The documents and testimony show that these are transparent fabrications. But here, in embryo, are the myths and legends which the German militarists will seek to propagate in the German mind. These lies must be stamped and Labelled for what they are now while the proof is fresh. Militarism has flourished far more widely and obstinately in Germany than elsewhere, but it is a plant which knows no national boundaries; it grows everywhere. It lifts its voice to say that war between East and west, or Left and Right, or White and Yellow is inevitable. It whispers that newly devised weapons are so terrible that they should be hurled now lest some other country use them first. It makes the whole world walk under the shadow, of death. the aegis of Nazism. The German militarists will the themselves to any man or party that offers expectation of a revival of German armed might. They will calculate deliberately and coldly. They will not be deterred by fanatical ideologies or hideous practices; they will take crime in their stride to reach the goal of German power and terror. We have seen them do it before. state the truth plainly. The German militarists joined forces with Hitler and with him created the Third Reich; with him they deliberately made a world in which might was all that mattered; with him they plunged the world into war and spread terror and devastation over the continent of Europe. They dealt a blow at all mankind; a blow so savage and foul that the conscience of the world will reel for years to come. This was not war; it was crime. This war not soldiering; it was savagery. Those things need to be said. We cannot here make history over again, but we can see that it is written true
M. CHAMPTIER DE RIBES: Mr. President, Your Honors: has bathed the World in blood. Today, when we ask you to declare the criminal organizations which served as instruments for their desigs, we are seeking from your justice the moral condemnation of an entire, coherent system, which has brought civilization into the gravest danger which it has known since the collapse of the Roman world.
as the one which we requested yesterday. it no less salutary to remind those who are powerful today, and will be tomorrow, of the dictates of a moral law without which neither Order nor Peac can rule the universe. when the folly of men has used the prodigious progress of science and technic for the work of death, and when, as a philosopher has said, "our civilization has equpped itself for suicide", the problems which confront the world's anguish are above all moral problems?
"Humanity", our great Bergson has said, "groans, half-crushed by the weight of the progress which it has made ... The enlarged body awaits the addition of a soul and the machinery demands a mystical faith." It is that which at the apogee of Gra eco-Roman civilization, at a time when Cato the Elder, the wisest of the wise, was writing in his treatise on politic economy: "One must know the right time to sell one's old oxen and one's old slaves", introduced these two ideas into the world, which were enough to revolutionize it, the idea of personality and that of human brotherhood. the isolated man, the mere number in the political order, the cog in the economic order, but the entire man, body and soul, soul incarnate, no doubt, but above all a soul for the flowering of which society is made, the social man, who finds his full development only in fraternal communion with his neighbor, the man whose calling confers a dignity upon him which rightfully permits him to escape any attempt at enslavement or monopoly. the written or traditional constitutions of all civilized nations, ever since Great Britain, the mother of democracies, guaranteed to every free man, by vir of Magna Charta and the act of Habeas Corpus, that he would be "neither arrested nor imprisoned, except by judgment of his peers rendered by due process of law It is this which inspired the American Declaration of 1776:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men have been endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights." It is this which inspired the French declaration of 1791: "The representatives of the French people, appointed by National Assembly, considering that ignorance, forgetfulness, or contempt for the rights of man are the only causes of public misfortunes and the corruption of governments, have resolved to set forth, in a solemm declaration, the natural inalienable and sacred rights of man: Consequently, the National Assembly recognizes and declares in the presence and under the auspices of the Supreme Being, the following rights of the man and the citizen." also inspire the constitution of the Union of Soviet Sociaust Republics, which, in its Chapter X, proclaims "the fundamental rights and duties of citizens of the USSR without distinction as to nationality or race?" 26 June, 1945, at San Francisco by 51 nations, begin with this solemm declaration: "We, the Peoples of the United Nations, resolved to preserve future generations from the scourge of war which twice within the span of one human life has inflicted indescribable sufferings on humanity, to proclaim our faith in the fundamental rights of man, in the dignity and value of human personality, in the equality of rights of men and women, as well as of nations, large and small?" stical faith as much as they desired. All of us recognize that it is Christianity's chief contribution to the world and that extending its conquests slowly, in the course of centuries, it has laid the foundations of world civilization. of the 20th century, attempted a violent reaction, by setting up against it his barbarous ideology of racism, his primitive concep tion of social life, regulated by biological laws alone.
