obstacle to their evil intentions, but, with characteristic cunning, they first moved against it under the disguise of necessary emergency legislation, which was enacted by the Reich Cabinet and which laid the groundwork for the later enabling legislation placing all manner of restrictions on usual church activities. This was the first and the decisive step, and once it had been taken, the fate of the Christian church was sealed; only time and the turn of events remained for its fulfillment. In the entire Reich Cabinet of that time, made up almost exclusively of men who pretended to wear the badge of Christianity, only one (Baron Eltz von Rubenach) stood up for the faith. So clear was the intention of the Cabinet decrees, that he had no hesitancy in asserting that Nazism and Christianity could never be reconciled. But for one Eltz von Rubenach, there were many who were willing to play the Nazi game. For a mass of political pottage, they denied their faith and handed to the political leadership its first weapon for use against the clergy. From these first steps, much of the hitherto unexplained moral decadence of the times undoubtedly stems. From these beginnings came the speedily declining influence of the Church. The Nazis wanted it that way. In their political philosophy there was no place for Caesar and for God. Schirach and Rosenberg as Reichleiters and members of the Leadership Corps, together with countless associates, hammered away at all spiritual forces -- never by a frontal attack, but always from the flank, while the hounds of the Leadership Corps carried out systematic slandering of the clergy and constant undermining of sacred religious practices. Soon the anti-clerical campaign was expanded to the confiscation of church properties, and in the later years broke out into open suppression of religious education and even of simple spiritual activities There can be no doubt as to the real attitude toward the Christian Church for it clearly appears in the organized espionage system instituted against the clergy by the Gestapo and the SD. For this shabby task, members of these two organizations were carefully schooled in a deceitful course of conduct rigged to establish a record, as a later basis, for the complete abolition of the Christian Church in Germany when the war was over.
Lying, falsification, and entrapment were fundamental methods for the building up of this fabricated evidence. The Gestapo, not content with breaking up church organizations and prohibiting church groups from social gatherings, or with its task of preparing false testimony, made wholesale arrests of clergymen, placed them in protective custody, and finally lodged them in concentration camps. From a program of such basic evil, it was not to be expected that the SS would remain aloof. Although heavily occupied with wrong-doing all over Europe, it found time to confiscate church properties and monasteries on its own responsibility and had Catholic priests by the hundreds cruelly murdered in the Dachau concentration camp. suffering. And thus in a strange arrangement of circumstances, the Nazis who tried to destroy both, may have founded the beginnings of an understanding that can grow best because it has survived the worst. tyranny. To the SA belongs the disgrace of having first established and maintained such camps to which it sent persons whom it had illegally arrested. Even SA meeting places were used for the confinement of potential opponents who were beaten and abused by SA men. SA members served as guards of the state concentration camps during the first months of the Nazi regime, and there applied the technique of brutality which they had acquired in operating their own illegal camps. Although the legal basis for protective custody was the extorted decree of the Reich President for the protection of the State in 1933 which suspended clauses of the Weimar constitution guaranteeing civil liberties to the German people, the Reich Cabinet soon obliged with ready legislation which made more expeditious the internment of political enemies and other undesirables under the concentration camp system. So interested in the establishment of these camps were members of the Reich Cabinet that Frick, Rosenberg, and Funk, while serving in that body, inspected the camps. And the Reich Cabinet budget set aside 125 million Reichsmarks for the SS and for the management and maintenance of the concentration camps.
In order to achieve domination of the German people, the concentration camp system was placed at the disposal of the Leadership Corps, and it made use of these camps as a dumping ground for thousands of Jews who were apprehended under Leadership Corps auspices during the pogroms of November 1938. As shown by the affidavit of the defense witness Karl Weiss, Gauleiters frequently put pressure upon the Gestapo to commit political enemies to concentration camps or tp prevent their release in proper time. camps system; Soviet prisoners of war were sent to concentration camps to be employed in the armament industries of the Reich, and officers of the OKW worked out with the Gestapo the plans for sending returned Soviet prisoners of war to the concentration camp Mauthausen where they were put to death for honorable attempts to escape from their captors. implicated in the concentration camps system were the Gestapo and the SS. In the early days the concentration camps were under the political direction of the Gestapo which issued orders for punishment to be inflicted upon the inmates. The decree of 1936 declared that the Gestapo should administer the concentration camps, but it was the SS which furnished guards from the Death's Nona Battalions and ultimately became responsible for all internal administration of the camps. The Geatpo remained the sole authority in the Nazi State empowered to commit political prisoners to concentration camps, although the SD joined the Gestapo in committing Poles who did not qualify for Germanization. The Gestapo sent thousands upon thousands of persons to concentration camps for slave labor and shipped millions of persons to annihilation centers for extermination. in themselves adequate to convict the SS as a criminal organization. The witness Hoess testified that toward the end of the war approximately 35,000 members of the Waffen SS were employed as guards in concentration camps.
