The choice is between pro gress or decline.
Fifteen or twenty years any longer.
We are, at this moment, filled "The period which is behind us was well utilized.
All measures were taken con "After six years, the situation today is as follows:
National political unity of for a few details.
The ultimate success "Danzig is in no case a subject of dispute.
of space needed for our existnece (Lebens raum) and of assuring our food supplies.
"The peoples of non-German territories will "The Polish problem is inseparable from a conflict in the West."
Keitel and others. - Doc. L.79, Exhibit USA 27). believe that her force was irresistable and that she could proceed to conquer the world.
All that was meant by this cruel, monstrous phrase of Hitler:
"We must keep firmly to the aim of our for eign policy:
secure for the German people this world.
And this act is the sole act justifies bloodshed.
..." All this monstrous phase was thus developed:
"We claim to have been compelled to carry out occupation, administration etc.
,...
a permanent settlement. It will not prevent us from taking the necessary measures:
executions, deportations... etc."
(Speech by Hitler on the Eastern Territo ries, 16.
7.41) (L.221). And further on:
"Partisan warfare will have one advantage for us.
It will enable us to exterminate all those who oppose us.
.."
(Same speech L.221). The same these was taken up and cynically proclaimed by the spokesmen of the State.
This Trial has brought you echos thereof. And in a speech by Himmler, document PS-1919:
"Whatever the nations of category A blood and bringing them up among us". From the same speech:
"whether nations thrive or starve only them as slaves for our civilization".From the same speech again:
"That 10,000 Russian women should die of for Germany".And further from the same speech:
"When somebody comes and says to me:
'I cannot have the anti-tank ditch dug human and would kill them, 'I reply:
You mothers."
And from the same speech; and concerning the extermination of the Jews:
"We have exterminated microbes. We did not with to be contaminated and die.
We have people.
Our spirit and character have not suffered from it".The conquest of vital space, i.e., of Territories emptoed of which they have been working.
To realize this all measures were weak and peaceful neighbors in peactime, wars of aggression, total wars with all the atrocities the words imply.
Goering and Ribbentrop cynically admitted that they particpated in it spiritually and materially, and the generals and the admirals helped as hard as they could. for him by Sauckel, Kaltenbrunner, the regional leaders of the NSDAP (the Gaulieters), and the Generals. Kaltenbrunner exploited the gas chambers which Frick, Schirach, Seyss-Inquart, Frank, Jodl, Keitel and the others furnished with victims. But the creation of the gas chambers themselves had been made possible because of a favorable political ideology had been developed and there each overlapping the other, you find the responsibility of all, of Georing, Hess, Rosenberg, Streicher, Frick, Frank, Fritsche, even of Schacht himself, the pro-Jewish Schacht included. Did he not say to Hirschfeld:
"I want to the greatness of Germany, and to the devile himself."
He entered into this alliance with the devil and with hell. Papen included, who sees his secretaries and friends killed around him and continues to accept official missions in Ankara, in Vienna, because he believes he can appease Hitler by serving him. living; for example the industrialists who exploited the workers of the enslaved countries after having carried Hitler and his system to power by providing the money without which nothing could have been done; who carried them to power by nationalistic fanaticism as well becuase they expected from Nazidom the guarantee of their privileges. the totalitarism policy, the total war, preparation and conduct of the plan of extermination of the peoples for the conquest of space, implied a co-ordination, a close liaison between all government administrations: Police and Army, Forien Affairs, and Police and Army, Justice and Police, economics and justice, Universities and Propaganda and Police.
And now we come to the secoudn preposition which we have to demonstrate. men stood, implies close cooperation between them. different elements of the German state. zontal bond between the various State and Party departments, between individual ministerial administrations and between individual National-Socialist organizations. They only connecting link would be the person of the Chief, at the head. According to the defense, the dominating principle of German structure would be personal union, not coordination and cooperation.