For he not only envisaged establishing Germany's military domination in Europe, he had the ambition to impose his "culture" on the world, which upsets all the moral and intellectual foundations upon which the civilized world has rested ever since the Christian era. are equally applicable to human communities, and primarily those of natuarl selection and the struggle for existence. independence of the human personality. Like the ant in the antheap, the individual exists only by and for the group, the State is not made for the individual but the individual for the State.
From this point of view there could be no question of pity, no: of brothersly love. Christianity, the religion-of the degenerate and the diseased, will be replaced by the new religion which recognizes no law except that of the stronger, no duty except of domination.
This animal conception of human life, this "culture," this religion, is not the work of a philosopher who is proposing a new theory in the field of intellectual speculation, it is the work of a realist, who puts it into practice. of the German people of the elements which contaminate it, and the improvement of the race of blond Aryans. And the Jews will then be driven out or exterminated. The abnormal, the sick, the weak, will be eliminated or at least sterilized. Youth, snatched at an early age from its family, will be formed by the State, for its mission, which is "to make the world tremble." "I want," said Hitler to Rauschning, "I want to see in its glance the gare which one sees in the eyes of a wild beast." Even so he slanders the wild beast, which kills, doubtless, because it is hungry, because it is afraid or because it is in rut, .but which is not acquainted with the sadism of refined tortures.
relations. "A stronger race," he writes in "Mein Kampf," "will driv out the weak races, for the ultimate struggle for life will break through the ridiculous barriers of a pretended individualistic humanity, to make place for humanity according to nature, which annihilates the weak in order to give their places to the streng new religion, how many dead the realization of this pretended doctrine of life has cost; the concentration camps, the gas chambers and the crematory ovens, the inoculations with viruses, the sterilizations, the vivisection practised on prisoners and deportees, the enslavement of peoples who were, believed assimilable, and above all the mot wedical extermination of those who are alleged to be inferior, and in short "genocide"-- all this is the monstruous fruit, of the Hitlerite ideology.
M. de Menthon was right in saying that the sin against the spirit is the fundamental vice of National Socialism and the source of all the crimes committed in its name. And did not Louis Vouillot have prophetic gifts, when he wrote in his "Parfum de Rome" in 1871;
"Germany, Germany, to whom heaven had given so much! when then shalt see an enperer's ghost reappear, who will not wield the sword to protect justice and defend the ancient law, but who will call himself the emperor of the people and the sword of the now law; then will be the hour of the great expiation."
crimes of National Socialism. But to realize their diabolical pl of universal domination, not only of territories but of consciences, they needed collaborators inspired with the same mystical faith, formed according to the same disciplines, and this is why the leaders, the "fuehrers", conceived and realized, little by little, this complicated and coherent system of leadership, coer cion and control, which constitutes the entirety of the organizations of the State and of the National Socialist Party. by virtue of the "Fuehrer-Prinzip", general orders and directive and these are the Reich Cabinet and the Leadership Corps of the Nazi Party. necessary, the Gestapo, the SA, the SD, and the SS. Party policy, and this was the work of the General Staff and the High Command, purged of all elements which were insufficiently nazified. groups or these offices were more or less the fanaties of the regime, and the Tribunal recalls the specious distinction made in the course of Ribbentrop's examination between the "pure Nazis" and those who were only halfway so. All had at least accepted the doctrine and the material advantages which the regime lavished up them. Because certain ones made a mental reservation, are they less contemptible and loss guilty? buted to the work of universal domination by overy means, has been abundantly proven in the course of these proceedings. during the interrogations of the individual defendants, and were not all of these defendants, in various capacities, members of on and often several of these organizations, so that the close cooperation between the collective organizations and the men who are now on the defendants bench has been established in an indis table way?
after the addresses of my eminent colleagues of the American and British prosecution staffs, I shall refrain from recalling once more the innumerable atrocities in which the groups or organizations listed in the indictment have participated, by ordering them. by executing them, or by permitting them. to which the defense counsels, and particularly those for the Gestapo, the SD and the High Command, appear to attach the greatest importance. in the heat of the struggle, which had become pitiless, in the course of the war, which had become total, but it was never a question of anything but individual crimes, which might involve the responsibility of the persons who committed them, but not th of the groups which condemned them. ce, seperated the various organizations of the Reich. For this reasons the activity of each organization should be examined separately and this examination does not reveal a criminal inten tion or activity in any of them.
