Attacks followed swiftly on the British Commonwealth, French Indo-China, and The Netherlands in the Southwest Pacific. Those aggressions were met in the only way they could be met, with instant declarations of war and with armed resistance which mounted slowly through many long months of reverse until finally the Axis was crushed to earth and deliverance for its victims was won.
JUSTICE JACKSON: (continuing) Your Honor, I am about to take up "Crimes in the Conduct of War," which is a quite separate subject. We are within five minutes of the recessing time. It will be very convenient for me if it willbe agreeable to you.
THE PRESIDENT: We will sit again in 15 minutes' time.
(Whereupon the court recessed for 15 minutes starting at 1530 hours).
(The court reconvened at 1550 hours).
THE PRESIDENT: The Tribunal must request that if it adjourns for 15 minutes, that members of the bar and others are back in their seats after an interval of 15 minutes. Mr. Justice Jackson, I understand that you wish to continue to 5:15, When you may be able to conclude your speech?
JUSTICE JACKSON: I think that would be the most orderly way.
THE PRESIDENT: Yes, the Tribunal will be glad to do so. May it please your Honor, I will now take up the subject of "Crimes in the Conduct of War." humanity some limitations on the savagory of warfare. Rules to that end have been embodied in international convention to which Germany became a party. This code had proscribed certain restraints as to the treatment of belligerents. The enemy was entitled to surrender and to receive quarter and good treatment as a prisoner of war. We will show by German documents that these rights were denied, that prisoners of war were given brutal treatment and often murdered. This was particularly true in the case of captured airmen, often my contrymen. airmen should no longer be granted the Status of prisoners of war. They were to be treated as criminals and the Army was ordered to refrain from protecting them against lynching by the populace. This order was sent out at the request of the Reichsfuehrer SS. "I am sending you the inclosed order with the request that the Chief of the Regular Police and of the Security Police be informed.
They are to make this instruction known to their subordinate officers verbally. It is not the task of the police to interfer in clashes between Germans and English and American flyers who have bailed out." pains to incite the civilian population to attack and kill airmen who crash3/4landed. Similarly, we will show Hitler's top secret order that commandos , regardless of condition, were to be killed to the last man. In that case we have the original documents with the Fuehrer's signature attached. We will show the circulation of secret orders, to be passed orally to civilians that enemy parachutists were to be arrested or liquidated. By such means were murders incited and directed. assumed its greatest proportions in the fight against Russia. Eventually all prisoners of war were taken out of control of the Army and put in the hands of Himmler and SS. In the East, the German fury spent itself. Russian prisoners of war were ordered to be branded. They were starved. I shall quote passages from a letter written February 28, 1942 by defendant Rosenberg to defendant Keitel; and this is what he said:
"The fate of the Soviet prisoners of war in Germany is on the contrary a tragedy of the greatest extent.
Of 3.6 millions of prisoners of war,only several hundred thousand are still able to work fully.
A large part of them has starved, or died.
, because of the hazards of the weather.
Thousands also died from spotted fever.
was provided at all. They lay under the open sky during rain or snow.
Even tools were not made available to dig mentioned; for instance, in various camps, all the "Asiatics" were shot.
party had prescribed certain immunities for civilian populations unfortunate enough to dwell in lands overrun by hostile armies. The German occupation forces, controlled or commanded by men on trial before you, committed a long series of outrages against the inhabitants of occupied territory that would be incredible except for captured orders and the captured reports which show the fidelity with which those orders were executed. by the conspirators as part of the common plan. We can appreciate why these crimes against their European enemies were not of a casual character but were planned and disciplined crimes only when we get at the reaon for them. Hitler told his officers on August 22, 1939 that "The main objective in Poland is the destructtion of the enemy and not the reahing of a certain geographical line." Those words were quoted. The project of deporting promising youth from occupied territories was approved by Rosenberg on the theory that " a desired weakening of the biological force of the conquered people is being achieved." To Germanize or to destroy was the program. Himmler announced, "Either we win over any good blood that we can use for ourselves and give it a place in our people or, gentlemen -- you may call this cruel, but nature is cruel -- we destroy this blood." As to "racially good types" Himmler further advised, "Therefore, I think that it is our duty to take their children with us, to remove them from their environment if necessary by robbing or stealing them." He urged deportation of Slavic children to deprive potential enemies of future soldiers.
