Meanwhile at home in the Reich the SA were taking over - I quote:
"the functions which had previously been entrusted only to the SS and Sipe and Army, for instance, the guarding of prisoners of war camps, supervision of forced labourers in Germany and occpied territories. This cooperation of the SA was planned and arranged by high offices in Berlin as early as the middle of 1943." for habitual drunkards, delinquents and shirkers, 300 inmates worked in the neighbouring stone quarries and on road construction. SA men provided the guards. Can we picture the conditions in which these shirkers and deliquent lived - or died ? struggle. Illegal arrest, unauthorized concentration camps, unbelievable sadism during the years of triumph, 1933 and 1934. Ruthless suppression and brutal persecution of Jews and Christians and of every opposition, coupled with warlike and aggressive training during the years from 1934 until the outbreak of war. And after that, more concentration camps, more sadism, more suppression and persecution, this time of the allegedly racially inferior peoples they had conquered; and violence and murder -but not, as it had been in the distant days of 1933, as individuals : now it was of whole peoples. It is the same pattern running through the years. Can your decision frank these men again to terrorize the peoples of Germany and Europe ? My Lord, I do not conceive it to be necessary to deal at any length with the evidence against the SS. You are already too well aware of the character of this organization and of the activities of its members. The letters SS appear in connection with almost every one of the crimes, great and small, of which you have now heard daily over the course of almost 10 months. It may all be summarised, even if understated, in the words of their leader Himmler, I quote:
"I know there are some people in Germany who become sick when they see these black coats. We understand the reason and do not expect that we shall be loved by too many."
I would therefore address you only upon one or two particular points that have arisen and to which the Prosecution attach particular importance.
The history of its development may be stated in a few words. Created originally as an elite bodyguard for the protection of Hitler himself, together with the SA, it formed a private Nazi army and the basis of what was to become the vital instrument in the conspiracy to wage aggressive war. Its value as a thoroughly reliable "instrument of the Fuehrer" was demonstrated in June 1934 when it performed the function of executioned in the blood purge which accompanied the murder of the SA leader Roehm. I quote:
"It appalled everyone" said Himmler later, and yet everyone was certain that he would do it again if such orders were issued and if it were necessary." The willingness of the SS to do it again was to be exemplified a millionfold in the ensuring years.
Until January 1933 the SS consisted of a single unit. There were no special branches, and, apart from their common role with the SA and their special position as Hitler's bodyguard, they had no other particular tasks. After the Nazi Party had come to power, however, and particularly after 1934 its members increased and its organization expanded and became more complex. Now units were created, such as the SS Totenkopf Verbaende, the task of whichwas, and continued to be, the guarding of concentration camps. A few selected units were given arms and in effect became Himmler's private army known as the SS Verfuegungstruppe. At the same time certain functions became the speciality of other groups which, while not having as separate branches, for instance, the SD who were the intelligence service of the SS and who were later to work in such close co-operation with the Gestapo. Although it became customary to distinguish between the several branches and formations of the SS by name, in terms of administration and command they were parts of the one SS, all under command of the Reichsfuehrer SS and all administered and controlled through the various main offices of the SS supreme Command.
mass of the SS membership which had remained unarmed, were drafted into the Wehrmacht. New recruits were enrolled in the Verfuegungstruppe, which was expanded to form the fighting divisions of the SS and it was these fighting divisions which, in about 1940 came to be known as the Waffen SS. how the SS had developed by 30 June 1944. By then it had a total membership of 794,941. The Allgemeine SS -the original nucleus of the SS- had declined in importance during the war because more than half of its 200,000 members had been called up to the Wehrmacht, the Labour Service or other special Nazi agencies. The remaining 594,443 belonged to the Waffen SS. The Tribunal has seen how 368,654 of the Waffen SS men were in field units. About 160,000 were in reinforcement, training and reserve units. 26,544 were in other units and offices directly subordinate to the Operational H.Q. of the SS High Command. 39,415 were in the SS Main Offices. Waffen SS were distributed. The Tribunal will see there I attached a total. Witnesses have told you that the Waffen SS had nothing to do with the concentration camps. But no loss than 24,000 of them were in the WVHA, the offices which organized and were responsible for the administration and personnel of the concentration camps. That 24,000 did not include the Totenkopf SS which provided the guards. Waffen SS men also provided the manpower of the various Nazi genocide organizations operating within and on behalf of the SS the Racial and Settlement Main Office, the Office of the Reich Commissar for the Consolidation of German Folkdom, the Central Office for persons of German Race, the Personal Staff of Himmler, including Sievers' infamous Ahnenerbe. organization the character of which was no different from any unit of the Wehrmacht. On the evidence this is not so. It is true that the Waffen SS was the combat arm of the SS. But, although its fighting formations came under the command of the Army, for operational purposes, always they remained an integral part of the SS.