This is false. This is contrary to the principles of the Nazi State and requirments of a State in hich every force strives towards the same goal and towards the actual reality of German life as revealed by the debates. place of Democracy. The Party is the political expression of the Nation, which materialises in the political action of the State carried out by the activity of its administrations. The 1 December 1933 Act proclaims, for the purpose of ensuring the unity of the Party and State, that the Party is the exclusive support of the State conception, and indissolubly unites the party and the State.
At the Party Congress in 1934, Hitler says:
"It is not the State that created us. We create the State for ourselves.
To some it but actually we are what we are."
complete union between the State and the Party. This explains the legislation which makes it compulsory for the 29 July M LJG 5-1 chief of the Party Chancery to be consulted in the appointment of ranking officials; which incorporates Party chiefs in municipal administration, integrates the SS into the Police, and assimilates the SS to police officers; makes the direction of the Hitler Youth a State department, integrates the direction of Party headquarters abroad into the Foreign Department and merges together to an increasing extent the military personnel of the Party and these of the State.
General von Brodowsky's war diary, which we have submitted to the Tribunal, shows that this merger was a fact at the time of the landing in France. Hitler, hwoever, continued to maintain the system of parallel State and Party administration, because they control and supervise each other. But he compelled both parties to cooperate closely to be certain of the effectiveness of the control. tives of State departments. They cannot hide behind the might of the Party, since Party and State shared the power. The Party expresses a doctrine which must direct the action of the State, but the State in its turn alters the Party doctrine to suit itself. Many items of the Party Program dated 24 February 1920, were never carried out and fell completely into oblivion after a certain experience of power. Income other than that from labor was not abolishod (item II); the trusts were not nationalized (item 13); land reform was not carried out according to the provisions of item 17 (I); property interest and land speculations remained. combined effect of State and Party forces. All the State departments and Party departments contributed to the creation of its components. department.
Let us take Foreign Affairs. It is one of the State administrations which, in its correct conception, should remain the farthest removed from any political doctrine. Not so in 29 July M LJG 5-2 Nazi Germany.
For the purpose of the extermination of the Jews, headquarters abroad cooperate with RSHA by the intermediary of the Wilhelmstrasse, as evidenced by Documents RF 12 06, 1220, 1502, 1210 and USA 433. Wilhelmstrasse officials are called upon to advise the military police and Secret State Police (Document RF 1061). It is Best, Ribbentrop's representative in Denmark, who transmits the order for deportation of the Jews to the Chief of the German Police, Mildner (Document RF 1503). Document RF 1501 shows Ribbentrop vindicating anti-Semitism to Mussolini and requesting Italian cooperation. terrorist measures against the elites; the SD and the Wilhelmstrasse are also involved in the organization of the aggression against the broadcast station of Gleixitz in order to furnish the pretext of a Polish attack. The report of the German military administration concerning the pillage of art treasures in France incriminates at the same time the special staff of Rosenberg and the German Embassy in Paris (Document RF 1505). The Wilhelmstrasse and the army are involved with the police in the question of hostages, reprisals, and deportations. The examples could be multiplied. We do not pretend to exhaust the subject, but only to illustrate an opinion. Rosenberg. Rosenberg, by virtue of his function, already coordinates several branches of the German State. His service of foreign policy has been incorporated in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He is furthermore the philosopher of the regime, Minister for the Eastern Territories and chief of the special Staff entrusted with the control of art treasures. The SD and the secret police work in liaison with him (documents L 188 and 946 PS). the order of the State machinery in matters concerning forced labor. All the ministers and all the higher functionaries, like 29 July M LJG 5-3 the Gauleiters, are involved in it, be it that they conceived or prepared the operation, or still more simply that they gave it a helping hand or that they benefited by it.
this subject, and the conference between Sauckel, Kaltenbrunner, Speer, Funk and the representatives of the OKW, which is the subject of document PS 3819, the meeting in Paris presided ever by Sauckel which was attended by representatives of the army, the police and the Embassy (document RF 1517) Economy is no longer independent.