In his never-to-be-forgotten confession in this courtroom he said that in Auschwitz alone during the time he was commandant the SS exterminated two and one half million men, women, and children by gassing and burning, and that another half million died from st*---*ion and disease, and among those killed were 20,000 Soviet prisoners-of-war. When the SS did not murder bedridden patients they drafted them for labor which they could perform in their beds. It ordered women prisoners to be beaten by other prisoners, and, in its unrestrained savagery killed, maimed, and tortured inmates of concentration camps by carrying out what were called medical experiments, but which were in fact sojourns in sadism. tyranny. Conditions in these camps were cruel, because the Nazis required the force of fear to perpetuate their hold over the common people. Behind every Nazi law and decree stood the specter of concentration camp confinement. The agencies which created, maintained, directed and utilized these camps were the organizations named in this Indictment. churches, and concentration camps, which we have been considering, the indicted organizations participated in many other crimes in aid of the conspiracy. The Leadership Corps was active in destroying the free trade union movement, and the SA took the initial direct action against the trade unionists. The art treasures of Europe were seized and despoiled by the Einsatzstab Rosenberg of the Leadership Corps in conjunction with the Gestapo and the SD.
The SS carried out the vicious Germanization program under which citizens of occupied territories were driven from their homes and lands to make way for racial Germans. The Gestapo and officers of the OKW conceived and carried out the hellish "Night and Fog" decree, by which hapless civilians of occupier countries disappeared into the Reich never to be heard of again. Thus, in a crime of which only the Nazis were capable, the awful anguish of relative and friend was added to wanton murder. better illustrated than in the murderous work of the Einsatz Groups of the Security Police and the SD, which were first organized by the SD in September of 1938 In anticipation of the invasion of Czechoslovakia. With their loaders drawn from the SD and the Gestapo and staffed by members of the Waffen SS, they coordinated slaughter and pillage with military manoeuvres, and reports of their activities were forwarded to the political leaders through the Reich Defense Commissioners. Even the SA participated in these jackal anti-partisan expeditions in the East. and Norway, the Einsatz bandits followed for the purpose of striking down resistance, terrorizing the population, and exterminating racial groups. So well did these terror specialists do their work, that four new units were set up before the attack on the Soviet Union, one of them headed by the infamous Chief of the SD, Ohlendorf, who testified in this courtroom, to the incredible brutality of his accomplishments, and to the shocking details of the operation carried out in coordination with branches of the military.
His testimony will be remembered for its cold account of callous murder, enslavement and plunder, and most of all for the horrible program of destroying men, women, and children of the Jewish Race. Mankind will not soon forget his sickening story of the mobile murder of women and little children in gas vans, nor of the evil-hardened killers whose very stomachs turned at the awful sight when they unlatched the doors of the death cars at gravesides. These were the men who sat at the edge of anti-tank ditches, cigarette in mouth, calmly shooting their naked victims in the back of the neck with their machine pistols. These were the men who, according to their own corpse accountants, murdered some two million men, women and children. These were the men of the SD. The organization Chart of the Security Police and the SD now before the Tribunal(USA 493) was prepared and certified to by SD official Schellenberg, the Chief of Office VI of the RSHA and by SD official Ohlendorf, Chief of Office III of the RSHA. This chart shows that these Einsatz Groups were an integral part of the Security Police and SD under the supreme command of the Defendant Kaltenbrunner and, not, as has been argued, independent organizations responsible directly to Himmler.The officers of these groups were drawn from the Gestapo and the SD, and, to a lesser extent, from the criminal police. They received their orders from the various offices of the RSHA, that is, from Office III or VI as appears on that Chart as to matter pertaining to the SD and from Office IV as to matters pertaining to the Gestapo. They filed their reports with these offices and these offices made up consolidated reports from which were distributed to higher police officials and Reich Defense Commissioners, several examples of which have been introduced in the course of these proceedings. been made by counsel for Defendants. Counsel for the Gestapo argued that the Gestapo was erroneously blamed for the crimes committed in the occupied territories and that the SS was responsible for them. Counsel for the SS said that the SS was erroneously blamed and that the SD was to blame. Counsel for the SD said that the SD was erroneously blamed and the Gestapo was really to blame. The counsel for the SS said that the Gestapo also were the feared black uniform and that therefore Gestapo men were frequently mistaken for SS men.