Indeed, the Hitler order regarding the function of the SS on mobilization provided that if placed under the command of the Army it, I quote :"remains a unit of the NSDAP politically". Recruiting, training, promotions, administration and supply of the Waffen SS throughout the war remained the function of the Supreme Command of the SS. It was recruited through the SS Main Office. It was organized, administered and supplied through the SS Operational Office, which was the seat of its Command Headquarters. Members of the Waffen SS were subject to the jurisdiction by the SS Main Legal Office. Like all other formations of the SS, the Waffen SS was subject to Himmler's jurisdiction as Reichsfuehrer SS. It was in theory and in practice as much an integral part of the SS organization as any other branch of the SS. You will remember the evidence that von Rundstedt gave, I quote:
"The troop units of the SS were subordinate only to Himmler. I had no disciplinary power nor judicial power over them. I could not give them leaves or issue awards. I was responsible only for the technical employment of those divisions, much as I might use an Italian, Hungarian or Slovakian *division."
"state within the state" as General Det*el called it. The Defence now seeks to divide this all-embracing unity of the SS into various totally separate components united only in the person of Himmler. He and three or four of his subordinates are alone made responsible for the millionfold crimes that were committed. But this contention violates both truth and sense. We are dealing in this trial not with the murder of ten men here, or twenty there. In this indictment is charged not only the murder of millions but a demoniac plan of genocide, of the planned murder of whole nations, peoples and races. The SS was the chosen instrument for this plan which out-Heroded Heron. This plan could only be executed by the use of the whole of the SS, of every branch of the SS working in unison and in co-operation with each other. The evidence given in this trial has shown that the times of the Nazi conspirators could not have been executed in an improvised by sporadic criminal acts. They were carefully planned, prepared and put into action through the SS and other criminal organizations. The men of the SS were particularly qualified for this plan of crime. Physically trained and selected, they were politically indoctrinated in Naziism and were committed to blind obedience to the commands of Hitler and Himmler and the rest of the Nazi leaders. "Orders must be sacred" said Himmler. Not only was membership voluntary during the first sixteen years of the existence of the SS from 1925 on: it was subject to most careful selection in an endeavour to produce what the SS called a "male racial elite", a "super-stratum", a "band of definitely Nordic German men." SS men had to be fanatical Nazis of "Aryan" descent. war the voluntary basis of the recruitment was replaced by compulsory drafting. The witness Brill gave evidence that "at the end of the war there were more draftees in the Waffen SS than volunteers." of that witness. While it is not questioned that at some stage during the war considerable numbers of men were arbitrarily drafted into the Waffen SS, the date when this practice commenced and the extent to which it was carried, as they have been given by the witness Brill, are both challenged.