Furing the war there exists under Funk a close cooperation between the economic and administrative services of the army and those of economic affairs. (document RF 3bis). The Ministry of Economy appeals to the police to develop plans for the germanization of economy, (document RF 803 and 814). The Ministry of Finance subsidized the SS to carry out scientific research on the internees, involuntary subjects of abominable experiments (D.002 PS) Long before the war and under Schacht, the same bonds, first secret, later on public, and closer than any other country in the world, unite politics, finance and economy with the army. Schacht, in a speech on 29 November 1938 pronounced the following opinion on his achievement:
"It is possible that no other issuing bank has followed Socialism.
With the aid of this policy, however, Germany policy.
...."
The judicial system is no longer independent. We find it associated with the police in the most criminal enterprises. Document PS 654 gives an account of a discussion between Thierack, Himmler and others, at the end of which it was decided that the anti-social elements and the internees of the concentration camps, the Jews, Gypsies, Russians, Ukrainians, Poles sentenced to more than three years in prison should be turned over to Himmler by the administration, to be exterminated, by work, and that in the future individual belonging to the same categories should not be judged by ordinary tribunals but handed over immediately to Himmler's administration.
police, of the State and the Party merge together. Sometimes the police is made subordinate to the army, though acting with a certain autonomy according to the orders of the RSHA. This is the case in Belgium. In France, in spite of being detached from the army, the police maintains close cooperation with it. The army participates with the SIPO, (Security Police and the SD in the persecution of the Jews, in the administration of the internment camp of Compiegne and in the designation of hostages (RF 1212 and 1212 bis) and in their execution (RF 1244). As we have seen the army and the police were accomplices in the terrorist actions against the Population. The navy and the Police are also accomplices in the massacre of the commandos, and it is the police which massacres certain categories of War Prisoners, although all the prisoners without exception come under the authorit of the OKW (PS 1165, with the State services of their coordination which at times goes so far as to result in a symbiosis, Realization of the common political idea : the conquest of space by all possible methods, is the Path pursued by all, one way or another.
The cooperation of the defendants is an evident result. Apart from the definite facts of co-operation which we allege, what we know of the general functioning of this totalitarian State, bound to the destiny of the Party, its vigour against the heretics for whom came with their gas chambers waited all that leads us to affirm that the defendants, be they Ministers or dignitaries or high functionaries with State or party authority, together with other who are not there -dead or held for trial in other Courts, formed an entity. And this, taken altogether, was the Government of the Reich; this was the Stated-Party or Party-State ;
an entity, perhaps, but a conscious and criminal entity which caused the massacre of millions of human beings in order to enlarge the Reich beyong all measure. analysed just a minute ago in the light of the national penal codes of their and our countries, respectively. They comprise also in their entirety those of the German State for which they acted of that German State, to which they gave life, conscience, thought, will and of which they must now assume the responsibility for the consequences, even the most extreme ones, because they could not personally disentangle themselves from these crimes.
And this brings us to our third proposition: in that criminal policy of which they were the promoters and instruments.
Was it not Dr. Seidl who, in defending Frank, has said: (page 55) "This is an acknowledged principle and it derives from the penal time of the working out of the verdict."
They are, as we know the elements of a criminal Stale policy. To consider the defendants as offenders of the common law, to forget that they have acted in the name of the German State and for the account of that State, to apply a standard to them the same as that applied to hooligans or to assassins, would narrow the amplitude of the trial, would misinterpret the character of their crimes. Crimes which the Courts of our countries ordinarily adjudicate show the criminal in opposition to the social order. These are individual deeds; their range is limited; their consequences are circumscribed. Their crimes never strike more than a few victims, and it is impossible to find in the annals of our countries an example of murder methodically perpetrated by terror organizations whose victims would run higher than a few hundred people. national Communities. institutions, our national communities can eliminate delinquents before they can do all the harm they are capable of. the community of States, an unorganized world which is just beginning to be conscious of Its own existence and had then neither armed power nor judges. State, putting at the service of their criminal plans all the executive might of the State. They acted as chiefs or leaders of political, diplomatic, juridical, military, economic and financial staffs. The activity of these staffs is normally coordinated in any country since they serve a common purpose, indisputably a common political idea.
