dtufail/nuremberg-trials-corpus huggingface dataset:
GEN. RUDENKO: 2) Did they take an active part in the planning, preparing, launching and waging of these wars? 3) Are they guilty of cynically trampling on the laws and customs of warfare? 4) Are they responsible for the atrocities and for the extermination of the peaceful population, for the sinking of passenger and hospital ships, for the towns and villages destroyed by the military machine of the Hitlerite Reich? It seems to me that after this investigation which has so carefully gone into all the details of this case it would be impossible, unless we remain blind to the facts, to give any but an affirmative answer to these questions. The evidence submitted to the Tribunal has fully proved that the military group of criminals is guilty of the most appalling crimes and that they have actively participated in the planning and execution of the common criminal conspiracy. The very fact that these crimes were committed by men in uniform not only does not mitigate their responsibility, it seems to me, but on the contrary, merely serves to heighten it. How can they attempt to whitewash themselves by referring to the "duty of a soldier," "the honor of an officer," and the "obligation of fulfilling orders"? Since when has "the duty of a soldier" and "the honor of an officer" been compatible with shooting prisoners without trial or exterminating women, children, and old people? The only true and correct explanation of the amazing fact that these generals and admirals did commit what, in effect, were ignoble crimes, lies in the fact that they were actually generals and admirals of Hitler's making. These are men of a special brand. They are fascists in military uniform bound in body and soul to the Nazi regime. This is the only reason why Hitler gathered these men around him and collaborated with them for so long a period of time. This is the only way to explain why they collaborated with Hitler in perpetrating crimes unprecedented in history. They fitted together and understood one another to perfection. Keitel.
GEN. RUDENKO: It is only natural that, when speaking of the military group, I begin with Defendant Keitel. Keitel held the leading post in Hitler's military machine from the very first years of its conception. Keitel's counsel admits that "the decree"-of 4 February 1938-"gave Keitel the marvelous title: 'Chief of the High Command of the Armed Forces.' " Further he goes on to say: ". . .the factual significance of Keitel's activities . . .was immense... It was an extremely ungrateful job and its miserly remuneration was a brilliant position in the immediate proximity to the head of the State." In the light of all subsequent events it may be taken for granted that the primary stage of all the future wars of aggression included everything connected with the secret rearmament of Germany after the Versailles Treaty. It is difficult to minimize the significance of all that was done at the time by the then Colonel Keitel in the committee of experts which painstakingly and consecutively sought and found means of circumventing and even violating the treaty. It was none other than Keitel in particular who gave instructions to the effect that in Geneva it was possible to say what one pleased, but care must be taken not to leave anything behind on paper. This cynical statement fully tallies with the role played by Keitel in the subsequent preparation and waging of aggressive wars. During the negotiations between Hitler and Schuschnigg, Keitel in person was the living reminder of Germany's preparedness to resort to arms. Keitel issued orders for troops to cross into Czechoslovakia at the time when President Hacha was so treacherously called to Berlin "for continuing negotiations." It was the OKW, and none other, which was fully prepared through the Department of the Abwehr to provoke an incident with Czechoslovakia in order to justify the invasion by the German hordes, ready to fall upon Czechoslovakia.
