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.
Shakespeare attempted to picture that saturation point in the memorable lines:
"Blood and destruction shall be so in use Their infants quartered with the hands of war;All pity chok'd through custom of fell deeds?"
companion for 40 weeks that we realise that the "domestic fury and fierce civi strife", the results of which Mark Anthony was prophesying, are an inconsiderable bagatelle beside the facts which we have had to consider. have been the instruments of death for 22,000,000 people - it is the quality of cruelty which produced the gas chambers of Auschwitz or the routine shooting of Jewish children throughout a Continent claiming to be civilised. There is not one of these organizations which is not directly connected with the sorry trade of murder in a brutal form. Who can doubt that the Reich Cabinet knew of the euthanasia used to conserve the physical resources of Germany for war? It is beyond question that the High Command and General Staff passed on these orders of which you have heard so much and which are all reduced in the end to plain murder; the Leadership Corps' shared in killing Jews and ruining the bodies of slave labourers. I have simply to mention the SS and the crimes come unbidded into the mind without any words of mine. Conniving, assisting and finding a reason for these crimes were the SD and the Gestapo. The trained its Baltic recruits to reach the SA standard which came to fruition in the Ghetto of Kaunas or the pit at Vilna.
The late President Woodrow Wilson once said:
"It is indispensible that the Governments associated against Germany should know beyond a peradventure with whom they are dealing." If Europe is to be cleansed of Nazi evil it is indispensible that you and the world should know these organization for what they are.
It has been cur sombre task to assist you to this knowledge; having done so, we sometimes wonder if the stench of death will ever wholly pass from our nostrils.
But we are determined to do out utmost to see that it will pass from Germany, and that the spirit which, produced it will be exercised. It may be presumptuous for lawyers, who do not claim to be more than the cement of society, to speculate or even dream of what we wish to see in its place. But I give you the faith of a lawyer. Some things are surely universal: tolerance, decency, kindliness. It is because we believe that there must be a clearance before such qualities will flourish in peace that we ask you to condemn this organization of evil. ground that you have cleared, a great step will have been taken. It will be a step towards the universal recognition that "sights and sounds all happy as her day, And hearts at peace" are not the prerogative of any one nation.
They are the inalienable heritage of mankind.
THE PRESIDENT: The Tribunal will adjourn.
(A recess was taken)
MR. DODD: Since the 20th day of November 1945, this International Military Tribunal has been in almost continual session. In these many months, a record of more than 15.000 pages has been compiled. Over 300.000 affidavits have been submitted," about 3.000 documents have been offered and oral testimony has been heard from some 200 witnesses. exclusively of German origin, has established beyond question the commission of the crimes of criminal conspiracy, aggressive war, mass murder, slave labor, racial and religious persecutions and brutal mistreatment of millions of innocent people. The four prosecuting powers have indicted and hold responsible for these frightful crimes as individuals the twenty-two defendants named in the Indictment. twenty-two individual defendants could not by themselves alone accomplish the execution of these enormous crimes, have also named in the Indictment the Nazi organizations, as the principal media, by and through which these transgressions were effected. These organizations -- some Nazi-created, some Nazi-perverted -- were the agencies upon which the defendants relied and through which they operated for the accomplishment of their criminal purposes over the complacent people of Germany and over the conquered peoples of Europa.
The named organizations fall into two classes: In the first class are those which are peculiarly Nazi creations, having no counterpart outside the Nazi regime and which had no intrinsically legitimate purpose. This group includes the Politische Leiter, the SA and the SS. In the second class care those which existed in one form or another before the Nazi regime but which were corrupted by the Nazis.