Autumn of 1939 and the Spring 1940. To say that the 36,000 were compulsorily drafted into the SS is deliberately misleading. When he was cross-examined before the Commissioner upon a similar statement he admitted that that 36,000 were already members of the Allgemeine SS which they had voluntarily joined. They were not conscripted: they were simply posted from one part of the SS to another. Figures of the subsequent conscripts which he gave were as follows:- During 1942, 30,000: during 1943, 100,000; and during 1944 210,000, making a total of 340,000. Even on there figures he is far short of justifying his statement that by the end of the war there were more conscripts than volunteers. He gave the grand total of the Waffen SS as 910,000 -- a figure which included its strength in 1940 and all subsequent reinforcements, both voluntary and compulsory. 340,000 amounts to only just over one-third of that total. into the SS there is considerable evidence to refute this witness. In February 1940 Hess was instructing the party offices to assist in the voluntary recruitment for the SS. In the decrees which he issued there was no suggestion of compulsory drafting. In April 1942 a recruiting pamphlet was emphasizing the voluntary basis of the Waffen SS in these words:
"The youth of the National Socialist Reich knows that he must himself initiate proceedings in order to complete his military service in the Waffen SS. That so many young Germans have volunteered for the Waffen SS is a living testimonial to the confidence of today's young generation in the Waffen SS, its spirit and above all, its leadership."
"The Soldier's Friend", a pocket diary for the German Armed Forces, published in 1943, the year in which Brill would have you believe that 100,000 men were conscripted without choice, was describing the members of the SS as hopeful young men who had "voluntarily decided to join the ranks of the Waffen SS." It stated, I quote:
"Everyone has acquainted himself with the comprehensive manual for the Waffen SS. The principal points are as follows: 1. Service in the Armed Forces SS counts as military service. Only volunteers are accepted."
admission of SIPO officials into the SS:
"I wish to clarify again: he said I want an admission only if the following conditions are fulfilled:
1. If the man applies freely and voluntarily."
29 Aug A LJG 14-1a Ninabuck And the Organization Book for 1943 explains that the Waffen SS by admitting volunteers for the duration of the war makes it possible for those volunteers to fight in the battle for the evolution of the National Socialist idea. I am entitled also to make this comment upon Brill's evidence. You will remember that I have already referred you to the statements which this witness made upon the activities of the SS Division Leibstandarte which must, in my respectful submission, be regarded as perjured testimony. In view of the suspect nature of his evidence and of the evidence there is to contradict it, it is my submission that whatever may have been the extent of compulsory service in the SS it was very much less and came into being at a very much later date than he contends. submission that the fact that a number of men were compulsorily enrolled ought not and cannot afford this organization a defense. The instances of crime committed by the SS during the war are so wide spread, so constant and so vast that you are compelled to infer that the vast majority of its members, whether in the first place they joined voluntarily or otherwise, readily accepted the tradition of the SS and themselves became willing parties to its criminal activities, May I consider in outline only some of the evidence upon which that conclusion must be drawn. the SS man received - a training for "the racial struggle" which Himmler commanded them to prosecute "without mercy." Racial theories, geopolitics, eugenics - this was their curriculum. Mein Kampf was their Bible. Their basic philosophy was expressed by Himmler :
"It must be a matter of course that the most copious breeding should be from this racial super-stratum of the Germanic people. In 20 to 30 years we must really be able to present the whole of Europe with its leading class. If the SS, together with the farmers . . . . . then run the colony in the East on a grand scabe 29 Aug A LJG 14-2a Ninabuck without any restraint, without any question about any kind of tradition but with nerve and revolutionary impetus, we shall in 20 years push the national boundary 500 km.
eastwards." SS men to the conception of a world in which the destruction, enslavement end the degradation of "inferior" peoples were regarded as an honourable duty. Pangs of conscience did not and could not trouble these men. The Tribunal will remember the words of Bach Zalewski when he was asked whether the murder of 90, 000 Jews by one small Einsatz group (to which, incidentally, the Waffen SS provided most of the killers) was in keeping with Nazi philosophy He said:
"I am of the opinion that when, for years, for decades, the doctrine is preached that the Slav race is an inferior race and Jews not even human, then such an outcome is inevitable." themselves infected by this poison. It is our submission that it did - and must have poisoned the ordinary SS man who did the killing. Their extermination of Jews was regarded as "A page of honour in our history."
