dtufail/nuremberg-trials-corpus huggingface dataset:
MR. THOMAS J. DODD (Executive Trial Counsel for the United States): Everyone who entered these organizations as a member knew of such excesses." That is what Dr. Hoegner said. That is Document Number D-930,. Exhibit Number GB-617. The Political Leaders dealt in information and in propaganda. They were the agents of the ideology and the political detectives who checked on the reactions of the people. Knowledge for them was a two-way circuit. They knew the plan and its operations and they learned of its effects. A, typical example is found in the order to lynch Allied airmen. This order had to be passed throughout the Leadership Corps in order to reach the lower echelons who were to carry out the 1ynchings. They saw to it that the order was carried out and they made reports on its effectiveness. There were no secrets in any Nazi cell or block unknown to them. The turn of a radio dial--the facial expression of disapproval--the inviolate secrets between cleric and supplicant-the ancient trust between father and son--even the sacred confidences of marriage--were their stock in trade. Knowledge was their business. Every member of the SS took an oath of obedience unto death to Hitler and every member of the SS was indoctrinated in the full meanings of Hitlerian ideology. In 1936, Himmler, in describing the SS as an anti-Bolshevistic fighting organization, openly stated, I quote: "We shall take care that never again in Germany, the heart of Europe, will the Jewish-Bolshevistic revolution of subhumans be able to be kindled either from within or through emissaries from without" (1851-PS). Can anyone doubt that SS men understood the meaning of these words? Or of Himmler's confession, again I quote: "I know that there are some people in Germany who become sick when they see these black coats." He went on to say that he did not expect that he and his SS men would be loved by too many.
MR. THOMAS J. DODD (Executive Trial Counsel for the United States): We say, the sickness which he referred to, which overcame people when they saw the black coats, was the malady of fear--fear of the brutal methods of the SS, the murders they committed on the streets, and the beatings they inflicted in the concentration camps. It was known to everyone that black-coated SS men carried out the murders of 30 June 1934. Even Von Manstein, of the Army, was in this witness-stand testifying that his soldiers so feared the evil SS that they were afraid to report SS mass killings in the East. The knowledge that is necessary to bind the SS organization is the knowledge that a member of the Death's Head Battalion had of atrocities committed in the concentration camp, that a member of the anti-partisan bands had of the killings, kidnappings, and plunder that went on behind the fighting lines, that a member of the SS Panzer Divisions had of the killings of prisoners of war, or that a member of the SS Medical Corps had of the savage experiments on human beings. This knowledge was diffused by frequent changes in their duties. The Death's Head Battalions, which at first were charged with the guarding of concentration camp inmates, subsequently were put into the fighting front; whereas during the war the fighting troops, the Waffen-SS, were used for guarding concentration camps and for carrying out exterminations in annihilation centers. The SS came generally to be known as the symbol for an organization both sinister and savage. The objectives of the Gestapo were laid down by law and discussed time and again in semi-official publications such as the Voelkischer Beobachter , Das Archiv , the magazine of the German Police, and Best's basic handbook on the German Police. Every member knew that the Gestapo was the special police force set up by Goering and developed by Himmler to strike down potential opponents of the tyranny. Every member knew that the Gestapo operated outside the law, that the Gestapo could arrest on its own authority and imprison on its independent judgment.
MR. THOMAS J. DODD (Executive Trial Counsel for the United States): Every member knew that the Gestapo was the agency which filled the concentration camps with political opponents. All knew that the Gestapo was organized for the specific purpose of persecuting the victims of Nazi oppression--the Jews, the Communists, and the Churches. The right to use torture in interrogations had to be known to all who interrogated. There could be no secrecy as to the criminal aims of the Gestapo or the criminal methods by which this primary agency of terror carried out its work. And that it was an instrument of terror was known not merely to the membership--it was known throughout Germany and Europe, and in every country of the world, where the very name Gestapo became the watchword of terror and of fear. So we ask that a common-sense and realistic test of knowledge be applied by this Tribunal in judging these organizations for what they are, the most vicious and evil of all Nazi inventions. Surely they shall not escape condemnation for the vast crimes they have committed through a false and flimsy defense of ignorance in their own circles. For long,. long years after this hall is emptied and for centuries beyond present perspective, the roll call of terror against humankind 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. But there is a Charter requirement that there be a member of each organization in the dock who is guilty of an offense relating to the organization of which he is a member, for the purpose of ensuring that there would be present before the Tribunal someone who could speak for each organization. So the great number of witnesses who have appeared before the Commission and the Tribunal has, in effect, made superfluous this Charter protection to the organizations. The measure of criminality of each organization is not limited to the acts committed by the defendant in the dock who was a member of the organization.
MR. THOMAS J. DODD (Executive Trial Counsel for the United States): It is wholly sufficient, we think, 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 ensure that there would be some defendant qualified to speak for, or otherwise represent, each of the named organizations. Seventeen of the 22 individual defendants were members of the Reich 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 of discriminatory acts against racial minorities. 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 Gauleiter Von Starch and Streicher are illustrative of the criminality 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 Starch 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 Main Office. His activities in directing this organization need no amplification. His shame disgraces all.
