: Dr. Seidl, do you wish to sayanything in answer to the objection?
DR. SEIDL: Mr. President, I beg you to overrule the objection by the prosecution and in elucidation I should like to say the following. I am not interested in criticizing an occupying power. Here again, once more, I am concerned with the question of whether a certain conduct of which the defendant Frank has been accused by the Prosecution constitutes the evidence of a criminal act. one occupying power to do must under similar circumstances be granted another occupying power, particularly if we are concerned with the case where accusations made against the defendant are for actions carried out during the war, whereas the state of war within Germany had ceased on May 9, 1945, at the very latest.
THE PRESIDENT: The Tribunal sustains the objection. There is no evidence of the statements which you have made. And in any event, the Tribunal considers them entirely irrelevant.
DR. SEIDL: I assume, Mr. President, that in that case I may continue with the last paragraph on Page 44.
THE PRESIDENT: I think so, yes, the last paragraph. BY DR. SEIDL: because the evidence has shown that it was the defendant Frank who from the first day of the National Socialists' assumption of power fought against the police-State system, and, above all, stigmatized the concentration camps as an institution which could in no way be made to harmonize with the idea of a state resting onlaw. In this connection I refer to the testimony given by the witness Dr. Stepp, to the defendants' own statement and above all to the extracts from the defendant's diary which I put in evidence. The evidence has further shown that the establishment and administration of the concentration camps lay within the sphere of Reichsfuehrer SS Himmler's organization.