Counsel for the SS blamed the Gestapo for the running of the concentration camp and counsel for the Gestapo blamed the SS. The fact is that all of these executive agencies participated in the commission of these vast crimes against humanity. Counsel do not point to any agencies other than those indicted here as the guilty organizations; the defense of each organization has been simply to fasten the responsibility on one of the other indicted organizations. The conclusion is irresistible that all of the organizations participated in the commission of these great crimes. organizations have not sought to deny these crimes but only to shift responsibility for their commission. The military defendants blame the Political Leaders for initiating wars of aggression; the Gestapo blames the soldiers for the murder of escaped prisoners of war; the SA blames the Gestapo for concentration camp murders; the Gestapo blames the Leadership Corps for anti-Jewish programs? the SS blames the Cabinet for the concentration camp system; and the Cabinet blames the SS for exterminations in the East.
The fact is that all of these organizations united in carrying out the criminal program of Nazi Germany. They are to blame as they complemented each other it is unnecessary to define as a matter of precise proof the borders of their own deviltry. When the Reich Cabinet promulgated the decree for "Securing the unity of the Party and State." it insolubly bound these organizations for good and for bad. When the membership of these organizations swore an unconscionable oath of obedience to Hitler, they united themselves for all time within him, his work, and his guilt. activities of the Cabinet. They carried out their work together. They met as a body. They considered proposed measures as a group, and they acted as a Cabinet, Somethimes they met as the Reich Cabinet, sometimes they met as the Reich Defense Council. But in every case they jointly considered proposed legislation to the machinations of the top conspirators. From the budgetary matters of the Reich alone, if from no other source, the members of the Cabinet, each year of the Nazi regime, were of necessity informed to a very extensive degree on all matters that were going on in Germany. They knew about the concentration camp system because they voted the money for maintenance of concentration camps, and because their ministers inspected concentration camps. They knew about the plans for aggress war because they laid the groundwork for the war economy. They knew about the forced labor of prisoners of war in armament industries became they planned it even in advance of war as the evidence shows. They prepared the political blueprints for the entire program of aggression and of aggrandizement. Planning requires consultation, and consultation imparts knowledge. objectives of the SA. The weekly periodical, the SA Mann, and the monthly periodical, the SA Leader, stated time and again the purposes, objectives, tasks and methods of the SA. The duties and activities of the SA in fighting in the streets abusing political opponents, and in chastising Jews are stated in almost every issue of these publications. The para-military nature of the organization was self evident. The SA participated in election proceedings, in the plan to set fire to the Reichstag, in anti-Jewish programs and boycott activities. Its activities were widespread and well-known and its criminality was open and notorious. Much of the infamy was commonly known throughout the world.
Dr. Wilhelm Hoegner, the Prime Minister of Bavaria, stated by way of affidavit: "The gross excesses of the SA and SS in the service of the NSDAP were accomplished so publicly that the whole populace knew of them. Everyone who entered these organizations as a member k of such excesses". That is what Dr. Wilhelm Hoegner said.