The Nazi purpose was to leave Germany's neighbors so weakened that even if she should eventually lose the war, she would still be the most powerful nation in Europe. Against this back ground, we must view the plan for ruthless warfare, which means a plan for the commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Hostages in large numbers were demanded and killed. Mass punishments were inflicted, so savage that whole communications were extinguished. Rosenberg was advised of the annilhilation of three unidentified villages in Slovakia. In May of 1943, another village of about 40 farms and 220 inhabitants was ordered wiped out. The entire population was ordered shot, the cattle and property impounded, and the order required that "the village will be destroyed totally by fire." A secret report from Rosenberg's Ministry of Eastern territory, where he was responible reveals this as I quote it:"
"Food rations allowed the Russian population are so only for minimum subsistence of limited duration.
The "The roads are clogged by hundreds of thousands of "Sauckel's action has erased great unrest among the civilians.
Russian girls were deloused by men, nude photos railroad station, etc.
All this material has been sent to the OKH."
and extensive slaving operation in history. On few other subjects is our evidence so abundant and so damaging. A speech of the defendant Frank, Governor General of Poland, made on January 25, 1944, boasts, "I have sent 1,300,000 Polish workers into the Reich." The defendant Sauckel reported that "out of the five million foreign workers who arrived in Germany not even 200,000 came voluntarily."
This fact was reported to the Fuehrer and defendants Speer, Goering, and Keitel. (Document No. R-124.) Children of 10 to 14 years were impressed into service. When enough slave labor was not forthcoming, prisoners of war were forced into war work in flagrant violation of international conventions. Slave labor came from France, Belgium, Holland, Italy, and the East. Methods of recruitment were violent. The treatment of these slave laborers was stated in general terms, not difficult to translate into concrete deprivations, in a letter to the defendant Rosenberg from the defendant Sauckel, it is stated:
"All the men (prisoners of war and foreign civilian workers) degree of expenditure."
standards of their neighbors and to weaken them physically and economically, a long series of crimes were committed. There was extensive destruction, serving no military purpose, of the property of civilians. Dikes were thrown open in Holland almost at the close of the war not to achieve military ends but to destroy the resources and retard the economy of the thrifty Netherlanders. of occupied countries. An example of the planning is shown by a report on France dated December 7, 1942 made by the Economic Research Department of the Reichsbank. The question arose whether French occupation costs should be increased from 15 million Reichsmarks per day to 25 million Reichsmarks per day. The Reichsbank analyzed French economy to determine whether it could bear the burden. It pointed out that the armistice had burdened France to that date to the extent of 18 1/2 billion Reichsmarks, equalling 370 billion Francs. It pointed out that the burden of these payments within two and a half years equalled the aggregate French national income inthe year 1940, and that the payments handed over to Germany in the first six months of 1942 corresponded to the estimate for the total French revenue for that year.
The report concluded, "In any case, the conclusion is inescapable that relatively heavier tributes have been imposed on France since the armistice in June 1940 than upon Germany after the World War. In this, connection, it must be noted that the economic powers of France never equalled those of the German Reich and that the vanquished France could not draw on foreign economic and financial resources in the same degree as Germany after the last World War." President of the Reichsbank that made that report; the defendant Ribbentrop was Foreign Minister; the Defendant Goering was Plenipotentary for the Four-Year Plan, and all of them participated in the exchange of views of which this captured document is a part. Notwithstanding this analysis by the Reichsbank, they proceeded to increase the imposition on France from 10 million Reichsmarks daily to 25 million per day. economy. The plan and purpose of the thing appears in a letter from General Stulpnagle, head of the German Armistice Commission, to the defendant Jodl as early as 14th September, 1940 when he wrote, "The slogan 'Systematic weakening of France' has already been surpassed by far in reality." of Germany's neighbors for the purpose of destroying their competitive position, but there was looting and pilfering on an unprecedented scale. recognize that no army moves through occupied territory without some pilfering as it goes. Usually the amount of pilfering increases as discipline wanes. Exactly the contrary with Germany. If the evidence in this case showed no looting from lack of discipline, I certainly would ask no conviction of these defendants for it. cipline or to the ordinary weaknesses of human nature. The German organized plundering, planned it, disciplined it, and made it official just as he organized everything else, and then he compiled the most meticulous records to show that he had done the best job of looting that was possible under the circumstances.
