His personal ability as a broadcaster caused him to become virtually an official commentator. To quote his own words:
"May I add that it is know to me that in the far corners of German comments."
He has emphasized that in these comments he had a free hand. Is it to be doubted that this was because he was prepared to broadcast whatever lie Goebbels wanted? He himself says, in dealing with the uses to which his influence was put:
"Again and again I was requested to awaken hatred against individuals and against systems."
You have seen a sample in his broadcast on the Athenia. As early as 1940 he broke far enough away from the restraint which he tried to picture in the witness box to call the Poles "under people" and "beasts in human form." the following words:
"The fate of Jewry in Europe was turned out to be as unpleasant as the Fuehrer predicted it would be in the event of a European war.
After which the nations of the Old World did not absolve them."
whole miasma of Nazi lies against the Jews, than that of instigating the war which brought such misery to humanity, yet this educated and thoughtful defendant deliberately made it. Hitler's aggression than his speech on 9th October 1941 which contained the words:
"... and we are particularly grateful for these lightning victories 27 July M LJG 13-1 to 300 soldiers at the cemetery.
.... At 9:30 hours the bus arrived loaded with women and children.
I stood bus to the grave.
I then saw a few seconds later how handed down to her by the SS men.
We then turned round shooting of these children.
Immediately after that I heard the shots.
.. Shortly after that another bus arrived, loaded with Poles.
An SS man shouted to the soldiers who stood around "Now you can all come in and watch."
shot previously. They were ordered to lie down and then heads from a very short distance.
Flesh, brains and sand of the soldiers who were watching.
About eighty soldiers stood too close to the edge of the grave.
These happenings windows of their houses opposite the Jewish cemetery."
leading officers of State did not know about these matters were not responsible. It is for you to decide. day fate would strike them...
"would strike them because they betrayed themselves and did not want to be what they are.
It is sad that they do 27 July M LJG 13-2 and brutality."
With what a voice of prophecy he spoke - for these are the mad scoundrels who did these very things.
Some it may be are more guilty than others; some played a more direct and active part than others in these frightful crimes. But when these crimes are such as you have to deal with here - slavery, mass murder and world war, when the consequences of the crimes are the deaths of over 20,000,000 of our follow men, the devastation of a continent, the spread of untold tragedy and suffering throughout the world, what mitigation is it that some took less part than others, that some were principals and others more accessories. What matters it if some forfeited their lives only a thousand times whilst others deserved a million deaths?
In one way the fate of these men means little: their personal power for evil lies for over broken; they have convicted and discredited each other and finally destroyed the legend they created round the figure of their leader. But on their fate great issues must still depend, for the ways of truth and rightcousness between the Nations of the world, the hope of future international cooperation in the administration of law and justice are in your hands. This trial must form a milestone in the history of civilization, not only bringing retribution to these guilty men, not only marking that right shall in the end triumph over evil, but also that the ordinary people of the world (and I make no distinction now between friend or fee) are now determined that the individual must transcend the State. The State and the law are made for man, that through them he may achieve a fuller life, a higher purpose and a greater dignity. States may be great and powerful. Ultimately the rights of men, made as all men are made in the image of God, are fundamental. When the State, either because as here its leaders have lusted for power and place, or under some specious 27 July M LJG 13-3 pretext that the end may justify the means, affronts these things, they may for a time became obscured and submerged.
But they are immanent and ultimately they will assort themselves more strongly still, their immanence more manifest. And so, after this ordeal to which mankind has been submitted, mankind itself - struggling now to reestablish in all the countries of the world the common simple things - liberty, love, understanding - comes to this Court and cries " These are our laws - let them prevail." fact, not only, as we must hope, of the German people but of the whole community of man:
"-thus ought the German people to behave.... giving and they to be; that is their destiny.
story of Gruber, but not in vengeance -- in a determination that these things shall not occur again.
"The father" -- do you remember? -- pointed to the sky, "and seemed to say something to his boy".
THE PRESIDENT: The Tribunal will adjourn.
(The Tribunal adjoined until Monday 29 July 1946, at 1000 Hours.)
29 July M LJG 1-1
THE PRESIDENT: I call on the Chief Prosecuter of the Previsional Government of the Republic of France, M. Champetier de Ribes.