GEN. RUDENKO: In his strictly confidential memorandum Keitel demanded that Hess and Himmler advise the OKW in advance of all measures taken by Party organizations or Police which were not included in Case Green. The declarations alleging that after the seizure of Czechoslovakia Germany had no more territorial aspirations in Europe were downright lies. This seizure was but a link in the chain of aggressive wars. I wish to emphasize the leading role of the OKW in the preparation and carrying out of aggression. The directive regarding the waging of war and the invasion of Poland is known to us as Keitel's and Hitler's directive of 10 May 1939. It was forwarded to the High Command of the Air Force, Navy, and Army. How is it possible, after this, to maintain that the OKW was not the driving power behind all the branches of the Armed Forces of the fascist Reich? If we once more peruse the documents pertaining to German aggression against Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Yugoslavia, and Greece, we will again come across the name of Keitel. He appears either as a participant in the most important events, or as the author of secret orders addressed to Raeder, Goering and the General Staff. We find the initials of Keitel and Jodl entered in their own hand on the secret directive signed by Hitler regarding "Operation Marital" Much has been said here of Case Barbarossa and its authors. At present it is important to stress that this document took shape in the innermost depths of the OKW, and on its initiative, and that the methods planned prior to a treacherous attack on the U.S.S.R. were likewise the work of the OKW. The significance of a military specialist's visa on a document is clear to everybody. Some of the defendants in their untruthfulness attempted to portray the attack on the U.S.S.R. as a preventive war. This contention is to such a degree unconvincing and contradictory to the irrefutable evidence presented in court-German documents-that I see no need for wasting the Tribunal's time.
GEN. RUDENKO: Keitel's counsel stated that his defense is based on the point of view that Keitel "is fighting not for his head but to save his face." I should like to help the Tribunal to unveil Keitel's true face. For this I should have to remind you of a number of Keitel's directives which may well lay claim to being among the foremost of all the infamous documents pointing to the barbarity of the German military clique, to its baseness and foul and unlimited contempt for every concept of the rules and customs of warfare. Let us consider the documents dealing with the shooting of political officers. Keitel, the soldier, as he likes to call himself, ignoring his oath, shamelessly lied to the representatives of the American Prosecution at the preliminary investigation by avowing that, to begin with, this order was in the nature of a reprisal and that the political officers were separated from the other prisoners of war at the request of the prisoners of war themselves. At the Trial he was unmasked. Exhibit Number USSR-351, Document Number 884-PS proved that this directive had been issued before the war had broken out. We also submitted a document under Document Number USSR-62, the text of a letter from German prisoners of war. This document makes it clear that even before the attack on the U.S.S.R. the armies in the field had been instructed absolutely to exterminate Soviet women in military service as well as political officers. And what can be said of the following statement, appalling in its boundless cynicism: "...human life in the countries concerned is not of value at all. . . a terrifying influence can only be achieved by unheard-of brutality." And what can we say of the directive of 13 May 1941 introducing courts-martial in the "Barbarossa" region? And of the order of 16 October 1941 calling for the execution of 80 to 100 Communists for each German killed? What could Keitel say about the document known as "Nacht und Nebel"? These are documents stained in blood.
GEN. RUDENKO: No one can compute how many thousands of prisoners of war, soldiers and officers of the Red Army, had been killed and tortured to death in the camps of fascist Germany. You remember how on 21 January 1946 at the afternoon session the witness Lampe testified that for Himmler's amusement the shooting of 50 Soviet officers was organized in Mauthausen Camp. You remember the witness Blaha testifying that in the spring of 1944, 94 Soviet senior military officers were tortured and then killed for refusing to impart military information. I should like to mention the testimony of the SS man, Paul Waldmann, regarding the slaughter of 840 Russian prisoners of war. You remember the testimony of the witness Kivelisha regarding the endless chain of scoffing and suffering to which all Russians captured by the Germans were subjected? It is impossible to overlook Keitel's directive calling for the branding of Soviet prisoners of war. One cannot forget the Keitel directive of 16 December 1942. It is entitled "Measures to be adopted against bands." Under the word "bands" Defendant Keitel understood any resistance movement and demanded that his troops revert to harshest methods, stopping at nothing, even with regard to women and children. The Soviet Prosecution submitted Le Court's testimony as Document Number USSR-162. Le Court states that he shot and burned Soviet citizens and razed their houses. He alone had shot over 1,200 persons and for this achievement was prematurely promoted to the rank of Obergefreiter and awarded the medal for service in the East. He acted in accordance with Keitel's directives. The directive of Keitel's instituting courts-martial in the "Barbarossa" region freed such persons of all responsibility for their crimes. Keitel's hands are stained with the blood of the victims of Le Court and his kind. It was in carrying out Keitel's directive to the effect that "life in the eastern regions was of no value at all," that the soldiers and officers of Hitlerite Germany committed their atrocities.