And we have those records. of the art objects of Europe by direct order of Hitler dated September 17, 1940. On the 16th of April, 1943 Rosenberg reported that up to the 7th of April, 92 railways cars with 2,775cases containing art objects had been sent to Germany; and that 53 pieces of art had been shipped to Hitler direct, The defendant apparently did ten times as well in the collection of art objects as the Fuehrer, and 594 to the defendant Goering. The report mentioned something like 20,000 pieces of siezed art and the main locations where they were stored.
Moreover this looting was glorified by Rosenberg. Here we have 39 leather-bound tabulated volumes of his inventory, which in due time we will offer in evidence. One cannot but admire the artistry of this Rosenberg report, 39 volumes such as I hold in my hand. The Nazi taste was cosmopolitan. Of the 9.455 articles inventorized, there were included 5,255 paintings , 297 sculptures, 1,372 pieces of antique furniture, 307 textiles,and 2, 224 small objects of art. Rosenberg observed that there were approximately 10,000 more objects still to be inventorized. Rosenberg himself estimated that the values involved would come close to a billion dollars.
The inventory is typically methodical; A list of the objects dealt with in the particular volume, and photographs of the great masterpieces of art looted from the cultural centers of Europe and shipped to Germany-39 volumes. The one that I hold deals with paintings; sculpture likewise. looting of individual soldiers long away from home who helped themselves to what comes to hand, but an organized, systematic plan to loot Europe. against humanity committed by the Nazi gangster ring whose leaders are before you. It is not the purpose in my part of this case to deal with the individual crimes.
I am dealing with the common plan or design for crime and will not dwell upon individual offenses. My task is only to show the scale on which these crimes occurred, and to show that these are the men who were in the responsible positions and who conceived the plan and design which renders them answerable, regardless of the fact that the plan was actually executed by others. It recovered from the demorilization of surprise attack, assembled its forces and stopped these men in their tracks. Once success deserted their banners, one by one the Nazi satellites fell away. Sawdust Caesar collasped. Resistance forces in every occupied country arose to harry the invader. Even at home, Germans saw that Germany was being led to ruin by these mad men, and the attempt on July 20,1944 to assassinate Hitler an attempt fostered by men of highest station, was a desperate effort by internal forces to stop short of ruin. Quarrels broke out among the failing conspirators, and the decline of the Nazi power was more swift than its ascendancy. German armed forces surrendered, its government disintegrated, its leaders committed suicide by the dozen, and by the fortunes of war these defendants fell into our hands, although they are not by any means all the guilty ones, they are survivors among the most responsible. Their names appear over and over in the documents and their faces grace the photographic evidence. We have here the surviving top politicians, militarists, financiers, diplomats, administrators, and propagandists,of the Nazi movement. Who was responsible for these crimes if they were not? victorious Allies with the question whether there is any legal responsibility on high-ranking men for acts which I have described. Must such wrongs either be ignored or redressed in hot blood? Is there no standard in the law for a deliberate and reasoned judgment on such conduct? to govern the conduct of little men, but that rulers are, as Lord Chief Justice Coke put it to King James, "under God and the law".
The United States believed that the law long has afforded standards by which a juridical hearing could be conducted to make sure that we punish only the right men and for the right reasons. Following the instructions of the late President Roosevelt and the decision of the Yalta conference President Truman directed representatives of the United States to formulate a proposed International Agreement, which was submitted during the San Francisco Conference to Foreign Ministers of the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and the Provisional Government of France.