The Political Leaders dealt in information and in propaganda. They were the agents of the ideology and the political detectives who checked on the reaction of the people. Knowledge for them was a two-way circuit. They knew the plan and its operations and they learned of its effects. A typical example is found in the order to lynch Alled Airmaen. This order had to be passed throughout the Leadership Corps in order to reach the lower echelons who were to carry out the lynchings. They saw to it that the order was carried out and they made reports on its effectiveness. There were no secrets in any Nazi call or block unknown to them. The turn of a radio dial--the facial expression of disapproval--the in violate secrets between cleric and suppliant--the ancient trust between father and son--even the sacred confidences of marriage--were their stock in trade. Knowledge was their business. every member of the SS was indoctrinated in the full meanings of Hitlerian idea logy. In 1936, Himmler, in describing the SS as an anti-Bolshevistic Fighting Organization openly stated: "We shall take care that never again in Germany, the heart of Europe, will the Jewish-Bolshevistic revolution of sub-humans be able to be kindled either from within or through emissaries from without." Can anyone doubt that SS men understood the meaning of these words? Or of Himmler's confession: "I know that there are some people in Germany who become sick when they see these black coats," He went on to say: "We understand the reason for this and do not expect that we shall be loved by too many." The sickness which overcame people when they saw the black coats was the malady of fear--fear of the brutal methods of the SS, the murders they committed on the streets, and the beatings they inflicted in the concentration camps. It was known to everyone that black-coated SS men carried out the murders of 30 June 1934. Even von Mannestein testified the soldiers so feared the evil SS that they were afraid to report SS mass killings in the East. The knowledge that is necessary to bind the SS organization is the knowledge that a member of the Death's Head Battalion had of atrocities committed in the concentration camp, that a member of the anti-partisan bands had of the killings, kidnappings, and plunder that went on behind the fighting lines, that a member of the SS Panzer Divisions had of the killings of prisoners of war or that a member of the SS Medical Corps had of the savage experiments on human beings.
This knowledge was diffused by frequent changes in their duties. The Death's Head Battalions which at first were charged with the guarding of concentration camp inmates subsequently were put into the fighting front; whereas ing the war the fighting troops, the Waffen SS, were used for guarding concentration camps and for carrying out exterminations in annihilation centers. The letters SS came generally to be known as the symbol for an organization both sinister and savage. again in semi-official publications such as the Voelkischer Beobachter, Das Arc* the magazine of the German Police, and Best's basic handbook on the German Police Every member knew that the Gestapo was the special police force set up be Goering and developed by Himmler to strike down potential opponents of the tyranny. Even member knew that the Gestapo operated outside the law, that the Gestapo could of arrest on its own authority and imprison on its independant judgment. Every member knew that the Gestapo was the agency which filled the concentration camps with political opponents. All knew that the Gestapo was organized for the special purpose of persecuting the victims of Nazi oppression--the Jews, the Communist and the Churches. The right to use torture in interrogations had to be known to all who interrogated. There could be no secrecy as to the criminal aims of the Gestapo or the criminal methods by which this primary agency of terror carried out its work. And that it was an instrument of terror was known not merely to the membership--it was known throughout Germany and Europe, and in every country of the owrld, where the very name Gestapo became the watchword of terror and of fear. Tribunal in judging these organizations for what they are, the most vicious and evil of all Nazi inventions. Surely they shall not escape condemnation for the vast crimes they have committed through a false and flimsy defense of ignorance in their own circles.
For long, long years after this hall is emptied and for centuries beyond present perspective, the roll call of terror against human kind will be led by these appellations--Nazi, Nazi Party Leadership, SA, SD, SS, and Gestapo. Over 300,000 members of these organizations have been heard either in person or by affidavit. dock who is guilty of an offense relating to the organization of which he is a member was for the purpose of insuring that there would be present before the Tribunal someone who could speak for each organization. The great number of witnesses who have appeared before the Commission and the Tribunal on behalf of the organization has, in effect, made superfluous this Charter protection to the organizations. committed by the defendant in the dock who was a member of the organization. I is wholly sufficient to meet the Charter requirements if the defendant member is guilty of some crime relating to his position as a member of the organization. In every case the criminality of the named organizations is based upon evidence which greatly surpasses the specific criminal acts of the defendants. The concept of membership stated in the Indictment in this connection is in no sense a technical one. The word representative might as well have been used since the object of the provision was to insure that there would be some defendant qualified to speak for, or otherwise represent each of the named organizations. Cabinet. All of these defendants participated to a greater or lesser degree in the meetings of the Reich Cabinet, of the Secret Cabinet Counsel, and of the Reich Defense Council. All of them considered, acted upon, and participated in the enactment of the legislation which led to the instigation of wars of aggression and the commission od discriminatory acts against racial minirities. The criminality of each of these defendants is founded in part upon his participation in the supreme legislative body of the Nazi system, the Reich Cabinet.
Ten of the individual defendants were members of the Leadership Corps. The activities of Gauleiters von Schirach and Streicher are illustrative of the crimi nality of all these defendants in their capacity as leaders of the Nazi Party.
It was as Gauleiter of Franconia that Streicher carried out his venomous campaign against the Jews and it was as Gauleiter of Vienna that Schirach exploited slave labor.