But in National Socialist Germany, as we know, such coordination was reinforced by the interpenetration of party and administrative agencies. Private crimes became community crimes when committee by the State. Indeed, they were bred by the political thought of each individual: "Conquest of space at any price". department were made possible only because all those who controlled every other major department contributed their share. Should some of them and their departments default, it meant the collapse of the State, the annihilation of its criminal power, which was tantamount to the end of the was chambers or to the technical impossibility of creating them. But none had either the will or the wish to default, since gas chambers and extermination to make space were the paramount idea of the system -- indeed were the system. of the defendants, their constant efforts, and those of their counsels to prove the autonomy of their departments and cast the Army's responsibility upon the Police, that of the Foreign Office upon the head of the Government, that of the Labor Department upon the Four-Year Plan, that of the Gauleiters upon the Generals; in short, by their attempt to persuade us that everything in Germany was run in tight compartments, whereas the interdependence of the administration and Party and multiplicity of connecting and controlling links between the State and Party prove the contrary by their clever overlapping. All French people who have lived in occupied France remember having seen on the wals of local Kommandanturs a poster depicting the bricks of a wall with the words:
"Teneo quia Teneor" printed over the picture. It was the whole motto of the system. A few bricks taken away were enough to make the wall crumble. None of these men have done that. On the contrary, they all contributed a brick to the edifice.
city which may perhaps be subject to discussion according to the different characterisation of the jurists, we shall furnish proof of the solidarity in crime and of the equal culpability of all. high officials of the Party or of one of the main State departments and acting on the State's account, to have with the object of extending by all possible means German living space conceived, to have been willing, to have ordered or merely tolerated by their silence that treaties ensuring the independence of other countries be violated, that wars of aggression be prepared or declared, that mass murders and other atrocities be systematically carried out, that demolitions and lootings without justification be systematically committed. conspired to commit it. drawn from the trial. For each defendant, the three principal propositions of this demonstration will be the following:
1) the defendant occupied an eminent position in the machinery of the state and the party which granted him authority over one entire office or several.
2) the defendant acquiesced in, if he did not conceive, the idea of the government :"conquest of space by any means".
3) he has personally taken part in the development of this idea by hisown activity. going into them at length. They were the designated successors of the Fuehrer They belonged to the movement from the beginning. Hess took the responsibility for the racial laws. Both contributed to the government's political ideas of which in the eyes of the masses they were the living representatives. By their speeches, their lectures, they made this idea penetrate into all circles.
and economic preparation of wars of aggression. millions of supposed enemies of the government found their death, where genocide was finally and completely consummated. tation of the 4 Years Plan, which, proof has been offered, was intirely direc ted towards the preparation for war With other, he is responsible for the deportation of workers, the brutalities exerted against them, of their allocation to sectors of production aimed against their own country. Furthermore he has taken part in the allocation of prisoners of war and political internees to works directly connected with the war effort of the Reich. He has organized the -destruction of the economy and the looting of the occupied nations. looting of works of art on a large scale, often with the aim of enriching his own collections. powers to decide about all questions concerning the management of the party. He participated in the preparation of laws and decrees in general, and even in the preparation of the orders of the Fuehrer. He participated in the appointment of government officials and labor office chiefs. He strengthened the hold of the party on the internal life of Germany. He had a direct influence on the army and on foreign policy. The part which he played in the development of anti-semitism implicates him in the criminal consequences of the movement.
Ribbentrop was one of the king-pins of the party and state machine. Pl ced in the Wilhelmstrasse by Hitler who distrusted "old-fashioned" diplomats he worked with all his might to create diplomatic conditions favourable to the war of aggression, the essential means for realizing the conquest of space. We recall the document submitted by our British colleagues and which establishes that Ribbentrop assured Ciano in August 1939 that Germany would make war even if Danzig and the corridor were ceded to her.
As it has already be shown, he and his offices are involved in acts of terrorism and extermination in the occupied Countries.