This group includes the Reich Cabinet, the High Command and General Staff, and the Gestapo. As to this second class, it is not our contention that the Institutions themselves were basically criminal, but rather that they became criminal under Nazi domination. Although, by its very nature as a secret political police system, the Gestapo was the most easily adapted to criminal purposes and became one of the most effective of all instruments of Nazi criminality. named in the Indictment, as isolated, independently functioning aggregations of persons, each pursuing separate tasks and objectives. They were all a part of, and essential to, the police state planned by Hitler and perfected by his clique into the most absolute tyranny of modern times. That police state was the political Frankenstein of our era, which brought terror and fear to Germany and spread horror and death throughout the world. The Leadership Corps of the Nazi Party was its body, the Reich Cabinet its head, its powerful arms were the Gestapo and the SA, and when it strode over Europe its legs were. the armed forces and the SS. It was Hitler and his cohorts who created this police-statemonster, and it brought Germany to shame and the nations of Europe to ruin. of this police system as something casual or its growth and development as normal political phenomena. For it was place planned from the earliest days by the conspiratours. The Nazi "old fighters" had a design for despotism. They built the SA at the outset as a private band of strong-arm men to wield the club against the political opponent and the whip against the Jew. They established the SS as the dread guard of the Fuehrer and of themselves. When they seized power they abolished police protection and substituted police persecution as the mission of the Gestapo.
They wiped out all semblance of free government and set themselves up in the Reich Cabinet with plenary powers. They depraved the highest traditions of military ethics and substituted "willing tools" for ranking men at arms. They obliterated all other political parties and fastened on the German people a political straight jacket in the form of the Leadership Corps. and they could never have accomplished their criminal aims. Take away the SA and they would have lost the mastery of the streets; take away the SS and they would have had no concentration camp system, take away the Gestapo and they would have had no means of illegal arrest and unlimited detention; take away the Reich Cabinet and they would have had no subservient law-making body; take away the truckling military men and they could not have secretly planned their attacks or ultimately waged their wars. to declare a group or organization criminal, and the functions of the Tribunal under those provisions, have been dealt with in the legal arguments and memoranda previously submitted to the Tribunal by the Chief Prosecutors..At that time, in response to the request of the Tribunal, Mr. Justice Jackson stated the grounds which, in our view, warrant declaring a group or organization criminal. may be well to restate those tests:
1. It must be a "group" or "organization" within the meaning of Article IX of the Charter--i.e., it must be an aggregation of persons, associated in some identifiable relationship, having a collective general purpose or pursuing a common plan of action.
2. Membership in the organization must have been basically voluntary, i.e., the membership of the organization as a whole, irrespective of particular cases of compulsion against individuals, or groups of individuals within the organization must not have been due to legal compulsion.
3. It must have participated directly and effectively in the accomplishment of the criminal aims of the conspiracy, and it must have committed crimes against the peace or war crimes or crimes against humanity, as charged in the Indictment.
4. The criminal aims or methods of the organization must have been of such character that its membership in general may properly be charged with knowledge of them.
5. Under the Charter the Prosecution must also establish that at least one of the defendants in the dock who is a member of the organization, is guilty of some act on the basis of which the organization may also be declared criminal. Prosecution has conceded must be met with respect to each organization before a declaration of criminality as to that organization is warranted. My distinguished colleague, Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, has discussed in his address the evidence against most of the organizations; and the Russian and French Chief Prosecutors will review specific crimes committee by these groups. I shall not discuss the High Command since it is to be the subject of a special argument by a member of the American staff. I shall, with the consent of the Tribunal, address my remarks to the general proposition of whether the Prosecution has sustained the burden of proving by competent evedence that each of the named organizations is criminal under all of the principles stated.
organizations in question are groups or organizations as we interpret these terms in the Charter --that is, each is an an aggregation of persons, associated in an identifiable relationship having a collective general purpose. aggregate, had a common purpose, and functioned as a group, is clear. Ample evedence as to the structure and functions of the Leadership Corps of the Party is to be bound in Nazi publications - the Organization at Book of the NSDAP, " der Hoheitstraeger"; the official magazine of the Leadership Corps, in the chart of the Leadership Corps, and a chart of the Party itself. This group some 600,000 strong had special uniforms, carried special membership cards enjoyed countless special privileges. The term "Politische Leiter" is not one we have invented for the purpose of giving an appearance of cohesion to a number of unrelated individuals performing similar, but uncoordinated, functions in the Party. The Organization Book of the Party itself deals with all these Party workers as a unit under the designation "Politische Leiter". It shows the hierachrchical structure under which they were organized and the manner in which directives were passed down automatically through the chain of command to the lowest level and were carried into effect by all members of the group. It shows further that in the functioning of this corps, the Leadership principle reached perfection. All Party workers were bound by identical oaths to unconditional obedience to the Fuehrer and to all leaders appointed by him. At each level, regular and frequent conferences were held and the higher and lower levels met together periodically for discussions of policy.
