dtufail/nuremberg-trials-corpus huggingface dataset:
DR.ALFRED SEIDL (Counsel for Defendant Frank): Only by considering these facts and the development of the conditions obtaining between administration and police in the Government General is it possible to form an even approximately correct appreciation of the events in the Government General, which form part of the subject of the Indictment in this Trial. Your Lordships, the Prosecution seeks to prove its accusations against the Defendant Dr. Frank in the main by quotations from the defendant's diary. In this connection I have the following basic observation to make. That diary was not kept personally by the Defendant Frank but was compiled by stenographers who were present at Government conferences and other discussions of the Governor General. The diary consists of 42 volumes with no less than 10,000 or 12,000 pages of typescript. With one exception, the entries do not represent. the outcome of dictation by the defendant, but take the form of stenographers' transcripts. For the greater part-and this is evident from the diary itself-the authors of this diary did not record the various speeches and remarks word for word, but made a summarized version in their own words. The entries in the diary were not checked by the defendant, nor-again with one single exception- were they signed by him. The attendance lists stapled into several volumes of the diary-they are only contained in such volumes as relate to Government conferences-cannot be looked upon as a substitute for a confirmatory note. Moreover, the evidence has clearly established that very many entries in the diary were not made on the basis of personal observations but came about through the fact that the author was told by participants about the subjects of Government meetings or other conferences after they had taken place, and then expressed it in the diary in his own words. Moreover, by an examination of the diary it can easily be ascertained that the entries cannot be considered complete. All these facts bring us to the conclusion that the material evidential value of this diary must not be overestimated.
DR.ALFRED SEIDL (Counsel for Defendant Frank): The evidential value of this diary can in no way be compared with the evidential value of entries made personally by the person concerned. Above all, however, it seems to me essential to point out the following: The contents of any document are of material evidential value only insofar as the document is appreciated in its entirety. The diary of the Defendant Frank with its 10,000 or 12,000 pages is one uniform document. It is improper to put in as evidence certain individual entries without showing the context in which alone some of them can be understood. But it is particularly improper-and this infringes upon the principles of any presentation of evidence-to select from some uniform whole, such as a long speech, a few sentences and put them in as evidence. In Document Book Number 2, I have listed a few examples of this and hereby refer to them. As the Defendant Frank himself rightly pointed out in the witness box, the diary is a uniform whole; only in its entirety can it be probative and form part of the presentation of evidence. I have read through that diary of more than 10,000 pages and can only confirm his opinion. And that was why I did not use individual entries in presenting my evidence but put in the whole diary. If I myself, in presenting evidence, have read certain single entries from the diary and if in the course of my present address I shall quote a few more passages from it, then, just as in the case of the extracts put forward by the Prosecution, their evidential value can certainly be gauged only within the framework of the whole diary. The following may also be looked upon as having been established by the evidence: As the diaries show, and as is evident in particular from the testimony given by the witnesses Buehler, Boepple, and Meidinger, the Defendant Frank in his capacity as Governor General often made two or three improvised speeches in the course of one day. The extracts from the diary presented by the Prosecution consist, for the most part, of single sentences from such speeches.
DR.ALFRED SEIDL (Counsel for Defendant Frank): If we take into consideration both the temperament of the defendant and his habit of expressing himself in an incisive manner, then that is another reason which tends to reduce the probative value of these extracts from the diary. And we actually do find many diary entries which flatly contradict other entries on the same subject occurring a little earlier or later. In connection with the many speeches made by the Defendant Frank, the following must not be left out of consideration and may also be looked upon as established by the evidence: It was a foregone conclusion that the Defendant Frank, as an avowed champion of the idea of a State founded on law and of the independence of the judiciary, would come into increasingly sharp conflict with the representatives of the police-state system; this developed to an even greater degree in the course of the war, both within the Reich and in occupied territory. The representatives of the police state, however, were Reichsfuehrer SS Himmler and, for the area of the Government General, the Higher SS and Police Leader, East, above all and in particular SS Obergruppenfuehrer and General of Police Kruger. The relation between the Defendant Frank on the one hand, and Reichsfuehrer SS Himmler and his representative, Obergruppenfuehrer Kruger, on the other, had been extremely bad even at the time the Government General was established. They deteriorated still more as the divergence of outlook concerning the tasks of the Police came ever more openly to the fore; and the Defendant Frank was forced to lodge increasingly strong protests with the Chief of the Reich Chancellery, Dr. Lammers, and the Fuehrer himself regarding the violent measures taken by the Security Police and the SD. As I have already mentioned, the Governor General, lacking an executive of his own, had no choice but to make repeated attempts to co-ordinate the work of the general administration with that of the Police, in order to be in a position to carry out any administrative work at all.