Honour ! Cold blooded loss murder regarded as honour ! Do we need further evidence to prove the type of man this filthy education bred? Long before they had enrolled themselves in the SS their members had been saturated with racial hatred and Fuehrer worship. SS training was only a more advanced course. When they joined the SS, to whatever part they went they saw the practical application of all that they had learnt before. Everywhere, in every office, in every unit, murder was the trade. And where murder was to be done it was the members of the SS that were enrolled to do it.
The Ahnenerbe was a department of the SS. Its list of members included the name of over one hundred professors and other educated men - also SS members, who relied upon the murderous business of hundreds of other SS members to supply them with the bodies for their experiments and the specimens for their collections 29 Aug A LJG 14-3a Ninabuck tated, care being taken that, I quote:
" the head should not be damaged."
Professor Hirt wrote :
"By procuring the skulls of the Jewish Bolshevik Commissars who represent the prototype or the repulsive but characteristic sub-human, we have the chance new to obtain a scientific document." office of the SS, the office responsible for the awful crime of genocide and all that it entailed. The RSHA and the WVHA controlling and responsible for the concentration camps were manned by SS. The crime of the SS in the concentration camps need no further mention except to emphasize that the enquiries instituted by the SS judicial system, of which the witness Morgen gave evidence, were not enquiries into mass murder but into cases of corruption by SS officials. That witness is another whom I have already suggested to be unworthy of belief. How can the story of an investigation by an SS judge into the murders by Hoess at Auschwitz, which were Interrupted by the advance of the Allies, be taken seriously? What further investigation could have been needed when Morgan himself knew all the details of the Auschwitz killings some time in 1943 or 1944. Do you doubt that had the Allies lost the war Hoess would still be committing mass murder in that concentration camp and that SS judges would still be investigating corruption and isolated crimes?
The Einsatz Commandes were primarily SS. They show in miniature the co-operation between the various branches of Himmler's system and the unit of the SS. Action Group "A" was composed as follows :
Waffen SS 34.4 % SD 3.5 % Criminal Police 4.1 % Gestapo 9.0 % Auxiliary Police 8.8 % Other Police 13.
4 % The system of exterminating Jewry was handled by SS.
The Warsaw Ghetto is but one example. The deportation, murder and robbery of the Poles and other peoples occupying territory which was required for German settlement was undertaken by SS. You will remember the Globocnik report, the action in which thousands of Poles were removed from their homes and 178 million Reichsmarks acquired for the WVHA and which in the words of Globocnik himself, was "Carried out within the framework of the SS ...... men used for this purpose could guarantee a complete delivery."
One is surprised that he did not add "pecunia non olet" (The money does not smell) particularly in the invasion of the Soviet Union, and exemplified the tyranny and slaughter which were inherent in Nazi domination.
"We will never let that excellent weapon, the dread terrible reputation which receded us in the battles for Kharkov fade, but will constantly add new meaning to it", said Himmler to the officers of three SS Divisions in Kharkov in 1943. reputation for terror. Numerous instances have been submitted to the Tribunal of the commission of war crimes, and crimes against humanity by units of the Waffen SS. They are fresh in the Teibunal's mind and I will not recapitulate them.
I would only remind the Tribunal that some of the worst atrocities took place in 1943 and 1944, at which time a proportion of the Waffen SS were conscripts. of the Waffen SS, were merely soldiers -soldiers who had no knowledge and took no part in these crimes ? How can it be said that it was not they whose. aims were criminal ? Wherever we find Nazi crimes being committed we find also SS men involved. always it is said that those SS men were something special, members of the SD or some other particular branch, members of the SS who had been drafted away to serve with special units such as the Einsatz Commandos, members of the SS who were not really SS men at all but doctors or police. Can this be really so ? Let us ignore the evidence, of the concentration camps, of the Einsatz Commandos, of the vast and brutal crimes against the populations of their invaded territories, of the mass exterminations of Jews throughout half the countries of Europe, of the legion instances of individual crime and sadism, of the legion other instances of murder in battle and of every other breach of the laws of warfare. Let us ignore the evidence of all these crimes, although each one of them was committed by different SS men in different towns and villages throughout the length and breadth of the Greater Reich. Let us ignore them although they did not constitute one sudden wave of crime but were being done day after day over the years. Let us ignore the fact that in almost no instance of crime of which we have heard were any other than SS men involved. Let us ignore all this if you wish. Without it the criminality of the SS from the highest to the lowest is established by the records which we have of the so three speeches that Himmler made to the officers of his SS units. Division Leibstandarte. In October 1943 he was addressing his Major Generals at Posen. In the same month the commanding officers of every regiment in three of his SS divisions were listening to what he said at Kharkov. These speeches have been quoted to you again and again and you know the sentiments that were expressed and the subject matter that they covered.