GEN. RUDENKO: Document Number USSR-51, submitted by the Prosecution, shows how, on 28 August 1941, attacking German troops drove a group of women, children, and old men in front of their combat units. In the village of Kolpino the fascists forced the peasants to dig trenches and build bridges for them. Then they shot all the peasants. In Yugoslavia the mass shooting of hostages was a daily practice of the Armed Forces and military administration. In a secret report of 15 February 1940, addressed to Goering, the OKW justifies the practice of seizing hostages. I wish to conclude with Exhibit Number USSR-356, Document Number EC-338, which Your Honors will, of course, remember. In this document Admiral Canaris informs Keitel of the club law prevalent in the prisoner-of-war camps, of the hunger, and of the mass shootings of Soviet prisoners of war. Even that hardened fascist spy, Canaris, fearing eventual responsibility, could not ignore a cruelty which cried to High Heaven and a flagrant violation of all accepted laws and customs of warfare. You will remember Keitel's note on this report: "I approve and support these measures." On 7 April 1946 in the course of the cross-examination, I put the following question to Keitel: "You, Defendant Keitel, called a Field Marshal, repeatedly referred to yourself as a soldier before this Tribunal, and you, by your bloodthirsty resolution of September 1941 approved and sanctioned the murder, in cold blood, of thousands of unarmed captured soldiers. Do you confirm this?" Keitel was forced to admit this fact. This resolution alone unveils the true, the authentic face of Field Marshal Keitel. The highly involved arguments of the defense cannot absolve him of his responsibility for the bloodshed and for the innumerable human lives cut short by the fascist military clique acting on orders and directives signed by Keitel's hand.
THE PRESIDENT: The Tribunal will recess now. [A recess was taken.]
GENERAL RUDENKO: Jodl. The Defendant Alfred Jodl shares equal responsibility with Defendant Keitel as his assistant and as Hitler's closest military adviser. Everything connected with the preparation and execution of the aggressive plans of Hitlerite Germany is inseparably linked to the name of Jodl, as well as to Keitel's. There is no need to repeat all the aggressive acts of Hitler's Germany which had been individually planned and executed with the direct connivance of Defendant Jodl. They are already facts of common knowledge. As the representative of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, I should like to emphasize once again that the criminal plan for the perfidious attack on the Soviet Union, coded by the Hitler clique under the name of the ill-fated Conqueror, Friedrich Barbarossa, is signed not only by Hitler and Keitel, but by Jodl as well. But this is more than a mere signature. As far back as the summer of 1940, in Reichenhall, Jodl held the first conference with his staff officers at which the question of a possible attack by Hitler Germany on Soviet Russia was discussed. It was the Defendant Jodl alone who, even before the attack against the U.S.S.R., issued his well-known "Instructions on the Use of Propaganda in the 'Barbarossa' Region." In these instructions it is definitely stated that "propaganda directed at the partition of the Soviet Union should not, as yet, be carried out." Thus, Defendant Jodl knew beforehand of the actual aims of Germany's attack on the U.S.S.R. and knew of the predatory, violent nature of a war which called for the dismemberment of the Soviet Union. It was Jodl who participated in the preparation and organization of a provocative incident staged on the Czechoslovak border intended to justify the aggressive act of Hitler's Germany against this peace-loving nation. It was Jodl who signed the directive of 28 September 1938 regarding the order in which the so-called Henlein Corps was to be used should Case Green be realized.