With many modifications, that proposal has become the Charter of this Tribunal. prisoners are to be judged does not express the views of the signatory nations alone. Other nations with diverse but highly respected systems of jurisprudence also have signified adherence to it. These are Belgium, The Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Czechoslovakia, Luxembourg, Poland, Greece, Yugoslavia, Ethiopia, Australia, Haiti, Honduras, Panama and New Zealand. You judge, therefore, under an organic act which represents the wisdom, the sense of justice, and the will of nineteen governments, representing an overwhelming majority of all civilized people. legal concepts which are inseparable from its jurisdiction and which govern its decision. These, as I have said, are also conditions attached to any grant of hearing to defendants. The validity of the provisions of the charter is conclusive upon us all whether we have accepted the duty of judging or of prosecuting under it, as well as upon the defendants, who can point to no other law which gives them a right to be heard at all. My able and experienced colleagues believe, as I do, that it will contribute to the expedition and clarity of this trial if I expound briefly the application of the legal philosophy of the charter to the facts I have recited. be contended that the prisoners on trial are entitled to have it applied to their conduct only most charitably if at all. Of course in clarifying it in one paragraph many questions of application must be left unsolved. It may be said that this is new law, not authoritatively declared at the time they did the acts it condemns, and that this declaration of the law has taken them by surprise. is the law; they really are surprised that there is any such thing as law.
These defendants did not rely on any law at all. Their program ignored and defied all law. That this is so will appear from many acts and statements, of which I cite but a few. I have already called your attention to the Fuehrer's remark before invading Poland that "The Victor is never asked whether he spoke the truth." In his speech to all military commanders on November 23, 1939, he reminded them that at the moment Germany had a pact with Russia, but declared, "Agreements are to be kept only as long as they serve a certain purpose." Later on in the same speech he announced, "A violation of the neutrality of Holland and Belgium will be of no importance." A Top Secret document, entitled "Warfare as a Problem of Organization", dispatched by the Chief of the High Command to all Commanders on April 19, 1938, declared that "the normal rules of war towards neutrals must be considered to apply on the basis whether operation of rules will create greater advantages or disadvantages for belligerents." And from the files of the German Navy Staff, we have a "Memorandum on Intensified Naval War," dated October 15, 1939, which begins by stating adesire to comply with International Law, "However," it continues, "if decisive successes are expected from any measure considered as a war necessity, it must be carried through even if it is not in agreement with international law," International Law, natural law, German law, any law at all was to these men simply a propaganda device to be invoked when it helped and to be ignored when it would condemn what they wanted to do. That men may be protected in relying upon the law at the time they act is the reason we find law of retrospective operation unjust. But these men cannot bring themselves within the reason of the rule which in some systems of jurisprudence prohibits ex post facto laws. They cannot show that they ever relied upon International Law in any state or paid it the slightest regard. wax crimes contained in the Charter, I have outlined to you the systematic course of conduct toward civilian populations and combat forces which violates international conventions to which Germany was a party. Of the criminal nature of these acts at least, the defendants had, as we shall show, clear knowledge.
Accordingly, they took pains to conceal their violations. It will appear that the defendants Keitel amd Jodl were informed by official legal advisors that the orders to brand Russian prisoners of war, to shackle British prisoners of war, and to execute commando prisoners were clear violations of International Law, Nevertheless, these orders were put into effect. The same is true of orders issued for the assassination of General Giraud and General Weygand, which failed to be executed only because of a ruse on the part of Admiral Canaris, who was himself later executed for his part in the plot to take Hitler's life on July 20, 1944. humanity. Chief among these are mass killings of countless human beings in cold blood. Does it take these men by surprise that murder is treated as a crime? the crime of plotting and waging wars of aggression and wars of violation of nine treaties to which Germany was a party. There was a time, in fact I think the time of the first World War, when it could not have been said that war inciting or war making was a crime in law, however reprehensible in morals. for one man with his bare knuckles to assault another. How did it come that multiplying this crime by a million, and adding fire arms to bare knuckles, made it a legally innocent act? The doctrine was that one could not be regarded as criminal for committing the usual violent acts in the conduct of legitimate war. The age of imperialistic expansion during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries added the foul doctrine, contrary to the teachings of early Christian and International Law scholars such as Gretius, that all wars are to be regarded as legitimate wars.