DR.ALFRED SEIDL (Counsel for Defendant Frank): Obviously these objectives demanded-at least on the face of things in a certain degree-a conciliatory tendency toward the general attitude of the Security Police and, above all, of the Higher SS and Police Leader, East. Moreover, the evidence has further established that the tension existing between the Governor General and the Higher SS and Police Leader often reached such a degree that the Defendant Frank could not but feel himself menaced and-to quote the words of the witness Buehler-was no longer a free agent and master of his own decisions. The testimony of the witnesses Bach-Zelewsky and Dr. Albrecht leaves no doubt on this point. Quite rightly, therefore, the witness Dr. Buehler also pointed out that the Defendant Frank expressed himself with particular vehemence when the Higher SS and Police Leader or the commander of the Security Police and the SD were present at conferences, while his utterances were made on quite a different note when he was speaking to an audience composed only of members of the administration. Even a cursory inspection of the diary will confirm this. All these circumstances must be taken into consideration in assessing the substantive evidential value of the Defendant Frank's diary. It should also be noted that these diaries constituted the only personal property that Frank was able to rescue from the castle at Krakow. On his arrest he handed over all the diaries to the officers who took him into custody. It would have been an easy matter for him to destroy these documents. Your Lordships, I now turn to the individual accusations brought against the defendant, and their legal aspects. The Defendant Frank is accused of having approved of, and participated in, War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity in the administration of occupied territory. As the law stands, it rests on the principle that only a sovereign state, not an individual, can be a subject of international law.
DR.ALFRED SEIDL (Counsel for Defendant Frank): To make international law binding on an individual, such law itself would have to lay down that a certain set of facts constitutes a wrong and that the rule thereby established is applicable to an individual creating such a set of facts. Only in that way can individuals, who under the law as it stands are subject only to the criminal law applying in each state, by way of exception be directly bound by international law. Deviating from this rule, existing international law permits, in exceptional cases, a state to punish the national of an enemy state who has fallen into its power, if before his capture he has been guilty of infringing the rules of war. But even here punishment is excluded if the deed was not committed on the person's own initiative, but can only be attributed to his state of allegiance. Moreover, the conception of war crimes and their factual characteristics are the subject of great controversy both in judicial decisions and in legal literature. Nor do the Hague Rules on Land Warfare, which form the Appendix to the IVth Convention on the Laws and Customs of War on Land and purport to be a codification of certain subject matter of the laws of war, list any facts which could be interpreted as a basis for the criminal liability of individuals. In Article 3 of this convention it is, on the contrary, expressly provided that not individuals but the state which infringed the rules may, under certain circumstances, be liable to pay an indemnity and is also responsible for all acts done by persons belonging to its armed forces. In connection with the Hague Rules for Land Warfare of 1907 the following should also be noted: The principles therein enunciated were evolved from the experience of wars in the lath century. Those wars were confined in the main to the armed forces directly concerned therein. Now the first World War already overstepped this framework and not only in respect of the geographical extent of conflict.
DR.ALFRED SEIDL (Counsel for Defendant Frank): On the contrary, the war became a struggle for extermination of the nations involved, a struggle in which each belligerent party utilized the whole of its war potential and all its material and imponderable resources. War technique having meanwhile been considerably perfected, the second World War was bound altogether to destroy the framework set up for the conduct of war by the Hague Rules for Land Warfare. That can be seen at a glance-the condition of Europe today reveals it. If we remember in addition that in Germany alone the greater part of almost every city has been destroyed as a result of bombing raids; and not only that, but that considerably more than a million civilians thereby lost their lives and that in a single major raid on the city of Dresden almost 300,000 people were killed, then it will be possible to realize that the Hague Rules for Land Warfare, at any rate in respect of many activities coming under the rules of war, can no longer be an adequate expression of the laws and customs to be observed in waging war. But if any doubt should exist on this subject, then that doubt will certainly be removed on contemplation of the consequences of the two atom bombs which razed Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the ground and killed hundreds of thousands of people. Taking these circumstances into consideration, it is not possible to adduce the provisions of the Hague Rules for Land Warfare, even indirectly or by way of analogy, to establish individual criminal liability. Seeing that this is the case, it must be looked upon as impossible to give a clear and general definition of the factual characteristics of so-called war crimes. Referring to the fact that even Article 6 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal only purports to furnish a list of examples, it will be realized that the question as to whether a certain line of conduct amounts to the commission of a war crime or not can only be answered on the merits of each particular case, and then only if all the circumstances are taken into consideration.