GENERAL RUDENKO: How full of derision are the words of the Defendant Jodl about the "honor of the soldier" when we read his order for the destruction of Leningrad, Moscow, and other cities of the Soviet Union. It was this selfsame Jodl who with inimitable cynicism declared at a conference with Hitler on 1 December 1941 that German troops could with impunity "hang by the feet and quarter" the Soviet patriots. As Hitler's closest military adviser, who had personally participated in the preparation and execution of all the bloodthirsty and aggressive plans of Hitlerite Germany, Defendant Jodl has been justly included in the ranks of the major German war criminals. Doenitz and Raeder. My British colleague has proved the guilt of Defendants Karl Doenitz and Erich Raeder so convincingly and thoroughly that I see no need to dwell particularly on these Grossadmirals of Hitlerite Germany, who have stained their admirals' uniforms by such infamous crimes. In the course of his cross-examination Doenitz told the Soviet prosecutor that he was unaware of the reasons for which Hitler had appointed him as his successor. I do not believe that Doenitz was quite sincere in making this statement. One has only to refer to the transcripts of the sessions of 8 May in order to understand without any confession on his part why he became Hitler's successor when the Hitlerite Reich collapsed to the ground. The important point is not the fact that an admiral was needed at a moment like this, but the fact that in the opinion of Hitler, who so soon was to fade from the picture, only the Nazi Grossadmiral Doenitz could do anything to save the sinking ship. Under Hitler Doenitz commanded the submarine arm of the German Reich. We know the role which the German U-boats played in this war.
GENERAL RUDENKO: In this connection it is worth emphasizing that Doenitz prided himself on being the author of the so-called "wolf-pack tactics." The people of the Soviet have not forgotten how Doenitz' submarines, in the Baltic and Black Seas, sank both hospital ships and steamers evacuating peaceful citizens-women and children. The last head of the Hitlerite Government should also be one of the first to pay the penalty for all those crimes which have led to the trial of the major war criminals before the International Military Tribunal. The name of Raeder is linked to the impious directive for the destruction of Leningrad. At the Trial Raeder tried to act the part of an "honest soldier." But the mere fact that it was he, together with Hitler and Keitel, who conspired to "wipe Leningrad off the face of the earth" and to exterminate more than 3 million of the population of that great city, whose very name is indissolubly connected with the development of -the culture and history of mankind, makes Raeder one of the major war criminals. Raeder participated in drafting all the most important plans of aggression of German fascism. This participant in the criminal fascist conspiracy must, therefore, bear the punishment meted out to his associates. Kaltenbrunner. The Defendant Ernst Kaltenbrunner was considered by Himmler as the most deserving successor to that hangman, Heydrich, executed by Czech patriots. On 30 January 1943, he was appointed head of the Reich Security Main Office and chief of the SD. Numerous documents and especially directives signed by Kaltenbrunner for the mass deportation of people to the concentration camps, the testimonies of his subordinates, including the depositions of Walter Schellenberg, former chief of foreign intelligence (Amt VI), and of Otto Ohlendorf, chief of the security within Germany (Amt III or SD), fully convict Kaltenbrunner of the most heinous crimes. At the session of 12 April 1946, in the course of Kaltenbrunner's examination, the testimonies of Johann Kandutor, ex-prisoner of Mauthausen, were read into the record.
GENERAL RUDENKO: In his depositions Kandutor described as follows the manner in which Kaltenbrunner passed his time on one of his visits to the camp: "Laughing, Kaltenbrunner entered the gas chamber; then the prisoners were led from the barracks to execution and all three methods of execution were demonstrated-hanging, shooting in the neck, and gassing" I shall not dwell upon the numerous proofs available, since they have been sufficiently clarified before the Tribunal. There is only one point of the accusation against Kaltenbrunner on which I consider it necessary to dwell. Together with the other RSHA organizations, Kaltenbrunner took over from Heydrich five Einsatzgruppen. The citizens of the Soviet Union well remember these cruel organizations of German fascism, headed by Kaltenbrunner. Einsatzgruppe A reached the approaches to Leningrad. It created the "Fort of Death Number 9" near Kaunas and the secret center for the mass extermination of human beings in Panarai; it carried out executions by shooting in the woods of Salaspilsk and Bikerneksk near Riga; it erected gallows in the parks of Pushkino one of Leningrad's suburbs. Einsatzgruppe B settled down in the vicinity of Smolensk. It burned alive the peasants of Byelorussia; it shot down the victims of the awful Pinsk action; it drowned thousands of Byelorussian women and children in the Masurian Lakes; it operated with "murder vans" in Minsk; it liquidated the ghetto in the Verchnye Sadka district of Smolensk. Einsatzgruppe C was billeted in Kiev. This group carried out the mass action in Babij Jar near Kiev, an execution unmatched in cruelty, when 100,000 Soviet citizens perished on a single day. Einsatzgruppe D operated in the southern regions of the temporarily occupied territories of the Soviet Union. This group was the first to experiment with the "murder vans" on Soviet citizens in the district of Stavropol and in Krasnodar.