M. CHAMPETIER DE RIBES: Mr. President, Gentlemen: Before presenting the final speech of the French Public Prosecutor, I must ask the Tribunal's permission to express the admiration and thanks of my country for the objectivity and the serenity with which these trials have been conducted. have been evoked at this bar. Germany's archives, these the Nazis were unable to burn before their defeat, have yielded us their secrets. be have heard numerous witnesses, whose recollections would have been lost to history but for the present trial. objectivity, leaving no room for passion nor even for sensibility. its opinion, seemed insufficiently demonstrated, anything that might have appeared dictated by a spirit of vengeance. that of Historical truth. Thanks to them, the historian of the future, as well as the chronicler of today, will knew, the truth about the political, diplomatic and military events of the most tragic period of our history; he will know the crimes of Nazism as well as the hesitancies, the weaknesses, the omissions of the pacific democracies. He will know that the result of twenty centuries of civilization, which believed itself to be eternal, nearly collapsed before the renewed onslaught of a new form of the ancient barbarism, all the more savage for being more scientific.
means of propaganda, that the devilish processes of a police defying the most elementary rules of humanity, have enabled a small minority of criminals to distort within a few years the collective conscience of a great people, and to transform the nation of Geethe, of Kant, of Sebastian Bach, into that of Hitler, of Himmler and\ of Goebbels, to mention only the dead. ceived the most gigantic plan of world demination and to have wished to realize it by all and every means. By every means, that is to say without a doubt by the breaking of the given word and by the unleashing of the very worst hind of war of aggression, but particularly by the methodical, scientific extermination of millions of human beings and specifically of certain national or religious groups, the existence of which hampered the hegemony of the Germanic race. the birth of Hitlerism, that the neologism of "genecido" had to be created to define it, that it required an accumulation of documents and testimonies to make it believable. was possible, the perfect collaboration of the four Public Prosecutors has permitted the proof to be given, and, within the limits of the counts of the indictment she reserved for herself, France believes she has done her part in the common task much before the Tribunal regarding the protection which the innocent civilian population is entitled to, as of an obvious principle, it has been established by us that the defendants have deliberately violated this principle by treating these civilian populations with utter disregard for human life. Is it necessary to evoke the terrible sentence pronounced by the defendant Keitel "human life is worth less than nothing in the occupied territories."
29 July M LJG 1-3 practices of warfare, the defendants reinstated the system of hostages. They put their signatures to general orders to capture and execute thousands of martyrs. In France alone 29,000 hostages were shot. We know that the fighters of the resistance, whose patriotism is now being admired by the defendants, have been massacred, tortured, interned for the purpose of their slow exterimination; that, under the pretext of reprisals, by the carrying out of orders or by the committing of individual cruelties which were covered by the complicity of the authorities, civilians chosen absolutely at random have been executed, that entire villages were burnt down: Oradoursur-Glane, Maille in France, Putten in Holland ahve not yet risen from their ruins. operational sector of Marshal Kesselring to combat partisan activity by terror. We saw there one officer order as a reprisal the execution of fifty, of one hundred, or even of all the men of region as a reply to isolated acts directed against the German army. The carrying out of that order was authorized on the basis of instructions by the commander of the theater of operations, who himself acted on more general instructions issued by the defendant Keitel. This example illustrates the perfect collaberation of the national Socialist Cadre and the State and pleads, if it is still necessary, for the joint responsibility of the leading personalities of the regime. their homes and forced to produce arms against their own country. more, because Germany, be it the traditional Germany, the Nazi Germany in power, or the same Germany now presenting the poor argument of its defense in the prisoners' docks, has always claimed to adhere to the universal rules of military honor and to the respect due to all soldiers. And, in spite of this, we 29 July M LJG 1-4 have seen Keitel himself, the champion of these ideas to a point that he brought it up again at the conclusion of his testimony in the witness box, urge the Wilhelmstrasse and the co-defendant Goering to approve his criminal propositions concerning the treatment of aviators who fell into their hands.
that the criminal orders to exterminate and lynch aviators had been issued in the regular manner and been transmitted to the agencies charged with their execution. drawing of the order concerning the commandos, nor as to the execution of this order in the various theaters of operations. The Prosecution has furnished a striking collection of evidence on this point. certitude that cruel orders had been issued to execute or intern for the purpose of their extermination men who had already been reduced to a state of helplessness by their detention in a prisoner of war camp.