The sum of these two doctrines was for a time to give war-making a complete immunity from accountability to law. Plain people, with their earthy common sense, revolted at such fictions and legalisms so contrary to ethical principles and demanded checks on war immunity. Statesmen and international lawyers at first cautiously responded by adopting rules of warfare designed to make the conduct of war more civilized. The effort was to set legal limits to the violence that could be done to civilian populations and to combatants as well. ever, that the law's condemnation of war reach deeper, and that the law condemn not merely uncivilized ways of waging war, but also the waging in any way of uncivilized wars - wars of aggression. The world's statesmen again went only as far as they were forced to go. Their efforts were timid and cautious and often less explicit than we might have hoped. But the 1920's did outlaw aggressive war. and that unjust wars are illegal is traceable in many steps. One of the most significant is the Briand-Kellogg Pact of 1928, by which Germany, Italy and Japan, in common with practically all nations of the world, renounced war as an instrument of national policy, bound themselves to seek the settlement of disputes only by pacific means, and condemned recourse to war for the solution of international controversies. This pact altered the legal status of a war of aggression. As Mr Stimson, the United States Sectretary of State put it in 1932, such a war of aggression "is no longer to be the source and subject of rights. It is no longer to be the principle around which the duties, the conduct, and the rights of nations revolve. It is an illegal thing * * *By that very act, we have made legal precedents and have given the legal profession the task of reexamining many of its codes and treaties."
International Disputes, signed by the representatives of forty-eight governments, declared that " a war of aggression constitues * * * an international crime." The Eighth Assembly of the League of Nations in 1927, on unanimous resolution of the representatives of forty-eight member nations, including Germany, declared that a war of aggression constitutes an international crime. At the Sixth Pan-American Conference of 1928, the twenty-one American Republics unanimously adopted a resolution stating that " war of aggression constitues an international crime against the human species," meaning of this evolution in the legal thought of the world, is not a defense or a mitigation. If anything, it aggrevates their offense and makes it the more mandatory that the law they have flouted be vindicated by juridical application to their lawless conduct. Indeed, by their own law -- had they heeded any law -- these principles were binding on these defendants. Article 4 of the Weimar Constitution provided that "The generally accepted rules of international law are to be considered as binding integral parts of the law of the German Reich." Can there be any doubt that the outlawry of aggressive war was one of the "generally accepted principles of international law" in 1939? are inherently criminal. War inevitably is a course of killings, assualts, deprivations of liberty, and destruction of property. An honestly defensive war is, of course, legal and saves those lawfully conducting it from criminality. But inherently criminal acts cannot be defended by showing that those who committed them were engaged in a war, when war itself is illegal. The very minimum legal consequence of the treaties making aggressive wars illegal is to strip those who incite or wage them of every defense the law ever gave, and to leave warmakers subject to judgment by the usually accepted principles of the law of crimes.
bind us all, does contain new law I still do not shrink from demanding its strict application by this tribunal. The rule of law in the world, flouted by the lawlessness incited by these defendants, had to be restored at the cost to my country of over a million casualties, not to mention those of other nations. I cannot subscribe to the perverted reasoning that society may advance and strengthen the rule of law by the expenditure of morally innocent lives but that progress in the law may never be made at the price of morally guilty lives. Charter. But International Law is more than a scholarly collection of abstract and immutable principles. It is an outgrowth of treaties and agreements between nations and of accented customs. Yet every custom has its origin in some single act, and every agreement has to be initiated by the action of some state. Unless we are prepared to abandon every principle of growth for International Law, we cannot deny that our own day has the right to institute customs and to conclude agreements that will themselves become sources of a newer and strengthend International Law. International Law is not capable of development by the normal processes of legislation, for there is no continuing international authority. Innovations and revisions in International Law are brought about by the actions of governments such as those I have cited, designed to meet a change in circumstances. It grows, as did the Common Law, through decisions reached from time to time in adapting settled principles to new situations. The fact is that when the law evolves by the case method, as did the Common Law and as International Law must do if it is to advance at all, it advances at the expense of these who wrongly guessed the law and learned too late their error. The law, so far as International Law can be decreed, had been clearly pronounced when these acts took place. Hence we are not disturbed by the lack of judicial precedent for the inquiry we propose to conduct. of crimes, set out in the Charter, whose perpetrators this Tribunal is convened to judge and punish fittingly.