Nine of the defendants were SS members. It is hardly necessary to go beyond SS Obergruppenfuehrer Kaltenbrunner as a representative of this organization. Here is a defendant who was the head of the most powerful department in the entire SS, the Reich Security Rain Office, His activities in directing this organization need no amplification His shame disgraces all.
Eight of the defendants were members of the SA. of which Goering assumed of command in the year 1923 at the very inception of the Nazi struggle for power. It was Goering who directed the SA in the Munich Putsch and it was Goering who built and made of the SA a fighting body of street rowdies.
Goering and Kaltenbrunner were members of the Gestapo. Goering, the founder of the Gestapo, bragged that every Gestapo bullet fired was his bullet, and that he assumed full responsibility for the acts of the Gestapo and was not afraid to do so. As chief of the Reich Security Main Office, Kaltenbrunner had direct responsibility for the Gestapo. The Tribunal has seen orders for committments to concentration camps carrying his typed or facsimile signature, it has reviewed evidence that executions in concentration camps were issued in his name, and it has examined many criminal orders from him as Chief of the Security Police and SD to regional Gestapo offices. the fact that most of the defendants were members of more than one of the named organizations. Frank, Frick, Goering, and Bormann were members of four.
Cabinet-members Ribbentrop and Neurath were SS generals. SA Generals Rosenberg and Schirach were Cabinet-members. Gauleiters Sauckel and Streicher were SA generals. Field Marshal Keitel and Admiral Doenitz were Cabinet-members. The complete significance of this integration is shown in the sinister murder of the French General Mesny.
This murder was directed and planned by SS Obergruppenfuehrer Kaltenbrunner, as head of the Gestapo end SD, and by SS Obergruppenfuehrer Ribbentrop, as a member of Reich Cabinet. Kaltenbrunner worked out the mechanics of the murder and Ribbentrop worked out the plan of deception. the murder was accomplished by the Reich Criminal Police rather than by the Gestapo since at the time Panzinger, who worked out the details, had succeed to the duties of Nebe asChief of Office V of the RSHA. But I should like to remind the Tribunal that there is not one shred of evidence before it to show that Panzinger ever retired from the post he had had and had held for years as head of the department in the Gestapo responsible for special actions and assassinations. Anyway, the murder of General Mesny, according to their own organizational chart, was a political action, was a political murder, and any under the cognizance of the Gestapo, and not of the Criminal Police. time that this nefarious episode was an act of reprisal, then I ask the Tribunal to bear in mind that reprisals against prisoners of war are expressly forbidden under the 1929 Convention, to which Germany was a signatory at this time and to which it had been a signatory for many years. officers' prisoner-of-war camp at Koenigstein to the sacrilegious ceremony attending the burial of his ashes with military honors at Dresden, required the connivance and action of the Reich Cabinet, the military men, the SS, the. SD, and the Gestapo. Throughout this particularly sad and sordid episode there is evident the outstanding fact of all Nazism-hypocrisy. This was while collar homicide, custom built for deceit, starched up with foreign office formality, bearing the cold sheen of Kaltenbrunner's SD and Gestapo, and supported and sustained by the outwardly respectable yoke of the professional army. organizations have each taken a large part of their time in arguing the legal principles which derive from the Charter, and, in many cases, seek to go behind the Charter itself.
They have argued that the procedure envisioned by the Charter amounts to collective punishment, that the idea of fastening criminality on organizations is unique in law and that the maxim "nulla poena sine lege" is being violated by these proceedings. exhaustively covered by Justice Jackson in his address in February. But I do assert again to the Tribunal that we are not here seeking a collective condemnation of individuals; we are seeking to establish one thing and one thing only, and that is that these organizations which taken together fastener the police state upon Germany and perpetrated these crimes, shall be characterized in history for what they were -- organizations the aims, purpose and actions of which were basically criminal and which openly violated all tenets of decency and law held in every civilized society. criminal, the members will become martyrs. I say that if you exonerate these organizations, the members who took these vows of unconditional obedience to Hitler and to Himmler and who committed millions of people to concentration camps, mistreated and starved and murdered thousands more in the names of these organizations, will say: "We are vindicated. What Hitler told us, what Himmler told us was the truth. These organizations to which we gave our unconditional obedience were not criminal organizations and we are not to be censured for having belonged to them." They will find in your acquittal of these organizations justification for these horrible crimes and thereby new reasons to convince people in Germany that no wrong was done. And it will give them the terrible opportunity for reviving them in one form or another any for inflicting again upon the civilized world the terrible consequences of criminal group action. remarks relative to the Sedition Act of 1910, that the United States Sedition Act of 1940 was cited only to show that the concept of organizational criminality is not foreign to Anglo-American jurisprudence. opportunity of resisting in court the charge of criminality of the organization to which he is accused of belonging.