MR. THOMAS J. DODD (Executive Trial Counsel for the United States): Eight of the defendants were members of the SA, of which Goering assumed 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 commitments to concentration camps carrying his typed or facsimile Signature; it has reviewed evidence that orders for 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 integration of defendants and organizations is further demonstrated by 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 Starch were Cabinet members. Gauleiter 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 and SD, and by SS Obergruppenfuehrer Ribbentrop, as a member of the Reich Cabinet. Kaltenbrunner worked out the mechanics of the murder and Ribbentrop, worked out the plan of deception.
MR. THOMAS J. DODD (Executive Trial Counsel for the United States): Counsel for the Gestapo, in arguing before the Tribunal, has argued that 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 succeeded to the duties of Nebe as Chief 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 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 a matter under the cognizance of the Gestapo, not of the Criminal Police. Parenthetically, I should like to say that if it is contended at any later 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. The whole macabre tragedy, from the faked removal of Mesny from the 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 white-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.
MR. THOMAS J. DODD (Executive Trial Counsel for the United States): I should also like to add at this point--I think I can conclude it in a very short time--that counsel for the, defendant 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. I shall not review the legal arguments on this subject since they were exhaustively covered by Justice Jackson in his address last 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 fastened the police state upon Germany and perpetrated these crimes, shall be characterized in history for what they were, for what they are worth--organizations, the aims, purposes, and actions of which were basically criminal, and which openly violated all tenets of decency and law held in every civilized society. Now, Defense Counsel argue that if you declare these organizations 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 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.
MR. THOMAS J. DODD (Executive Trial Counsel for the United States): And it will give them the terrible opportunity for reviving them in one form or another and for inflicting again upon the civilized world the terrible consequences of criminal group action. I should also like to point out, because I have read into the record some remarks relative to the Sedition Act of 1940, 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. Under the Sedition Act, each person indicted of course has the 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 the organization was criminal. For what we seek here is not a criminal conviction of the members of these organizations. Their individual criminality--I think 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 vast majority of the crimes committed in the names of these organizations must go unpunished.
MR. THOMAS J. DODD (Executive Trial Counsel for the United States): 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 will 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. On 28 February 1946, in this courtroom, the Chief Prosecutor for the 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 repetition of these crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, it would be a greater catastrophe to acquit these organizations than it would be to acquit the entire 22 individual defendants in the box. These defendants' power for harm is spent. That of these organizations goes on. If, these organizations are exonerated here the German people will infer that they did no wrong and they will easily be regimented in reconstituted organizations under new names behind the same program. "In administering retributive justice it would be possible to exonerate these organizations only by concluding that no crimes have been committed by the Nazi regime. For these organizations' sponsorship of every Nazi purpose, and their confederation, to execute every measure to attain these ends, is beyond denial.
MR. THOMAS J. DODD (Executive Trial Counsel for the United States): A failure to condemn these organizations under the terms of the Charter can only mean that such Nazi ends and means cannot be considered criminal and 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-FYFE: 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: Mr. President, may I just take up a few moments of the Tribunal's time? On the basis of a letter which I received last night, I am now in a position to prove that a written order existed forbidding all preparations for active bacteriological warfare. I have already discussed this matter with Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe; the letter will be translated, and then the question of whether it should be admitted as evidence can be taken up. I just wanted to mention this, Mr. President, so that the letter should not then be refused as coming too late.
THE PRESIDENT: Dr. Laternser, you mean that the letter will be translated and submitted to the Prosecution, and then they will let us know whether they are prepared to agree to the letter going in for what it is worth? But it must be done today.
DR. LATERNSER: Yes.
THE PRESIDENT: Very well. General Telford Taylor.
BRIGADIER GENERAL TELFORD TAYLOR (Associate Trial Counsel for the United States): Mr. President and Members of the Tribunal: Under the Indictment, the Prosecution seeks a declaration of criminality against six groups or organizations. For purposes of clarity in marshalling the evidence and specifying the charges, 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 not 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. Appendix B of the Indictment specifies the leaders and principal instrumentalities 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 composition of this group of military leaders was described by the Prosecution during the case-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. A number of the points made by the Defense are based either on misunderstanding, or a deliberate misreading of the Indictment's definitions.
BRIGADIER GENERAL TELFORD TAYLOR (Associate Trial Counsel for the United States): Thus, several witnesses have told us that the "General Staff" consisted of young officers of relatively junior rank who acted as assistants to the commanders-in-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 this 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 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, OKM, OKH, and OKL, all of whom were key figures in military planning, and the commanders-in-chief who directed operations. Together, they adequately comprehend the military leadership. Several other minor and technical points merit only brief mention. It has been objected that the chart which was attached to the affidavits of Halder, Brauchitsch, 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 chart is attached say nothing about chains of command 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.