Concerning Keitel, my explanation will be equally short. The condition under which he agreed to be chosen by Hitler instead of von Fritsch and von Blomberg, to be placed at the head of the High Command of the Army and introposts, expressed by his presence at the side of the Fuehrer in Godesberg, later on during the discussions with Petain and Horthy, expressed again by the orders he signed and of which the order for implementation of the N.N. decree is not the least famous, show that it is not just a question of a men soldier, but a politician general. His part in the arrests and massacres of patriots condemn him. Without any possible doubt he has participated in the exterminations, if only by abandoning to the police, for special treatment, certain classes of prisoners of war, Moreover, we recall the connections of this offices with the police and the armed force of the party.
(A recess was taken).
SS in Austria. He became Secretary of State of the Security and the Police in Austria, afterwards Chief of Police in Vienna and Chief of RSHA (Reich Regent's Office) from 30 January up to the capitulation. During this last period he was responsible for the Gestapo, the Police, the Security Service and the concentration camps. realization of the policy of extermination and in accomplishing the annihil* tion of a race (genocide). His responsibility for the mass-murders has been established. He issued the orders of internment and execution.
"The measures of protective custody", he says, "were measures justified by the war". He also tries to make us believe he made a stand against the application of these measures. It is impossible to believe him, We have proof that he ha full power over the camps.
We are aware of Rosennerg's important position in the 3rd Reich. A Department bore his name. Moreover, he was Minister of the Eastern Territories and Propagandist. In "Blood and Honor" (Blut und Ehre) he resumed and developed the thesis of the space cue to the so-called German race. He starts from the unfounded affirmations that "the irradiation of Nordism gives its entire meaning to the evolution of humanity" and that "there is decadence wherever the Nordic culture, instead of condemning the Asisties and the Jews to a permanent enslavement, mingles with these impure elements... He concluded by saying that the continent must be subjected to the concept of the German race "Blodd and Honour". To bring Germany back by all possible means to her racial purity was the subject of his speech at Nuremberg in 1933. He extolled the extermination of the Jews, and we know that it was not an oratorical phrase. Besides, he wrote in a report to the Fuehrer on 11 August 1942 (042-PS):
"Instructions aiming at keeping down the number of the population of the Ukraine and at the non-application of Article 218 of the German pena Code were studied last year and resumed on the occasion of a tripof the Director of the Ministry of Health ......
"In the Ukraine measures have been taken with a view to preventing epidemics not in the interest of other races, but exclusively for the protection of the German occupation forces and for maintaining labour in the service of the German war industry ?" Finally he was implicated in the attack on Norway, and thanks to his special staff he proceeded to a methodical plundering of the artistic riches of Europe.
Frank is one of the very first adherents of the Party. He was its le adviser and took part in the elaboration of the program. He was also the Fuehrer's advisor. He was Minister of Justice in Bavaria, then Minister of State charged with the co-ordinating of Reich Justice, and lastly Governor General of Poland. It is he who tried to give a legal shape to the State's and the Party's terroristic program of persecution and extermination. He defended the institution of concentration camps in the German "Legal Gazette" in 1936, and he proclaimed that the second fundamental law of the Hitlerite Reich was racial legislation. His personal activity in Poland contributed to the extermination of numerous poles. He boasted about it al in his paper.
Frick was Party member from 1925 on. He became a Reich Leader and afterwards Reich Director for the elections from 30 January 1933 up to 20 August 1943. He was Chief of the service for the annexation of Austria to Germany for the incorporation of the Sudetenland, Memel, Danzig, the Eastern Territories, Eupen Malmedy and Moresnet. Moreover, he was Director of the Central O ffice for the Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia, the Government-General Lower Styria, Upper Carinthia, Norway, Alsace, Lorraine and all the other occupied countries. He was Protector of Bohemia-Moravia for more than one year. He was Reich Minister of the Interior since the assumpt of power, a member of the Defense Council. Being elected to the Reichstag in 1924, he posed anti-Jewish laws. Strictly obedient, he became several time the spokesman for the political thought of the organization : He declared among other things :
"In National Socialist Germany, the direction is in the hands of an organized community, viz. the National Socialist Party. This latter represents the will of the nation. The policy adopted by the Party in keeping with the vital interests of the nation is at the same time the policy adopted by the country." (3258 PS) It is he who appointed Himmler. He is responsible for the anti-Jewish legislation and finally he had sterilization applied to the descendants of coloured soldiers. Moreover he caused the lunatics reputed to be incurable to be killed.