The Leadership Corps constituted a perfect pyramid in which every stone at every level was necessary to maintain the whole structure It had one single, common pupose -- the maintenance of the organization and ideology of the Nazi Party. three classes of persons: (1) members of the ordinary cabinet after 30 January 1933; (2) members of the Council of Ministers for the Defense of the Reich; and (3) members of the Secret Cabinet Council. These three classes together make up the group of 48 members which we are prosecuting under the designation "Reichsregierung", Each of these, taken by itself, constitutes an identifeable aggregate working toward a common end. The ordinary cabinet of any government is as clear an example of a group as could be found. The ordinary cabinet of the Nazi Reich did not differ in that respect from similar institutions in other governments. It met frequently as a cabinet in the early days of the Nazi regime, and when meetings thereafter became uncommon, it continued to function as a group in passing on decrees and laws through the procedure of circulating drafts of proposed enactments to all its members. An example of this procedure is before the Tribunal in the form of a memorandum from the Defendant Frick to the Chief of the Reichs Chancellory. The same cohesion and unified function is found in the Council of Ministers for the Defense of the Reich, which was established in 1939. Like the ordinary cabinet, its members consulted together in actual meetings as shown by the minutes of such meetings in September, October, and November, 1939. And, like the ordinary cabinet, it also functioned by using the circulation procedure, a typical instance of which is the letter from Dr. Lammers 17 September, 1939, to members of the Council of Ministers for the Defense of the Reich. The Secret Cabinet Council, an advisory body on foreign policy, consisting of eight members, was an identifiable unified aggregation as appears from the decree which created it.
The inclusion of those three classes under the single designation "Reichsregierung" is not an attempt to create an artificial relationship among three separate and independent entities. Actually, the three were collectively as much a group 29 Aug A LJG 18-1 Daniels as each was independently, for the Council of Ministers for the Defense of the Reich and the Secret Cabinet Council were really committees formed out of the ordinary cabinet.
The decrees creating these two committees demonstrate that the entire personnel was composed of individuals who were in the ordinary cabinet, Not only in personnel, but in action, functions, and purpose as well the ordinary cabinet and its committees were unified, Member of the ordinary cabinet who were not members of these committees, were nevertheless, present at meetings of the Council of Ministers, as shown by minutes of such meetings, and, under the circulation procedure, received drafts of decrees prepared by the Council of Ministers. This aggregation the cabinet and committees formed of some of its members--had a single collective purpose, that of governing the Reich in such a fashion as to carry out the schemes of the Nazi conspirators. examples of the type of group or association contemplated by the provisions of the Charter. It was defined by a German Law as a component of the Party, having its own legal personality, and it was characterized by the Nazi Party Organization Book as a distinct entity. It had an identifiable membership of from 1,500,000 to 2,000,000 members, bound together by common standards, wearing a common and distinctive uniform, having common aims and objective and carrying on common activities. The general purpose of the SA, to which the whole membership was devoted, was stated in the Organization Book of the Party, " to be the bearer of The National Socialist armed will", and, according to the same Party manual, a member had to withdraw if he no longer agreed with the SA views or was not in a position to fulfill completely the duties imposed upon him as a member of the SA. It was established by German law as a component of the Party having its own legal personality. It was described in the Organization Book of the Party as a "homogeneous firmly welded fighting force bound by Ideological oaths." It had a clearly identifiable 29 Aug A LJG 18-2 Daniels membership which rose to about 600,000 toward the end of the war, composed of persons who net the same basic uniform standards of race ideology.