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.
the military leadership of the Third Reich. That is their "likeness", their "identifiable relationship", or their "unifying element." Their "collective general purpose" was to build up and train the Wehrmacht and to make its plans and direct its operations. Leading German generals - Brauchitsch and Halder -- have said in sworn statements that these who hold the positions listed in the Indictment had the "actual direction of the Armed Forces" and "were in effect the General Staff and High Command." The technical objections made later by the defense with respect to the chart are quite irrelevant to this essential point. military leaders did not have any formal organization or any secret advisory council, is quite wide of the mark. The prosecution has not charged this; nor has it charged that the military leaders were a political party, or that they had a set or uniform view on internal political matters. Germans, like ourselves, found coordination within a single service easier to achieve than coordination between the Army, Navy, and Air Force. The more existence of OKW is sufficient proof of the importance which the Germans attached to inter-service collaboration, and numerous documents show that constant and detailed planning and discussion between the three services. In any event, it is quite unnecessary to look behind the actual course of events. Surely no one would have suggested in 1941, after witnessingt he coordinated use of tanks and Stukas in Africa, and the team-play of all three services during the Norwegian invasion, that the German war effort lacked coordination. the most important part of OKW was the operations staff, of which Jodl and Warlimont were the chief and deputy chief respectively. The field commanders, too, participated in planning. We know from Brauchitsch and Blaskowitz that the military plans for the attacks on Poland and other countries were submitted in advance to the commanders-in-chief of army groups and armies, so that OKH would have the benefit of their recommendations.
Brauchitsch and Blaskowitz have also told us that, during operations, the OKH and the commanders-in-Chief of army groups and armies were in continual consultation, and that the commanders-in-chief were repeatedly consulted by Hitler himself. The testimony of General Reinhardt is to the same effect. Contemporary documents clearly show the participation of the field commanders in-chief in planning for the Polish campaign. had executive power (Vollziehende Gewalt) within the areas under their command. Within those areas, they were supreme, and had the power of life and death over theinhabitants. They had the responsibility for determining such questions as whether the commissar and commando orders should be distributed, and if so, how widely and with what instructions. To summarize, these generals were an aggregation of persons who directed the German Armed Forces, and whose collective purpose was to prepare it for and lead it in military operations. From time to time, when all themembers not together, it was a congregation. The purpose and spirit of the London Agreement clearly bring such a body of men within the scope of Article 9 thereof. The Agreement established this Tribunal to try such offenses in the planning and waging of aggressive wars, and violations of the laws and customs of war. The German military leaders are charged, among other things, with developing the plans under which aggressive and illegal wars were initiated, and with directing the Armed Forces in the launching and waging of these wars. They are charged with circulating throughout the Wehrmacht orders directing the murder of certain types of prisoners, and with aiding, abetting, and joining in the murder and ill treatment of the civilian population, all in violation of the laws and customs of war.
The argument of the defense that the military leaders are not a "group" and are therefore immune to a declaration under Article 9, is, we submit, utterly unfounded, and flatly contrary to the plain purposes of the London Agreement. That Agreement cannot be reasonably construed to exclude from the purview of Article 9 the leaders of one of the two chief instrumentalities of the Third Reich.
voluntary. I say "appears to", because in one breath, we are told that the generals could not withdraw from the positions they occupied, and in the next that many of them resigned because of disagreements with Hitler.
The question is, I think, a simple one. We are not concerned here with the ordinary German conscript who made up the bulk of the Wehrmacht. We are concerned entirely with professional soldiers, and with the most zealous, ambitious and able German officers in the business. Most of them chose a military career because it was in their blood, as Manstein put it, "they considered the glory of war as something great." They slaved at it and were devoted to their profession, and if they reached thestatus of commander-in-chief, they were, like Manstein, proud that an army had been entrusted to them. No one became a German commander-in-chief unless he wanted to. his commission or his post at his own free will. But this does not turn the professional officers into a conscript or make his status an involuntary one. No one becomes a professional officer without knowing in advance the obligations that will bind him in time of war. The fanatical Nazis who rushed to volunteer for the early Waffen-SS divisions or who voluntarily joined other para-military sections or the Party could not thereafter resign at will, but I have not heard it urged that they were conscripts or involuntary members. The members of the General Staff and High Command group were keen, professional warriors, who competed with others like themselves for the respnsibilities and honors of being commanders-in-chief. They rose within the Wehrmacht just as an ambitious Party member might rise to be a Kreisleiter or Gauleiter. else in the Wehrmacht. The junior officer, who protested against what was going on around him, might lose advancement or be moved to a less desirable assignment, or be court martialled and disgraced. He was not given the option of retiring, and he was usually too young to plead illness plausibly. The commanders-in-chief were in a far better position.