Will you try to imagine a General from your own countries talking to all the officers of one of your own divisions of hauling into slavery "thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands" of people; of shooting "thousands of leading Poles". Will you try to imagien a British or an American or a Soviet or a French army commander telling his Major Generals :
"What happens to a Russian, to a Czech, does not interest me in the slighest ...... Whether 10,000 Russian females fall down from exhaustion while digging an anti-tank ditch interests me only in so far as the antitank ditch for Germany is finished." Or saying this :
"I also want to talk to you, quite frankly, on a very grave matter . . . . It's one of these things it is easy to talk about - 'The Jewish race is being exterminated', says one party member, 'that's quite clear, it's our program -elimination of the Jewsm and we're doing it, exterminating them. And then they come, 80 million worthy Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. Of course the others are vermin, but this one is an A 1 Jew. Not one of all those who talk this way has witnessed it, not one of them has been through it. Most of you must know what it means when 100 corpses are lying side by side, or 500 or 1000. To have stuck it out and at the same time - apart from exceptions caused by human weakness- to have remained decent follows, that is what makes us hard. divisions :
"Anti-Semitism is exactly the same as delousing. Setting rid of lice is not a question of ideology, it is a matter of cleanliness. In just the same way anti-Semitism for us has not been a question of ideology but a matter of cleanliness." officers and of the men that they commanded ? Is it possible that officers and men in these Waffen SS divisions who could be spoken to in such a way were highminded, clean-living, decent and honourable soldiers ? Such men, be they from Germany or from any other country, in the world, would not tolerate these words.
Those speeches have become hackoyed enough during the course of this trial, but they never lose their significance. They show that every member of those SS units was a prototype of his SS fuehrer. If it were not so the defendant Goering could not have said, after telling Mussolini the horrors of German's methods in fighting the artisans, "Members of the Party discharge this task much more harshly and efficiently ...... The SS, the guard of the old fighters of the Party, who have personal ties with the Fuehrer and who form a special elite, confrim this principle."
If it were not so the defendant Hess could not have written:
"The units of the Waffen SS ...... are more suitable than other armed units for the specific tasks to be solved in the occupied Eastern territories due to their intensive national socialist training in regard to questions of race and nationality." We know what Hitler had in mind as the future role of the Waffen SS -State Police to impose German authority in the conquered countries; State police who would never fraternise with the proletariat and underworld. That was their destined role which all the army knew because, by order of the OKW, it had received the "greatest publicity". We knew enough of the Nazi State Police, of the education and training during these years of war to fit them for the task that lay ahead of them, to know also the sort of methods which they would have employed. It is those men, the men who were intended and had been trained to police and terrorise Europe, who compose the organization of the SS which we ask you to convict as criminal. nizations, the Corps of Political Leaders, the SA and the SS to which I desire to draw your attention. It was these Organizations which provided the machinery by which the crimes that these defendants conceived were executed.