First argument: To determine if an organization is criminal it is necessary, says the defense, to examine the essential principles of its structure. there is nothing criminal about thi from that time on, the crimes, if perhaps any have been committe could not have been attributed to the individuals, and does not allow the criminl character of the group as a whole to be inferr is a state police, charged, like all police of civilized states, with aiding in the work of justice and protecting the group against individuals who treaten its security.
It is possible that it has sometimes received and carried out orders from above, which are not directly relevant to its essential mission of protection, like the mass arrests of Jews, the extermination of Russian priso ners of war, the assassination of recaptured escaped prisoners. But those accidental activities do not fall within its competenc as an institution. They do not alter the essential character of the organization, which has nothing criminal about it. and sounding out of the public opinion, a sort of Gallup poll, of itself harmless.
It is possible that members of the S.D. have collaborated accidentally in the repressive measures of the Gestapo. It is true that members of the SD have held a number of high positions and have indulged in a number of questionable activities, but they did not act then as functionaries of the SD and could not compremise the organization, the institution character of which had nothing criminal about it. Thus the High Command was charged institutionally only with the defense of the Reich and only with its defense. It does not busy itself with politics and has nothing to do with the police. It is possible that it may have sometimes everst ped its mission. It is true that it aboved the order to deport these who resist to an unknown destination, to hand over to the police for extermination the core dos and escaped prisoners, which is against military honor, but it acted then as a simple internediary agent for Hitler's or Himmler's orders. This accidental activity, outside the bounds of its own jurisdiction could not change its essential character, which is not criminal. Thus the defense always tries to distinguish between the institutional character of the organization which it believes it has shown to be non-criminal, and the practical activity of the group, which, it recognizes could be subject to criticism, a distinction, which could be understood in a democratic regime, when pre established institutions limit the arbitrary nature of governments, when the au nomy of the individual and the liberty of the citizen are protected from the mi se of power, but which is incomprehensible in the Hitler regime. Did Best, the police theorician trouble about respecting a principle when he wrote that the means of action of the police are prescribed by the enemy ? Does the decree of 23 February 1933 trouble about principle, when it allows the all-powerful State to ignore all legal limitations ? Does Hitler make any distinction between principle and practice, when, at the conference of 23 may 1933 which assemble at the Chancellery the members of the High Command he states; "The principle consisting in avoiding the solution of problems by adaption to circumstances must be banished. Rather must circumstance be adopted to necessities. It is no more a question of justice or injustice, but -- the existence or the non-existence of 80 million people". In reality, under the HITLER regime there are no pre-established institutions, no locality, no limitation to arbitrariness, no possible abuse of power, There is no other principle than the "Fuehrerprinzip", no other legality than their good pleasure of the chief, the order of whom, from the top to the bottom of the ladder, must be executed without any possible dissension.
The concept of a pretended institution which had supposedly presided over the constitution of the collective organizations and given them a certain character, is merely an "a posteriori" construction of the defense counsel's ingenuity". The concrete activity of the collective organizations alone counts, and we have monstrated that it was criminal. Moreover, the defense seeks a way to exculpate the collective organizations by the fast that the members of the Gestapo, the SS, or the SD, who have indulged these criminal acts did not perform them in the name of their original organization, but were temporarily detached therefrom. Is the proof not to the contrary that, in the general organization of the National Socialist system, these groups played the role of reserves and preparator schoo whence the leaders, for their work of domination, drew the executors, perfectly prepared for the criminal deeds entrusted to them ? And the fact that HITLER often conferred the dignity of honorary membership in one of these organizations on his accomplices, is also proof of the importance which he attached to the testimony of orthodoxy, which was the appurtenance of one or other of these groups. Thus, according to whichever point of view one takes, the first argument of the defense cannot be maintained.
THE PRESIDENT: M. Champtier de Ribes, I think you can hardly finish your spe before the adjournment; I think perhaps we had better adjourn now.
M.CHAMPTIER DE RIBES: Yes, Sir.