No war officer or War Department wants a field commander-in-chief who is in constant and fundamental disagreement with his instructions. Such a commander-in-chief must be removed. Yet often he has sufficient seniority prestige, and acknowledged ability so that his demotion or disgrace would be embarrassing, and retirement or acceptance of resignation is the best solution for all concerned. The record is replete with testimony by or about commanders-in-chief who openly disagreed with Hitler on tactical matters, and who, as a result of such disagreements, were retired or allowed to resign. I note in passing that the record is notably barren of evidence that any commander-inchief openly disagreed with Hitler so decisively on the issuance of orders which violated the laws of war or *---* forced his retirement on account of these orders.
At all events, it is quite clear that a commander-in-chief who wanted to retire could contrive to do so, whether by pleading illness or by honest, lunt behaviour. If he had the will, there was a way out. It is worth noting that the three Field Marshals who testified before this Tribunal had all found or fallen into the way cut, and the record shows that many others were equally successful and chat few of them thereafter suffered serious harm on this account.
I pass now to the criminal activities of the group. The prosecution submits that the evidence before the Tribunal conclusively established the participation of the General Staff are High Command group in accomplishing the criminal ends of the conspiracy, and in the commission of crimes under all parts of Article 6 of the Charter and under all counts of the Indictment. We also submit that the criminal aims, methods, and activities of the group were of such a nature that the members may properly be charged with knowledge of them, and that, for the most part, they had actual knowledge. period ending in the spring of 1939, when detailed planning for the attack on Poland got under way. It is worth noting that during this early period, the group defined in the Indictment never exceeded eight in number, and that four are defendants in this trial.
I do not want to spend time retreading much-travelled roads. We know that during these years, the military leaders built up the Wehrmacht and made it into a formidable military machine, which struck terror into neighboring countries and later succeeded in over running most of them. There is not a shred of evidence to contradict the charge that members of the General Staff and High Command group directed the building and assembling of this machine. Some witnesses have testified that the rearmament was for defensive purposes only, but the Wehrmacht's new strength was promptly used to support Hitler's aggressive diplomatic policy. Austria and Czechoslovakia were conquered by the Wehrmacht, even though there was no war.
The events of 1939 to 1942 and the terrible offensive power of the Wehrmacht are a further and sufficient answer, even without referring to Blomberg's official written statement in June, 1937 that there was no need to fear an attack on Germany from any quarter. had little or no foreknowledge of the absorption of Austria, Many of these witnesses were not at the time members of the group, but the point is, in any event, unhelpful, since the Anchluss was not time in advance by the Germans, but was precitiptated by Schuschnigg's purprise order for a plebiscite. That is why, as Manstein testified, plans for the march into Austria had to be quickly improvised. But the plans were drawn up by Manstein under the supervision of Beck (Chief of the General Staff of the Army and a member of the group), and other members of the group were closely involved in the Anchluss, as were other generals who later *eame members. tion of the Sudetenland, the defense's main point seems to be that Brauchitsche, Beck, and other generals opposed risking a war at that time. The record makes it quite clear that the generals' attitude was not based on any opposition to a diplomatic policy supported by military threats, or on any disagreement with the objective of smashing Czechoslovakia. Rather their attitude was that the Wehrmacht was not as yet (in 1938) strong enough to face a war with major powers. The defendant Jodl expressed it very clearly in his diary, in drawing a contrast between "the Fuehrer's intuition that we must do it this year and the opinion of the Army that we cannot do it as yet, as most certainly the Western powers will interfere and we are not as yet equal to them." parations for the occupation of Czechoslovakia and that the Commander-in-Chief of the Army gave no instructions in the regard, is completely incredible when weighed against contemporary documents of unquestioned authenticity, which have long been in evidence before the Tribunal and which the defense cannot and did not attempt to explain away.
The military directives and planning memoranda contained in the so-called "Fall Gruen" file demolish any such contention, and fully reveal the extensive preparations being made by the Wehrmacht under the leadership of Keitel, Jodl, Brauchitsch, Halder, and others. Jodl's diary gives us further details about such matters as coordination of the air and ground offensives, timing of the D-day order, collaboration with the Hungarian army, and order of battle. It also shows the personal participation of other members of the group and of other generals who later became members. Military preparation for absorption of the remainder of Czechoslovakia is also adequately shown by documents in evidence befor the Tribunal.
One other point about this pre-war period should be noted. The military leaders not only participated in the plans; they were delighted with the results. They were afraid of getting into a war before they were adequately prepared, but they wanted a big army and they wanted the strategic and military advantages which Germany derived from Hitler's Austrian and Czechsslovakian successes. That is, in fact, why the Party leaders and the military leaders worked together; that is why the generals supported Hitler; that is why the Third Reich, through the Party and the Wehrmacht, was able to achieve what it did achieve. Leading German generals have told the Tribunal this in so many words. Blomberg tells us that before 1938-1939 the German generals were not opposed to Hitler. Blaskowitz says that all officers in the army welcomed rearmament and therefore had no reason to oppose Hitler. Both of them tell us that Hitler produced the results that all the generals desired.