DR.ALFRED SEIDL (Counsel for Defendant Frank): In the course of the presentation of evidence for the personal responsibility of the Defendant Frank, the Prosecution submitted as Exhibit USA-609 (864-PS) minutes of a conference held by the Fuehrer with the Chief of the OKW on the future form of Polish relations to Germany. This conference took place on 17 October 1939. It is alleged that these minutes alone, by which the administrative goals of the Defendant Frank in the Government General are said to be established, reveal a plan or conspiracy at variance with the laws of warfare and humanity. This is an inadmissible conclusion, at least insofar as the Defendant Frank is concerned. The Prosecution was unable to prove that the Fuehrer entrusted the Defendant Frank with a task in conformity with the administrative aims demanded in that conference. Moreover, this seems very unlikely, because the directives laid down at that conference dealt mainly with measures which could not be carried out by the general administration, but only by the Security Police, the SD, and the other organs and offices under Reichsfuehrer SS Himmler. In this connection special mention should also be made of the powers vested in Reichsfuehrer SS Himmler before the date of that conference in his capacity of Reich Commissioner for the Preservation of German Nationality. Actually, there is at the end of Exhibit USA-609 a reference to a commission with which Himmler was charged. In consideration of the fact that the Defendant Frank, in the course of a short interview with Hitler about the middle of September 1939, had been told to take over the civil administration of occupied Polish territory as Chief of Administration and had not seen Hitler for a very long time after that, it can safely be assumed that the directives laid down at the conference between Hitler and the Chief of the OKW were intended, not for the Defendant Frank, but for Reichsfuehrer SS Himmler, who was the only person to have the necessary executive organs at his disposal.
THE PRESIDENT: We will adjourn now. [A recess was taken.]
DR. SEIDL: Mr. President, My Lordships, another document to which the Prosecution has referred and which is also alleged to show the criminality of the administrative aims of the Defendant Frank is Exhibit Number USA-297, which is EC-344(16). The content of this document is a discussion which the Defendant Frank is said to have had on 3 October 1939 with a certain Captain Varain. The Defendant Frank testified in the witness box that he had never made any such or similar statements to an officer. Moreover, a comparison of the dates shows that this conversation, even if it should have taken place, can have no connection with the subject of the conference between the Fuehrer and the Chief of the OKW, the latter not having been held until 17 October 1939, that is, at a later date. Not within the framework of the evidence presented in connection with the personal responsibility of the Defendant Frank, but in connection with the accusation of so-called Germanization, a document was submitted with the Exhibit USA-300, 661-PS. This is a memorandum entitled "Legal Aspects of German Policy toward the Poles from the Ethno-Political Point of View." According to a note on the title page, the legal part of this was to serve as a model for the Committee of the Academy for German Law which dealt with legal nationality questions. This document can have no probative value in connection with the personal responsibility of the Defendant Frank. He testified in the witness box that he had given no instructions for the writing of that memorandum and that he was not aware of its contents. Over and above this, it would seem that no substantive evidential value can be attached to that document within the scope of this whole Trial. Nor is it evident, from the memorandum, who wrote it or who gave instructions that it should be written. Its whole form and content would seem to show that it is not an official document, but rather the work of a private individual. It was stated to have been found at the Ministry of Justice in Kassel.
DR. SEIDL: But in actual fact there has been no Ministry of Justice at Kassel for many decades. All these circumstances would seem to indicate that the material probative value of this document is, to say the least, extremely small. But whatever the evidential value of minutes of conferences that took place in the year 1939 on the occasion of the establishment of the Government General, the following should be pointed out: In judging the conduct of the Defendant Frank it is not of such essential importance to know what Hitler, he himself, or other persons said on one occasion or another, but what policy the Defendant Frank actually pursued toward the Polish and Ukrainian peoples. And here there can be no possible doubt-on the basis both of the general result of the evidence and, in particular, of entries in the diary of the defendant himself-that he repudiated all tendencies and measures designed to effect Germanization. That is shown with great clarity by the extracts from the diary which I have submitted to the Tribunal. Thus on 8 March 1940 he declared at a meeting of department chiefs, that is, to an audience of men who as leaders of the various main departments were deputed to put his directives into practice: "I have been charged by the Fuehrer to look upon the Government General as the home of the Polish people. Accordingly no Germanization of any sort or kind is possible. In your departments you will please see that the two-language principle is strictly observed; you will also point out to district and provincial officers that no violence is to be used in opposing such safeguarding of Polish national existence. We have in a certain sense herewith taken over on trust from the Fuehrer the responsibility for Polish national life." This declaration alone makes it apparent that the directives laid down in the conference between Hitler and the Chief of the OKW on 17 October 1939, as contained in Exhibit USA-609, 864-PS, cannot possibly have been made the subject of the duties with which the Defendant Frank was charged.