But that is not to say, it seems to me, that apart from constitutional questions, which are inapplicable here, the Congress of the United States could not provide, as in this Charter, that the criminal character of the organization should first be litigated in a general proceeding in which all members are given a chance of appearing in person or by representation, reserving their personal defenses to subsequent trials in which they may contest all questions except the single question of whether to organization was criminal. For what we sock here is not a criminal convicted of the members of these organizations. Their individual criminality -- I this it is worth repeating -- is not an issue now before this Tribunal. The only issue is whether the Tribunal shall or shall not declare these organizations to have been criminal.
Finally, Mr. President, the very anonymity which the Nazis intended to give to crime by the use of these organizations plagues us to the very end of this trial. After these proceedings are concluded, this same organizational anonymity will plague the Allied powers in seeking to bring to book those who are responsible for these terrible offenses. It is a sobering fact that the vase majority of the crimes committed in the names of these organizations must go unpunished. But Nazism must not escape by this route which it rigged for itself; it must not survive in secret and undenounced organizational entities to prepare a new onslaught against civilization. By a declaration of criminality against these organizations, this Tribunal mil put on notice not only the people of Germany -- but the people of the whole world. Mankind will know: that no crime will go unpunished because it was committed in the name of a political party or of a state; that no crime will be passed by because it is too big; that no criminals will avoid punishment because there are too many. United States of America, Mr. Justice Robert H. Jackson made a statement before this Tribunal concerning the criminality of these organizations. That statement represents the attitude of the United States in these proceedings towards the organizations. I can do no better than to remind the Tribunal of it again. I quote from what Mr. Justice Jackson said on that occasion:
"In administering preventive justice with a view to forestalling individual defendants in the box.
These defendants' power for harm is spent.
That of these organizations goes on. If these organizations under new names behind the same program."
"In administering retributive justice it would be possible to been committed by the Nazi regime.
For these organizations' every measure to attain these ends is beyond denial.
A failure to that the Charter of the Tribunal declaring them so is a nullity."
THE PRESIDENT: The Tribunal will adjourn.
(The Tribunal adjourned until Friday 30 August 1946 at 1000 hours.)
THE PRESIDENT: The Tribunal has had an application from Dr. Steinbauer for permission to put in an affidavit on behalf of the defendant Seyss-Inquart. Have the Prosecution had an opportunity of seeing that affidavit yet, and have they any objection to it?
SIR DAVID MAXWELL FYFEL: My Lord, I do not think that all my colleagues have had an opportunity of looking through the affidavit yet. They got it late last night. So if Your Lordship could allow us an hour or two, we would be glad to report later in the day.
THE PRESIDENT: If you would do that, yes.
SIR DAVID MAXWELL FYFE: If Your Lordship please.
DR. LATERNSER: (Defense Counsel for the General Staff and the OKW) Mr. President, I should like to take but a few moments of the High Tribunal's time. On the basis of a letter which I just received last night, I am in a position to prove that a written order was in existence according to which any and all preparations for an actively carried on bacteriological warfare were prohibited. This letter is to be translated, and the matter is to be discussed whether this letter may be adimissable as evidence.
I just wanted to make this announcement, Mr. President, so that I shall not be accused of being too late afterwards.
THE PRESIDENT: Dr. Laternser, you mean that the letter will be translated and submitted to the Prosecution, and then they will let us knew whether they are prepared to agree to the letter's going in for what it is worth? But it must be done today?
DR. LATERNSER: Yes.
THE PRESIDENT: Very well.
Mr. President and Members of the Tribunal: ity against six groups or organizations. For purposes of clarity in specifying the charges and marshalling the evidence, this division into six parts is appropriate, since it accurately reflects the formal structure of the Third Reich.