30 Aug M LJG 3-1a Gallagher weakened by the statements of various defense witnesses that many army officers disliked some of Hitler's internal policies end distrusted some of the Nazi politicians. It is too much to ask that all partners in crime should like and trust each other. That, in spite of those differences, the Third Reich came so Close to imposing its dominion and evil theories on the world, merely emphasizes the deep agreement between the Party and the military loaders on the most essential objectives--national unity and armed might, in order to accomplish territorial aggrandizement. This cannot be doubted, and for confirmation we need only look at the testimony of a witness called by the defense (Colonel General Reinhardt, who was chief of the Army Training Section before the war and later commended a Panzer Army and an army group on the eastern front), When asked what was the attitude of the officers' corps toward Hitler, he replied:
"I do not believe there was a single officer who did not back up Hitler in his extraordinary successes.
Hitler had in its foreign politics, and economically."
So we turn to the war itself. The group of military leaders specified in the Indictment becomes much larger; we are no longer concerned only with t he generals in Berlin, but also with the war lords who commanded the Wehrmacht in the field-names far more familiar to and feared by the peoples of the territories overrun by the Germans. Names such as Blaskowitz, von Bock, von Kluge, Kesselring, von Reichenau, Rundstedt, Sperrle, and von Weichs.
What do the general's say in defense of the attack on Poland? Some of their statements, like Manstein's explanation that the Poles might "carelessly" attack Germany, are merely laughable. About the best they can. say is that they expected that Poland would give in without a struggle. Were this a defense, its credibility is dubious. Hitler himself had made it clear to the military loaders that it was not a "question of Danzig end the Corridor, 30 Aug M LJG 3-2a Gallagher but of living space and increasing the food supply under German exploitation.
The generals could have hardly expected the Poles. to give themselves up entirely without a struggle, and Hitler had said that there would be war and no repetition of the Czech affair. for a "Blumenkreig." The witnesses for the defense have agreed that German demands on Poland were to be enforced by military throats and armed might. There is 110 evidence that the generals opposed this policy of sheer holdup. In fact, it is clear that they heartily endorsed it, since the Polish corridor was regarded by them as a "desecration" and the regaining from Poland of former German territory as a "point of honor". And it has never been a defense that a robber is surprised by the resistance of his victim, and has to commit murder in order to got the money. of the members of the General Staff and High Command group in the planning and launching of the attack itself. Brauchitsch has described how the plans were evolved, and then passed to the field commanders-in-chief for their recommendations. We know, both from his own testimony and from contemporary documents, that Blaskowitz one the field commanders-in-chief, received the plans for the attack in June and thereafter perfected them in consultation with the army group and OKH. Rundstedt's Chief of Staff received the plans, and there can be no doubt that all the other conmanders-in-chief did also, A week before the attack, all the members of the group not at the Obersalzberg for the final briefing. the entire continent of Europe, the Wehrmacht grow and many more army groups, armies, air fleets, and naval commands were created and the membership in the group was correspondingly enlarged. All three branches or the Wehrmacht participated in the invasion of Norway and Denmark, which was an excellent demonstration of 30 Aug M LJG 3-3a Gallagher "combined operations" involving the closest joint planning and coordination between the three services.
The documents before the Tribunal show that this operation was a brain child of the German admirals; the proposal originated with Raeder and other naval members of the group and, after Hitler's approval had been obtained the plans were developed at OKW. Numerous members of the group participated in its planning and execution. The testimony of several army commanders that they had no foreknowledge of the attack is not surprisingly a fact since the OKH and the army commanders-in-chief were all fully absorbed at the time in planning the much larger attack on the Low Countries and France. Only a few German divisions were used in Norway and Denmark and, since it was a "combined operation," the plans were developed in OKW, not OKH.
Dr. Laternser's defense of the Norwegian attack on the basis that it was a preventive move to forestall an English invasion of Norway, might have some superficial plausibility if there were any evidence that the Norwegian invasion was improvised to meet an emergency. But it is totally and wantonly incredible in the free of documents which show that the Norwegian invasion had been under discussion since October, 1939, that active planning bega n in December, that on March 14 Hitler was still hesitant about giving the order for the attack because he was "still looking for some justification," and that all through the weeks proceeding the Norwegian attack there was discussion within the General Staff group as to whether it might not be preferable to initiate the general western offensive against France and the Low Countries before undertaking the Norwegian campaign. testimony of defense witnesses that Hitler wanted to attack in the fall of 1939 and that Brauchitsch and other generals persuaded him that it should be postponed until the spring of 1940. This postponment indeed shows that the generals had considerable influence with Hitler, but hardly excuses the later attack. When the 30 Aug M LJG 3-4a Gallagher spring of 1940 arrived, according to Manstein, " the offensive in the west from the point of the soldier, was absolutely inevitable."