( A recess was taken until 1400 hours).
30 Aug A LJG 12-1 Williams (The Tribunal reconvened at 1400 Hours.)
THE PRESIDENT: The Tribunal has had an application from Dr. Stahmer on behalf of the defendant Goering that certain affidavits offered in evidence on behalf of the General Staff and High Command should be considered on behalf of the defendant Goering. The Tribunal, of course, will consider those affidavits on behalf of the defendant Goering as it would consider all the rest of the record.
Yes, M. Champetier de Ribes.
M. CHAMPETIER DE RISES: Mr. President and gentlemen, the Defense submits a second argument. know each other. Some are subject to the State, the others to Party, while State and Party exert their activity in different domains. Within the organizations themselves watertight partitions divided the various sections that composed them, and which acted quite independently. And, at the risk of sacrificing the worst compromised cells, the defense counsel are trying to clear from responsibility the greater possible number of such supposedly isolated groups. general organization of the Reich's administrative services. As shown by Mr. Dubost in establishing the personal responsibility of each individual defendant, the close interlocking of the organizations and of the services is beyond discussion.
The National-Socialist State is totalitarian. Its officials as well as its services derive their inspiration from a common ideology, pursue common aims, and unity of action is insured by the penetration of the Party which is the expression of the politic al will of the People throughout the whole State machine. realized by the law of 1 December 1933: " The National - Socialist Party has become the representative of the idea of the German. State ano is indissolubly bound to the State" (Art. I) 30 Aug A LJG 12-2 Williams Public services must cooperate with the services of the Party.
and Party is realized by the concentration into the same hands of the powers emanating from one and the other. and of the Party. at the same time head of the Police which is subject to the State. representative of the State in their capacity of governors of the Reich or Chief Administrators of Prussia. elaboration of the more important laws and in the nomination of the higher State officials. officials suspected of insufficient devotion to the Party, and we know with what brutality this same purge was carried out in the High Command. Thus, in their acts as well as in their writings the inter-dependence of State, Party and Army is realized to the utmost extent, and in the sum total of their activity it is impossible to discern the share of responsibility belonging to the one or to the other. Is it necessary to give examples there of? We gave several examples thereof and fear to weary the attention of the Tribunal. the Gestapo, the SD, the SS and the Army in the common elaboration of the general instructions and incarrying out operations against the resistants, reprisals against the civil population and the extermination of the Jews?
Do we not find a convincing proof of it in Hitler's instruction of 30 July 1944 which has frequently been quoted:
"All acts of violence committed by non German civilians in the occupied territories against the Wehrmacht, the SS, and the Police and against the installations which they use, 30 Aug A LJG 12-3 Williams must as acts of terror or sabotage, be fought in the following way:
"a) The troops and each individual member of the Wehrmacht, SS and Police must kill then and there the terrorists and saboteurs who are caught in the very act.
"b) Anyone caught later on must be transferred to the nearest local service of the Security Police and the Security Service. SS and the Police, does not Hitler underline the close cooperation between these organizations?
Is It necessary to remind once more of Keitel's numerous instructions, Marshal Kesselring's order of 14 January 1944 and General von Brodowski's diary of operations that put the army at the disposal of the Police or the Police at the army's disposal with a view to the savage repression of the actions of the resistants?
is it necessary to recall to your memory Keitel's orders to the Generals in Command in France, Holland and in Belgium, that the army should be made to participate in the pillaging of art treasures oganized and directed by Rosenberg? Court on 1 August that the decree "Macht und Nebel" was the outcone of collaboration between the High Command and the Ministry of Justice? dividing them between agencies of the State and of the party, between the socalled independent organizations. partitions separate, within the same organization, the various sections of which it is composed. For example, whom does it expect to believe that the administrative officials of the SD. (Security Service) and of the Gestapo were ignorant of the magnitude of the deportations since they had to solve the difficult problem of arranging for convoys; or that the offices supplying material could fail to know about the exterminations by chemical processes, as they had to repair the gas vans?
In fact, all the departments of the Gestapo, the SD., the SS and the high Command are jointly responsible for the crimes which were committed in common; again, what holds true for the organizations applies likewise to the Reich Cabinet and the political chiefs, as has been brought out by my most honorable colleagues of the Public Prosecution. the deeds; has the brain less responsibility than the arm? those organizations which we request you to pronounce as criminal. the most severe verdicts against all members of these organizations?