In a deeper sense, however, the Third Reich was net sextuple. It was simpler than that. The Third Reich was a political machine and a military machine. It was embodied in and sought its ends through the Nazi Party and the Armed Forces. Its successes at home and abroad were achieved by these two instruments. The Wehrmacht owed its resurgence largely to the Nazi Party; the Party, in turn, would have been helpless and impotent without the Wehrmacht. As General Reinecke put it, the two pillars of the Third Reich are the Party and the Armed Forces, and each is thrown back on the success or downfall of the other. strumentalities of the Party and the Armed Forces. From the Party, the Indictment specifies, for instance, the Corps of Political Leaders, and also the members of the SS, a principal executive arm of the Party. From the Armed Forces, the Indictment specifies the leading generals to use the language of the indictment, who had the principal authority for plans and operations. the prosecution during the ease-in-chief, and little more needs be said by way of exposition. The defense has taken the view that these military leaders do not constitute a group within the meaning of the Indictment. The arguments in support of this technical objection are, I believe, insubstantial, but I want to meet them directly and clearly. understanding, or a deliberate misreading of the indictments therein. Thus, several witnesses have told us that the "General Staff" consisted of young officers of relatively junior rank who acted as assistants to the commandersin-chief. This involves a confusion with what is known to military people as the "General Staff Corps" of War Academy graduates.
The Indictment does not include these officers and the prosecution made clear at the outset. Insofar as this, or similar testimony, is an attack on the name which the Indictment applies to the military leadership group, this is an utterly insignificant point. There is no stock phrase or word of art in German or English for all the military leaders of the Wehrmacht; the Indictment combines a phrase "General Staff" and "High Command" as most descriptive of the chiefs of the four staffs of OKW, OKN, OKH, AND OKL, all of whom were key figures in military planning, and the commanders-inchief who directed operations. Together, they adequately comprehend the military leadership. It has been objected that the chart which attached to the affidavits of Halder, Bruachitsch, and Blaskowitz, does not accurately depict the chain of command. That is true; the chart was not intended to show the chain of command, the affidavits to which the Charter is attached says nothing about it, and the prosecution has not suggested anything of the kind. Equally irrelevant, is the question of whether Keitel might have been shown in the same box with Hitler, instead of having a box to himself. None of these points about the chart involves the addition or subtraction of a single member of the group, or affects the Indictment's definition of the military leadership. Equally irrelevant is the contention that the list of members of the group includes some generals who held only temporary appointments as commander-in-chief and were never formally designated as such. This might later be relevant in the trial of these individuals, if they can show that they never really had the status and responsibility of a commanderin-chief, but is not important in contemplating the group as a whole. generals were members of the group for loss than, six months; that a number of them died or were removed or retired, from their positions before the end of the war, and that the younger ones were not generals when the war started. This is all quite natural. We are concerned here with a 7-year period, during most of which therewas a war, which is a hazardous and wearing occupation. During these years some generals died, others failed, still others out of favor; new faces appeared as replacements; the great increase in the number of German Army Groups and Armies brought still ether officers into the status of commander-in-chief.
To the extent that in war the hazards were sharper and the failures more costly in the Wehrmacht than in politics, this turnover may have been correspondingly greater in the Wehrmacht than in the Party. But again, these questions are relevant only on the degree of responsibility of individual members of the group, and not on the responsibility of the group itself. did not become such until after 1942. The argument drawn from this circumstance is, I take it, that the generals who joined the group only after 1942 could not have taken part in the planning and launching of aggressive wars. It is ture that by the end of 1942 the Wehrmacht, led by the accused group, had invaded or overrun all or a large part of every neighboring country except Switzerland and Sweden, so that further wars of aggression had become impractical. I suppose that it might be urged with equal, if any, force thatmany Germans joined or rose to high rank in the SS or the party Leadership group after 1942. Certainly the argument ignores that the military leadership group, long after 1942, was a group whose official orders were to murder commandos and commissars and to achieve "pacification" by spreading terror. Many of the atrocities, committed by the German Armed Forces occurred late in the war. Once again, this point has substance only in that individual late-comers, to the group may show in other proceedings that they never learned of, and did not join in the criminal activities. The group itself cannot escape responsibility by pleading that it continued to grow after the Third Reich's capacity to initiate aggressive wars had been exhausted.
The defense tells us thatthe military leaders were not a "group" because they merely occupied official positions without any "unifying element." This is a factual question. Its solution is not advanced by nice linguistic points, such as whether the German word "gruppe" means "Group" or "number". I suppose that "group" means a number of persons chosen because of some likeness. Or as Mr. Justice Jackson put it, the members must have an "identifiable relationship" and a "collective, general purpose." I suppose also that the "likeness" or "relationship" and the purpose must be meaningful under the London Agreement.