se of this trial. The defendants themselves attempt only to evade their personal responsibility without denying the atrocity nor the truth of the facts. We have shown now the refractory escaped officers and non-commissioned officers, whose past records and attitude demonstrated their moral force, had been exterminated by the "action" Kugel. domination by systematically organizing the extermination of the populations whose territories she occupied. cal economic and moral destruction of the occupied countries. The means used for that purpose were the brutal or gradual seizure of sovereignty, or the carefully worked out interference of the German authorities in all domains, the creation and implacable execution of a program of economic pillage in order to achieve the exhaustion of the occupied country and to put it at the absolute mercy of the occupant, and as a result the Nazification of the State and the people, together, with the desturction of cultural and moral values. domain of the systematic massacring of people. sedly impossible of assimilation with the National-Socialist world, the immense grave yard of the concentration camps, where 15,000,000 people perished, the abominable achievements of the "Einstzgruppen" (groups for special commitment) described with irrefutable exactness by General Ohlendorf mination attempts which upon examination, prove to be one of the most perfect expressions of the policy followed by the defendants. I am referring to the deliberate under-nourishment to which these non-Germans were subjected who fell under Nazi authority under whatever circumstance entire nations starved out in reprisals, civilians in occupied territories ruthlessly rationed in the framework of the pillage of the territory. The Tribunal recalls what Goering says to the Gauleiters, Number 170 USSR, "It is absolutely immaterial to me if you tell me that your people are collapsing for hunger, Let them collapse, so long as no German starves."
And again with reference to Holland: "It is not our mission to feed a nation which spiritually rejects us. If its people are so weak that they cannot as much as raise a hand where they are not employed to work for us, so much the better..." potential, all this, as well as the slow exhaustion of political internees and prisoners-of-war, is included in the plan of extermination of populations to clear German vital space. in the case of labor deportees, of young healthy men whose presence at home was necessary to the future of the country. a decrease in population of 5 to 25% whereas Germany is the only country in Europe which shows an increase in population.
We have proved all these crimes. After the submission of our documents the hearing of the witnesses, after the projection of films which the defendants themselves could not behold without a shudder of horror, nobody in the world can possibly claim that the extermination camps, the executed prisoners, the slaughtered populations, the mounds of corpses, the human herds maimed in flesh and soul, the cements of torture, gas chambers and creamtories, that all these crimes existed only in the imagination of anti-German propa andists. we have reported. Since they cannot deny them, they merely try to clear their responsibility by burdening the memory of those of their accomplices who committed suicide.
"We knew nothing of those horrors", the say, or again: "we did everything we could to prevent them but Hitler, who was all-powerful, commanded and did not allow disobedience or even resignation from office".
What a ppor defense: Whom can they possibly persuade that they alone were ignorance of that which the whole world knew and that their monitoring stations never reported to them the solemn warnings which the heads of the United Nations gave to the war criminals by radio.
They could not disobey Hitler's orders, they could not even resign from office? Indeed: Hitler could doubtless govern their bodies but not their minds; by disobeying they would perhaps have lost their lives but the would have saved their honor at least. Cowardice has never been an excuse, nor even an extenuating circumstance. elaboration- the doctrines of National Socialism and its will for universal domination, that they well knew to what monstrous crimes it led its adepts and its performers with disastrous results, that they had accepted its responsibilities as they profited by the material and moral advantages which i lavished upon them. of victory, and that before the triumph of force, the question would not be asked: was the cause just? They persuaded themselves as they had done after the war of 1914, that no international jurisdiction could ever pursue them. They thought that Pascal's pessimistic judgment on human justice in international relations would always be true:" Justice is liable to argume Force is easily recognizable without argument. So being unable to make strong what is right, one has made right what is strong." and of Justice is born, and has taken shape in the international custom of civilized nations. of the charges of the Prosecution, the French Prosecution has stated precisly the responsibility of all the defendants, "guilty of having, in their capacity of principal Hitlerite leaders of the German people, conceived, desi ordered or only tolerated by their silence that murders or other inhuman actions be systematically committed, that violence be systematically exerted on prisoners-of-war or civilians, that devastation without justification be systematically committed as a deliberate means of accomplishing their design to dominate Europe and the world by terror, and to exterminate entire populations, so as to extend the living space of the German people."
place before you, have only confirmed and reinforced the accusations and the qualifications, that at the beginning of the proceedings we already formula against the big criminals, whom, in execution of the Charter and to satisfy the exigencies of Justice the United Nations have deferred to your Court.
I ask the Tribunal to allow M. Dubost to make these statements.