These three Organizations were not separate and distinct from each other as their Counsel have attempted to portray them. It was their members who together constituted- and still do- the fundamental and dangerous core of National Socialism. As the separate branches of the National Socialist elite their aims and purposes were the same and they worked and co-operated with each other using the same methods which were criminal for all to see. From the outset this was so and continued so until the end. Nothing more clearly demonstrates these things than the evidence of how the NationalSocialist Party and Government based the concepts of law and order and corrupted the judicial practice of their Courts in order to protect themselves an their followers in the criminal courses they were pursuing. Nazi police and Nazi judiciary were condoning violence and murder committed by the SA and the SS and the Gestapo. And for what reasons :-reasons which must have demonstrated to all Germany and must demonstrate to all the world today the very rottenness of National Socialism:
"As the deed did not originate from ignoble notive but rather served the achievement of an exceedingly patriotic aim and the advance of the National Socialist State, the quashing of the proceedings .., does not seem incompatible with the orderly administration of criminal justice." Such was the opinion of the Public Prosecutor to the Provincial Court in Nuremberg in respect of the SA men who had beaten a Communist to deathbeaten him until the soles of his teeth were so swollen "owing to the mass of blood gathered there, that after the blood had been drained off by incision, pockets nearly the size of a fist were formed."
In Munich the state Minister of the Interior was giving similar reasons for quashing proceedings against SS guards in Dachau who had beaten a prisoner on the head until he died:
"As a reason it is pointed out that the conducting of investigations would cause great harm to the prestige of the National Socialist State, since these proceedings would be directed against members of the SA and SS and thus the SA and SS as the chief protagonists of the National Socialist State would be immediately affected."
agreement with the Supreme Leadership of that organization.
"The deed and intention of the SA men were only aimed at the wellbeing of the National Socialist movement. Political reason and the purity of intentions is thus beyond doubt." convict SA guards who "not only attempted to wring confessions from inmates but acted in sheer lust for torture", they were at once expelled from the Party; The prosecutor who happened himself to be a member of the SA was warned that he should resign and the Gauleiter wrote to the Supreme Court advising that a pardon should be substituted for the sentence that had been imposed. tions did not know that membership afforded the license to murder ? The military could not resist anything so attractive. By 1939 a military judge was granting to an SS man extenuating circumstances "because he was induced to participate in the shooting by a corporal handing him a rifle.
He was in a state of irritation woing to numerous atrocities committed by Poles against persons of German race. As an SS man, particularly sensitive at the sight of Jews and to the hostile attitude of Jewry to the Germans, he therefore acted quite thoughtlessly in a youthful spirit of adventure."
Those SS soldiers had been sentenced to imprisonment for "manslaughter" which the army commander refused to confirm. It was for "manslaughter" of a kind known to National Socialists who, as we have soon in this Court, display a curious sensitiveness to the word "murder". This they called manslaughter: "After about 50 Jews, who had been used during the day to repair a bridge, had finished their work in the evening, these two men drove them all into a synagogue and shot then all without reason." supreme guardian of National Socialist honour and discipline to whose agust authority and jurisdiction the members of all those organizations were subject. Of the murders committed during the 1938 demonstrations by Hoheitstrager and member of the SA and SS, the investigation of which had been entrusted to the Secret State Police and Party Jurisdiction, of Gauleiters and other Political leaders, it was pleaded that, I quote, "in such cases as when Jews were killed without an order or contrary to orders, ignoble motives could not be determined." The purpose of those proceedings in the Party Court were, I quote again, "to protect those Party comrades who, motivated by decent National Socialist attitude and initiation had overshot their mark." horror and tragedy, that these defendants and the members of these organizations have brought upon the world. You see to what depths of evil they corrupted the human conscience. No ignoble motive- The murder of woman and children the "decent National Socialist attitude and initiative". Such was the National Socialist creed which the members of these organizations fanatically accepted, the creed which - can one doubt - they still cherish and, given the opportunity to do so, would revive. trespass on the ground which will be covered so well by my colleagues. Nevertheless I want to state, as clearly and emphatically as it may be stated, that the British Delegation unreservedly joins them in the request for the condemnation of the group indicted does the General Staff and High Command. aggression. They