GENERAL RUDENKO: And when Kaltenbrunner's fate will be decided, all the victims asphyxiated in the "murder vans" near Stavropol, buried alive in the graves near Kiev and Riga, burnt alive in the Byelorussian villages, must never be forgotten. All these innocent victims are on his unclean conscience. Successor to a hangman, and himself a hangman, Kaltenbrunner carried out the most revolting function in the common criminal plan of the Hitlerite clique. Rosenberg. I shall now summarize the evidence relevant to the guilt and responsibility of the Defendant Rosenberg. In spite of Rosenberg's efforts to minimize both his role and his importance, in spite of his efforts to juggle with historical facts and events, he cannot deny that he was the official ideologist of the Nazi Party; that already a quarter of a century ago, he had laid the "theoretical" foundations of the fascist Hitlerite State, which during this whole period morally corrupted millions of Germans, preparing them "ideologically" for the monstrous crimes committed by the Hitlerites-crimes unprecedented in history, and which are the subject of this Trial. When, at the Trial, Rosenberg was asked: "Were you not one of Hitler's closest collaborators?" he did not even speak-he shouted in reply: "That is not true, I never was." But however hard Rosenberg tried to deny his "Fuehrer," he has not succeeded in washing away the stigma of being "one of the oldest and the most faithful of Hitler's comrades-in-arms." For 25 years Rosenberg, first acting as Hitler's collaborator and afterward under his direction, worked out and assisted in the realization of the fantastic plan for world supremacy, having chosen, for the justification of this criminal plan, the misanthropic theory of racism. The fact that Rosenberg utilized for his purposes garbled science and borrowed theories from Karl Lueger and Paul Lagarde, Count Gobineau, Oswald Spengler, and Arthur Moeller cannot affect the question of Rosenberg's guilt and responsibility.
GENERAL RUDENKO: The important fact is that Rosenberg, having assembled all these "scientific excrete," raised the racial theories to a degree of racial fanaticism and educated in this spirit the members of the Nazi Party and the youth of Germany. And when the representatives of the "master race" elaborated and committed acts of aggression, when the German occupation troops enslaved and exterminated nations and peoples, when the factories of death were created at Maidanek and Auschwitz, Treblinka and Chelmno, Rosenberg's share in all these crimes was not insignificant. All this was the outcome of the fascist racial ideology, the essence of which consists in the idea that the 'Aryan, North Germanic" race is a "master race," and that all other races and nations belong to "lower strata." Rosenberg's counsel said: "The Tribunal must judge crimes and not theories." In Rosenberg's case such an argument is clearly unconvincing. For Rosenberg not only confessed the fascist racial theory, but knowingly propagated it and instilled it into the conscience of the German people, this very theory which became a direct menace to the existence of the democratic European states. The person who carries microbes must be isolated, but the person who willingly disseminates microbes must be tried. Rosenberg's criminal activities were not limited to the ideological preparation for aggression and to the propagation of man-hating theories. His activities had many facets. The criminal activities of the foreign policy department of the NSDAP have already been sufficiently elucidated at this Trial; this department, which for many years was subordinated to the Defendant Rosenberg, was in charge of a network of semilegal Nazi agencies abroad. The influence of this organization on the measures of foreign policy undertaken by Hitlerite Germany and in the initiation of aggressive wars was very great indeed.