M. DUBOST: I am recalling the facts set forth by the French Delegation This reminder was needed to establish our contribution to the trial. We do not intend, however, to disjoin our work from the whole work of the trial, as results from the expositions of the other three Delegations and the debat It is on the basis of this work as a whole that we shall proceed with our indictment and examine the personal responsibility of the defendants. be murder, indictible theft, and other serious offenses against persons and their property which are always punishable in civilized countries. M. de Menthon has in his introductory address shown this already. with ordering them. In the technical sense of our French law, they are therefore accomplices. Makin allowance for certain differences, mostly differences of form only, in most countries the perpetrators of serious offices and their accomplices are punished by capital punishment or very severe penalties, forces labor, solitary confinement. That is the Anglo-Saxon practice. This also follows in France from application of Articles 221 ff, 379 ff, 59 ff of the French Penal Code. In Germany Article 211 punishes homicide, Article 212 murder, Articles 223 to 226 tortures, Article 229 poisoning and murder by gas. Article 234 covers slavery subjection to serfdom, incorporation with a view to military service in a foreign country; Articles 242 and 243 cover theft and pillage; Article 130 provoking the population to violence. The case of accomplices and of co-originators is covered by Articles 47 and 49. That, as the leaders of the Reich, as the accomplices of the Fuehrer, these men are all responsible for the crimes perpetrated under their rule, that before the universal conscience their responsibility is heavier than that of the common executioners, two defendants:
Frank and Schirach have admitted it:
Frank said:
"I never created extermination camps for Jews. I never favored the we made all kinds of statements against them.
...." and these last words of Frank condemn, with him, all those who pursued the campaign of instigation against the Jews in Germany of elsewhere. Let us remember Fran's answer to the question, put to him by his Defense Counsel regarding the charges stated in the indictment. It holds good against all the defendants and still more against those who were closer to Hitler than he was:
"Regarding the charges I will only say this: I request the Tribunal thoroughly guilty."
Von Schirach on his part stated:
"Here is my fault for which I am answerable before God and the German people.
I brought up our youth for a man whom in the course him I trained our youth that considered him as I myself did.
It is who killed millions of people . . . Any German who after Auschwitz still adheres to the social policy is guilty.
.. I consider it my duty to say so". frequently, copying Goering's quibbing vanity, the defendants tried to justify themselves in the name of a policy of Neo-Maohiavellism which would free the leaders of the State of all personal responsibility.
Let us note only that no such provisions are made anywhere in the laws in any of the civilized countries, and that on the contrary the arbitrary and aggresive acts aimed at individual liberty, at Civic rights or at the constitution are more severely punished when they have been committed by a public functionary, a Government official of higher rank, and that the severest punishment is meted out to the Ministers themselves (Article 114 and 115 of the French Penal Code).But let us limit ourselves on this point.
Our only aim is to recall that the main facts charged against the defendants my be analysed separately as violations of the criminal laws of any one of the positive internal laws of all civilized countries, or else of that common internation law which M. de Menthon has already interpreted and which has been submitted here as the root of international custom, and that thus the punishment of each of these facts is not without a foundation, but that on the contrary, even restricting one's self to this analytical preview, the gravest penalties have already been incurred. any culpable fact as such, the analysis of the defendant's guilt in the light of internal laws is only a first approximation which would enable us to prosecute the defendants merely as accomplices and not as principal perpetrators. And we are anxious to demonstrate that indeed they were the principal culprits.
We hope to succeed in this by developing the following three propositions:
1.) The acts of the defendants are the elements of a criminal political plan.
2.) The coordination of the various departments which were headed by these men implies a close cooperation between them for the realization of their criminal policy.
3.) They must be judged as acting in behalf of this criminal policy.
The defendants have practised widely different activities. As politicians, diplomats, soldiers, sailors, economists, financeers, jurists, or propagandists, they represent practically all the forms of liberal activity. Without any hesitation, however, one is able to recognize the tie that binds them together. All have placed the best -- or the worst of themselves -- at the service of the Hitlerite State. To a certain extent they represent the brains of that state. By themselves alone they did not represent it entirely.