DR. SEIDL: On the other hand, in view of the entire activities of the Higher SS and Police Leader, East from the first day of his appointment, it can safely be assumed that it was Reichsfuehrer SS Himmler whom Hitler charged with carrying out the directives laid down at his conference with the Chief of the OKW. A diary entry of 19 February 1940 is on the same lines; in this the Defendant Frank advocates the formation! of a Polish government or regency council. On 25 February 1940, at a service conference of officials of the District of Radom, the Defendant Frank gave out, in program form, his directives regarding general administration. On this occasion the Defendant Frank said among other things: "1. The Government General comprises that part of the occupied Polish area which is not a component part of the German Reich . . . "2. The Fuehrer has decreed that this territory shall be the home of the Polish people. The Fuehrer and Field Marshal Goering have impressed on me over and over again that this territory is not to be subjected to Germanization. "3. In accordance with the instructions we have received under the Fuehrer's decree Polish laws will remain in force here." On 7 June 1942 the Defendant Frank stated word for word as follows: "It is not as rulers by violence that we come and go in this country. We have no terroristic or oppressive intentions. Welded into the interests of Greater Germany, the living rights of the Poles and Ukrainians in this territory are also safeguarded by us. We have not taken away from the Poles and Ukrainians either their churches, their schools, or their education. We Germans do not wish to denationalize by violent means. We are sufficient unto ourselves, and we know that people must be born into our community and that it is a distinction to belong to it. And that is why we can look the world in the face in this our task." These examples could be amplified by many more, which all show clearly that the measures taken, at any rate by Frank, were intended to care for the Polish nation and that he repudiated any terror policy.
DR. SEIDL: I now come to the so-called "peace-enforcing action." When the campaign against Poland had ended in September 1939 that did not mean that all resistance had ceased. Very soon afterward new centers of resistance sprang up; and when on 9 April 1940 German troops occupied Denmark and Norway and on 10 May 1940 the German western army had begun their attack, the leaders of the Polish resistance movement believed that, in consideration of the general political and military situation, the time for action had come. This resistance movement was all the more dangerous because dispersed but not inconsiderable remnants of the former Polish Army were active in it. A large number of entries in the diary of the Defendant Frank show that the security situation deteriorated from day to day during that period. Here for instance is an entry for 16 May 1940: "The general war situation requires that the most serious consideration be given to the internal security situation of the Government General. A large number of signs and actions lead to the conclusion that there exists a widely organized wave of resistance on the part of the Poles in the country and that we are on the threshold of violent happenings on a large scale. Thousands of Poles are already organized in secret circles; they are armed and are being incited in the most seditious manner to commit all kinds of violence." In consideration of this menacing general situation, the order was given-as the diary shows, by the Fuehrer himself-that in the interest of the maintenance of public security all measures were to be taken to suppress the imminent revolt. That order was given through Himmler to the Higher SS and Police Leader. The administration of the Government General at first had nothing to do with it. It intervened, however, in order as far as possible to prevent the Security Police and the SD from taking violent measures and to make sure that innocent people should under no circumstances lose their lives.
DR. SEIDL: The testimony given by the Defendants Frank and Seyss-Inquart in the witness box and the evidence given by the witness Dr. Buehler have shown that the efforts made by the administration of the Government General were so far successful in that all the members of the resistance movement rounded up by this special action were brought before a drumhead court-martial introduced by a decree issued in 1939; and moreover, the decisions of this court were not carried out before being submitted to a Board of Pardon which in many cases modified the sentence. The chairman of this Board of Pardon, until his appointment as Reich Commissioner for the Netherlands, was the Defendant Dr. Seyss-Inquart. As his testimony revealed, no less than half the death sentences pronounced by the summary court were commuted to imprisonment by the Board of Pardon. For the rest, in regard to the so-called peace-enforcing action, I refer to the oral testimony and to the extracts from the diary of the Defendant Frank which I read into the record. Within the scope of the charges against him personally, the Defendant Frank is accused of having supported the resettlement plans of the Reich Commissioner for the Preservation of German Nationality (Himmler) and of having thereby also committed a war crime. There is no question but that resettlement, even when carefully planned and well prepared, means great hardship for those who are affected by it; in many cases a resettlement means the destruction of a person's economic existence. Nevertheless, it seems doubtful whether resettlement constitutes a War Crime or a Crime Against Humanity, for the following reasons: Germany today is being flooded with millions of people who have been driven from their homes and who own no property but what they carry with them.