have borne essential parts in the deeds which in the hands of their immediate perptrators are undeniably war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Yet they protest their innocence. the lessons of history. the remnants of their conscience. They knew that they were doing what was wrong but they now say "Befehl ist Befehl" - an order is an order. they are only too conscious of their own failings in that direction. But there comes a point when, faced with crimes which are obvious murder or barbarity, there is a higher duty. Even Dr. Laternser admitted this was so. His suggestion to the witness Schreiber that he ought to have protested at the Amy Staff's proposals for bacteriological warfare came strangely on behalf of these men whose very de ense has been to declare the impossibility and uselessness of protest. What nonsense - what utter nonsense - is this which you have been asked to listen to by these Defendants and their Generals when their own Counsel, to discredit a witness, must ask the very question which the Prosecution have been asking of themselves since the day this trial began. In fairness to all military tradition it should not go forth that soldiers have sheltered behind the letter of a command from facing moral problems - and deciding them, rightly or wrongly, as moral problems. Great captains are not automate, to be weighed against a rubber stamp. I need not traverse the history of our military figures - the philosphy of Montrose, the breeding thoughts of Marshal Ney, the troubled heart of Robert E. Lee in 1861, to find examples. Two of the greatest names in German military history spring to one's mind: von Clausewitz leaving the Prussian Army to serve in that of Russia; Yorck von Wartemburg making his decision of neutrality - both put that they deemed the needs of Europe and Humanity above the orders of the moment.
How much more clear and obvious was the duty when the work of drafting, issuing and carrying out the Nachtund-Nebel decree, the Commando Order, the Commissar Order, Hitler's Order to murder cur 50 Air Force Officers, meant the defiling of every idea which every soldier cherishes and holds dear; when - as all of them who ever served upon the Eastern Front could see with their own eyes - they were asked to support and co-operate in a calculated system of mass extermination and utter brutality. yet for years they had met in conference after conference to sit at his feet and listen to his words. They fed his lust for power and enslavement with the best of their professional skill. While the defenseless peoples of the East, the men, women and children of Poland, of the Soviet Union and of the Baltic States were being deliberately slaughtered and deported into slavery to allow for German Lebensraum, these men talked of the necessities of war. When their own cities were bombed and Germans killed, they called it murder. Only in July 1944 when Hitler's star was dimmed did three Field Marshals and five Colonel Generals recognize that he was murdering also their own country and take action. When that star was rising in victory they had hailed it and ignored the blood red colour of the clouds from which it rose.
So much for the facts and the merit. It is perhaps permissible to say one word on the construction of the Charter. The use of the two words "group" or "organization" surely connotes that the entity in question may have been either formally organized by the Nazis or selected, by the Prosecution as a group which existed in living reality. This group was bound by the transmission of those criminal orders.
For that reason we the British Prosecution is again asking unhesitatingly for a conviction.
Beyond this I wish to make two points only. who joined the Cabinet in 1933. If anyone in that Cabinet did not know to what he was commiting himself on 30th January 1933, he had a very good idea in March when the Jews were attacked. is knowledge increased in April when the whole nation was organized in boycotting the Jews and the official figures of 20,000 people under arrest re given in the German Press. In June 1934 he know that murder was being based as an instrument of policy. In 1935 and 1936 he knew that the foreign policy was being carried on at the calculated risk of war. Defense, of Ministers in complete ignorance of what was going on. In my submission, government does not function like that. Whether totalitarian or democratic, a Government can only act by dealing with human beings. The lives of human beings are not lived in watertight compartments; their infinitely varying interests are inextricably interlocked. The most completely authoritarian minister must, as indeed Dr. Kubuschok in his speech was disposed to agree, consider the repercussions of his actions on the acts of his colleagues, In other words, he must know what is going on. and took the principal positions and richest rewards of the State for themselves as the price of such, support, that we ask for the conviction of the organization today. scheme of the Nazi State, As one would expect, the evidence that I have mentioned introduces them in innumerable ways. Beyond once more emphasising my support of my colleagues' lea for their conviction, I do not intend to comment further upon those organizations. and not the least of the dangers, of this trial is that those of us who have been engaged day in and day out for 9 months have reached the saturation point of horror.