Streicher entered the party practically as soon as it was formed. He engaged in an unrestrained propaganda against the Jews in his speeches as well as in his writings and he incited the German people to persecute and to exterminate them. He has been a Gauleiter. He does not reject anything that has been done. He stated :
"When one has known the Fuehrer as I have known him in his deepest personality as I have, and when I later learned from his testament that he knowingly gave the order to execute the Jews, well I declare that this man has a right to do so."
Funk entered the party in 1931. He had the golden badge bestowed on him. He was the head of the Reich's press, Secretary of State for propaganda Finally he succeeded Schacht in the Ministry of the Interior in 1937. He became Plenipotentiary General for Economy and President of the Reichsbank in 1941. In 1932 he was acting as middleman between the Fuehrer and certain heads of the German industry. He took part in the meeting of the industrialists on 20 February 1933 organized by Goering in order to obtain the political and financial support of industry for the realization of the Nazi program. He stated on 4 May 1946 :
"As State Secretary for propaganda I have a formal responsibility. I have of course favoured propaganda as did all those who found themselves in position of importance in Germany, for propaganda filled and permeated the nation's spiritual life." He asked that the Jews be excluded from important positions.
He issued decrees for the realization of that idea. He has received the de exterminations. Finally, he built up the war economy and signed the secret law of 4 September 1938.
Doenitz was Commander-in-Chief of the German navy. He succeeded Hitler with Seyss-Inquart as Foreign Minister. He was a recipient of the golden party badge. His adherence to the criminal policy of the system is testified by a speech in which he said :
"The officer is a representative of the state. The ridiculous babble about a non-political officer is plain nonsense." he said, to increase putput by 100%. He proclaimed submarine warfare without resturctions and ordered his sailors "to be hard", and not to effect anymore rescues. He approved and extolled massacres of communists. He was present at Hitler's conferences in which the latter revealed his plans. The texts were noted down in assing. He placed the navy at the Nazi regime's service. He conducted the clandestine rearming and contributed in preparing the aggression against Poland, against Norway.
His contempt for international Law is well known. It is enough to quote the memorandum of 15 September, U.K.65 Schirach was a party member from the age of 18 years on.
He joined it in 1925; leader of the Hitler Youth from 1931 to 1940, Gauleiter of Vienn up to the capitulation, he was one of the essential parts of the machine.
He admits that as Gauleiter of Vienna he united in himself the powers of the State, of the city and of the party. It was he who shaped the German youth in accordance with the party's ideology and he has claimed the responsibility for the consequences of this exclusive formation. He allowed Himmler to recruit SS among the Hitler Youth. on the Jews, but long before that he had taken a quite clearly defined stand as to this question and had conducted an active anti-semitic propaganda.
Sauckel joined the party in 1925. As Gauleiter of Thuringia, and Plenipotentiary General for labor commitment, and honorary Obergruppenfuehrer SS, he held a quite select situation in the State-Party machine. all of them devoted to the development of Nazi ideology. He approved the idea of extermination and said:
"Concerning the extermination of asocial element, by work is far the best."
(632-PS) Again he stated:
"....The Fuehrer stated that we had to revise people .... it is the Fuehrer's wish that germanic language be settled in Europe."
(025-PS) tions and he declared the following on this subject the 28 May 1946:
"One can only obtain results in production by employing labor economically."
nearly two million Frenchmen to collaborate in the war by their toil. To recruit them he used force and the intervention of the police, the SS and the Army.