Nevertheless, nobody can doubt that they were an important part of it. They conceived the policy of that state. They wanted their thought to become action and all in scarcely differing degrees have contributed toward its realization. This is true whether it applies to Hess, to Goering, professional politicians who admit never having practised any other profession than that of agitator or statesman, or to Ribbentrop, to Neurath, to Papen, the diplomats of the regimes, or to Keitel, to Jodl or Doenitz or Raeder the military men, to Rosenberg, to Streicher, to Frank, to Frick, the thinkers (if that term can be applied to them) of the ideology of the system; to Schacht, to Funk, the financiers without whom the system would have failed and collapsed before it was able to rearm, to jurists like Frank, to publicists and propagandists like Fritzsche, and, again, Streicher, devoted to the diffusion of the common idea or again to technicians like Speer or Sauckel, without whom the idea never could have been developed into action as it has been, to policemen such as Kalterbrunner who subdued minds by terror, or simply Gauleiters like Seyss-Inquart, Schirach or, again, Sauckel, administrators, officials of high authority as well as politicians, who shaped into a concrete whole the common policy conceived for the sum-total of the State and of party machinery. machines, and today's defendants are always reminding us: "Hitler wanted this, Himmler wanted this, Bormann wanted this", they say. "I only obeyed", and their defence counsels stress the point. Hitler the prodigious tyrant, the fanatic visionary imposing his will with an irresistible magnetic power. This is too simple. This is too sketchy. No man is entirely non-receptive to suggestions, to insinuations, to influence, and Hitler could escape that law no more than any other man. We have had irrefutable proof of this in all that these proceedings have permitted us to guess concerning the struggle for influence which was waged in the "great man's" entourage. The treacherous, underhanded slanders were unrolled, the intrigues which reminded us at certain time during the proceedings of the small courts of the Italian Renaissance. Everything was included, even up to murder. Is it not true that Goering, before he himself fell into disgrace, got rid of Roehm and Ernst, who had not plotted against their master, but against him, as Gisevius told us.
So much imagination such perseverance in evil, but also such efficiency, show us that Hitler was not insensible to the actions and intrigues of the men around him. What a pity that these intrigues were not trained in the right direction! But of Hitler's receptiveness to influences we have direct evidence, and it is given us by Schacht who thereby apart from these men involves the German masses, the good sense of which these men had contributed to warp and in which they roused the worst of passions.
Did not Schacht say of Hitler in Court:
"I believe that in the beginning he did not have only evil tendencies should strive to avoid."
What was then the great idea of them all? means, even the most criminal. quired, Schacht, who is on Hitler's side, asks for colonies; we remember Hirschfeld's testimony, but he dissembles, he partly disguises the great idea of the State machine to which he belongs, and this idea we would be less easy in our mind in denouncing it without the disconcerting artlessness of "the great man", who ten years previously had revealed the whole of his plans of battle for all the world to see.
"Mein Kampf" (French text) "The German people cannot consider its future otherwise than as that of a world power.
During nearly two thousand years the steward ship of our people's interest, as we must call our more or less world history.
We have even witnessed it; for the gigantic conflict "between nations from 1914 to 1918 was nothing else than the globe and we even call that event the World War.
"The German people went into the fight as a so-called world power.
I say 'so-called' for in reality it was not.
If in 1914 there had been a different the other factors might have found a successful issue"... This is the next quotation:
"I would rather say this: The claim for the reestablishment of the logical.
In reality they did not include all the men of German point of view.
They were not the result of a calculated political plan, but rather temporary frontiers; in the couse of a struggle by no means ended, they were even partly the result of a gamble."
of the German nation. They constituted neither a safeguard for the past nor a power for the future. They will not enable the German people "to maintain its inner unity nor to assure its subsistence.
Regarded powers or to be more correct, in relation to the real world powers."
Here is another quotation:
"But we, we other National-Socialists, must hold immovably to the goal of our foreign policy:
to secure for the German people the territory to which it is entitled in this world.
And this is the only action which before God and before Germany's future generations justifies the shedding of blood; before God, because we were placed upon this earth "to gain our daily bread through perpetual striving, as creatures to thousands of new citizens.
The territory upon which the robust imposed upon our people."
A further quotation:
"A State which in an age of racial contamination keeps jealous watch become the master of the earth.
...."
The last quotation:
"A stronger race will drive away the in order to give their place to the strong.
..."
("Mein Kampf", page 135). The recognized army was soon powerful enough to permit Germany to arm openly. Who, at that time, would dare to interrupt the monstrous development of this biological materialism? Hitler specified his ideas in a smaller circle, and those who heard his words were not all Nazis. Enlightened as to the master's purposes, they will yet stay by his side, and that is what condemns them. Is it not so Raeder?
"The question is not of conquering pop suitable for cultivation.
.." Hiter said in conference with von Blomberg, von Fritsch, and Raeder on 5 November 1937 "Expansion cannot be made a reality except ning the risks.
....." That comes from the same speech. and Jodl, picked because of their servility to the system, had a solid war-tool in their hands. On the evening before the at break of the conflict, Hitler recalled his thoughts:
"Circumstances must be adapted to goals which are to be attained.
This is im "Vital space proportionate to the great way or another.