The standards for war crimes and crimes against humanity are to familiar to need comment. There are, however, certain novel problems in applying other precepts of the Charter which I should call to your attention.
or wage a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements, and assurances, or to conspire or participate in a common plan to do so is a crime. to define a war of aggression. Abstractly, the subject is full of difficulty and all kinds of troublesome hypothetical cases can be conjured up. It is a subject which, if the defense should be permitted to go afield beyond the very narrow charge in the Indictment, would prolong the trial and involve us in insoluble political issues. But so far as the question can properly be involved in this case, the issue is one of no novelty and is one on which legal opinion has well crystalized. on this subject is the Convention for the Definition of Aggression signed at London on July 3, 1933 by Roumania, Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Turkey, the Soviet Union, Persia and Afghanistan. The subject has also been considered by international committees and by commentators whose views are entitled to the greatest respect. It had been little discussed prior to the First World War but has received much attention as International Law has evolved its outlawry of aggressive war. In the light of these materials of International Law, and so far as relevant to the evidence in this case, I suggest that an "aggressor" is generally held to be that state which is the first to commit any of the following actions:
(1) Declaration of war upon another State:
(2) Invasion by its armed forces, with or without another State:
(3) Attack by its land, naval, or air forces, with tory, vessels or aircraft of another State:
and (4) The provision of support to armed bands formed in And I further suggest that it is the general view that no political, military, economic or other considerations shall serve as an excuse , or justification for such aggressive actions; but of course the exercise of the right of legitimate self-defense, that is to say, resistance to an act of aggression, or action to assist a State which has been subjected to aggression, shall not of course constitute a war of aggression.
of a conspiracy to provoke and wage an aggressive war is prepared and presented. By this test each of the series of wars begun by these Nazi leaders was unambiguously aggressive. we bear in mind the difference between our charge that this war was one of aggression and a position that Germany had no grievances. We are not inquiring into the conditions which contributed to causing this war. They are for history to unravel. It is no part of our task to vindicate the European status quo as of 1933, or as of any other date. The United States does not desire to enter into discussion of the complicated pre-war currents of European politics, and it hopes that this trial will not be protracted by their consideration. The remote causations avowed are too insincere and inconsistent, too complicated and doctrinaire to be the subject of profitable inquiry in this trial, A familiar example is to be found in the "Lebensraum" slogan, which summarized the contention that Germany needed more living space as a justification for expansion. At the same time that the Nazis were demanding more space for the German people, they were demanding more German people to occupy space. Every known means to increase the birth rate, legitimate and illegitimate, was utilized. "Lebensraum" represented a vicious circle of demand -- from neighbors more space, and from Germans more progeny. We need not investigate the verity of doctrines which led to constantly expanding circles of aggression. It is the plot and tha act of aggression which we charge to be crimes.
however objectionable it finds the status quo, aggressive warfare is not a legal means for settling those grievances or for altering those conditions. It may be that the Germany of the 1920's and 1930's faced desperate problems, problems that would have warranted the boldest measures short of war. All other methods -- persuasion, propaganda, economic competition, diplomacy - were open to an aggrieved country, but aggressive warfare was outlawed. These defendants did make aggressive war, a war in violation of treaties. They did attack and invade their neighbors in order to effectuate a foreign policy which they know could not be accomplished by measures short of war. And that is as far as we propose or need to inquire, because that is as far as we accused. part of those who commit acts defined as crimes, or who ineite others to do so, or who join a common plan with other persons, groups or organizations to bring about their commission. The principle of individual responsibility for piracy and brigandage, which have long been recognized as crime punishable under International Law, is old and well established. That is what illegal warfare is. This principle of personal liability is a necessary as well as a logical one if International Law is to render real help to the maintenance of peace. An International Law which operates only on states can be enforced only by war because the most practicable method of coercing a state is warfare. Those familiar with American history know that one of the compelling reasons for adoption of our Constitution was that the laws of the Confederation, which operated only on constituent states, were found ineffective to maintain order among them. The only answer to recalcitrance was impotence or war.