Certainly not. In requesting of your justice the moral condemnation of the organizations, without which the crimes of National Socialism could not have been perpetrated, we are not asking you to condemn without hearing men who, on the contrary, could make their personal defense arguments prevail before the competant tribunals.
If moreover the Charter of your Tribunal does decree that "in every case in which the Tribunal has proclaimed the criminal character of a group or organization ... such criminal character shall be considered as established and can no longer be contested", it does not say anywhere that all members of such groups or organizations will have to be arraigned before competent authorities, and in our opinion only those will have to be prosecuted who, having knowledge of the group or organization's criminal activity, have deliberately joined it, thus participating personally in the crime committed by all collectively. justice and the hope of universal pacification, the penalties must be made proportionate to the gravity of the offence charged, and that if the most severe penalties are justly attendant upon the crimes of which a member of an organization is found to be personally guilty, mere affiliation, even voluntary to one of these groups should only be punished by penalties involving deprivation of freedom or even by mere deprivation of all or part of the civil or political rights. Charter to prevent it from saying so in whatever form it deems most fitting.
Your verdict therefore will not be, as Dr. Steinbauer seemed to fear in his final pleading for Seyss-Inquart, the conclusion of a "trial of the vanquished by the civtor". It will be the solemn and serene manifestation of eternal justice.
In this same final pleading, trying to oppose the words of M. de Menthon to the attitude of one of the most heroic chiefs of the French Resistance, who has since become President of theGoverment of the Republic, Dr. Steinbauer recalled Mr. Georges Bidault's words while visiting severly wounded Germans after the liberation, "Comrades", he said to them, "I wish you a prompt recovery and a happy return to your country".
The defense counsel of Seyss-Inquart was wrong. There is no Contradiction between the words of Francois de Menthon and those of Georges Bidault, and the Frenchmen, as well as, I am sure, all the free citizens of the United Nations will agree to reconcile the necessary severity for the culprits with the pity for those who perhaps have only been the victims.
competent authorities to punish the guilty and only the guilty, in solemnly recalling to the world that a moral law existed before the arbitrary conduct of persons, on nations as well as on individuals, and that it is criminal to violate it, your sentence will contribute forcibly to the great work of universal pactification which the representatives of the free peoples undertake in the organization of the United Nations, as at the Peace Conference, in New York as in Paris, "in the great hope of the plain people with upright hearts".
Your Lordship! Your Honors ! with exceptional care and with the greatest skill. The Prosecution has presented exhaustive proofs for the individual cases of the major war criminal now at the dock. We fully support also the charges against the criminal organizations --the Government of Fascist Germany, the General Staff and High Command of German Armed Forces, the Leadership Corps of the German National Socialist Party, the State Secret Police (Gestapo), the Security Detachments of the German National Socialist Party (SS), Security Service (SD) and Detachments of SA. was headed by a sang of conspirators, who seized the Government power and the Administration of all Germany. population of many millions, at the centre of a huge state machinery could not exist without a whole system of subsidiary criminal organizations, connecting the conspirators with the remote districts, the leaders of the thoroughfare with the leaders of the streets and bye streets. Therefore in Hitler's Germany there was a network of organizations assigned with great power: the Leadership Corps of the NSDAP, Gestapo, SS, SD etc., which functioned under the constant and direct leadership of the conspirators.
The law of 1933 according to which the machinery of the Fascist party was Merged in the state machinery of Hitler's Germany, was an open local recognition of the fact.
each of the conspirators acted in several capacities and held several offices, representing many persons: Goering for example, as Minister, Commander of the Air Force, plenipotentiary for the four year plan, Reichsleiter, supreme Commander of SA and SS; Hess -- Cabinet Minister, Hitler's deputy for the party, General of SS and SA; Rosenberg -- Reichsleader of the National Socialist party for questions of ideology and foreign policy, as well as Cabinet Minister and Obergruppenfuehrer of SA and SS etc. Just as Goering -Minister is inseparable from Goering -- Obergruppenfuehrer of SS, so are Gestapo and the ether criminal or animations inseparable from the State under Hitler's Germany. It is impossible to imagine Hitler's Germany without libraries, without schools, even without hospitals, but Hitler's Germany without SS and Gestapo could not exist. Military Tribunal provides for two kinds of participation in the criminal associations of Hitler: Art. 6 of the Charter refers to participation in the criminal conspiracy, and Art. 9-10 refers to the participation in the criminal organizations. Both of these conceptions are organically and indissolubly connected, for they express in legal terms the correlation and the connection which actually existed in real life between the conspiracy and the organizations in Hitler's Germany. Hitlerites in the international crimes, that is, participation in the conspiracy and participation in the organizations, the Charter of the International Military Tribunal had established with full reason different criminal and local consequences for two kinds of participation.
Participation in the conspiracy, and it's very natural conception precludes by its very nature a very considerable number of persons, and is provided for by the Charter as an independent criminal action.
organizations, comprising hundreds of thousands of members on the other hand is differently defined by the Charter. Based entirely upon the principles of law and justice the Charter of the Tribunal leaves it to the competence of the national Tribunals to determine the individual responsibility of the members of the organization which is closely connected with the determination of guilt and of the criminality of a great number of individual persons.
According to Art. 10 of the Charter "if the Tribunal considers one or another organization as criminal, the national courts have a right to prosecute Separate individuals for belonging to criminal organizations". Therefore the Tribunal has the right to consider an organization as criminal not for the purpose of punishing this organization as a whole or all of its members but to enable thus the national courts to prosecute individuals for belonging to such organizations as have been declared criminal.
In accordance with the instructions of Art. 10 of the Charter the Tribunals of USSR, USA, Great Britain and France and of 18 states which joined the London Agreement, may certainly condemn, but they have the right also to come to a conclusion, that the defendant is not a member of the organization at all, or belonging to it only formally, was in fact far from it and according to such a conclusion they may acquit him. All those questions as well as related questions were and remained the competence of the national courts. These courts are United only in one theoretically important respect which is on principle of profound importance: if the International Tribunal considers the organization as criminal, the National Tribunals can neither deny nor even discuss the criminal character of such an organization; here for the first time in legal history the sovereignty of individual countries is limited by the enforcing power of the verdict of the International legal authority the Tribunal. Tribunal and the National Courts is very essential in order to understand the regulations of the Charter of the Tribunal concerning criminal organizations. general question concerning die criminality of the organization and not separate questions about the individual responsibility of these various organizations, the Charter does not indicate any particular criterion of the concept "organization" and in this case it does not bind the Tribunal by any formal requirement The absence in the Charter of a detail definition of a criminal organization is not, therefore, an omission in the Charter but a theoretical position on principle which fellows from the above mentioned fact, namely, consigning the elucidation of the question of facts to the agencies of National Justice.
Therefore, attempts to require some kind of factual signs (voluntary membership, mutual information) in order to consider the organization as criminal do not find any support in the Charter but differ from its entire structure. The main and only task presenting itself to the Tribunal is not such investiagions with which national courts deal and will have to deal, but the establishing of one decisive fact; namely; whether by its criminal actions the organization participated in the realization of the plan of Hitler's conspirators. ceedings for the prosecution of organizations. question concerning criminal organizations under the indispensable condition to consider the case of a real representative of this organization sitting in the dock of the defendants. The defendants at this Trial who are now and were at the same time the participants of the conspiracy and the leading members of the organization, in whose reference the Tribunal has to decide the question of considering them as criminal. For this reason, the evidence submitted that has been used for the individual cases of the defendants, is at the same time the fundamental evidence for the organizations which they represent. The documents submitted by the Prosecution have quite clearly proved the organizations mentioned in the Indictment served as constant and direct as instruments for realizing the criminal plots of the conspirators. Thus the legal proceedings have fully and comprehensively proved the criminal character of these organizations, in the curt of the present proceedings. organizations the Charter of the Tribunal invited by broadcastings, through the Press and by special announcements the members of the accused organizations to submit their explanations to the Tribunal. The Tribunal is aware of the number of persons kept in concentration camps who wished to avail themselves of this possibility. The formation of an auxiliary commission made it possible for the Tribunal to interrogate the greatest possible number of members of the organizations who are later to be examined and judged later by the National Courts.