dtufail/nuremberg-trials-corpus huggingface dataset:
DR. KEMPNER: The Czechoslovak War Crimes Commission report. After I have shown the general scheme, of which Frick was a co-author, I would like to show that Frick's ministry was acquainted with the things that were going on under his organizational authorship; and therefore I am quoting now a letter to the fact that he was acquainted with these killings and that these killings had even become public knowledge. For this reason I offer in evidence Document 615-PS, Exhibit Number USA-717., This document is a letter from the Bishop of Limburg of 13 August 1941 to the Reich Minister of Justice. Copies were sent to the Reich Minister of the Interior-this means Frick-and to the Reich Minister for Church Affairs. I quote: "About 8 kilometers from Limburg, in the little town of Hadamar, on a hill overlooking the town, there is an institution which had formerly served various purposes and of late had been used as a nursing home; this institution was renovated and furnished as a place in which, by consensus of opinion, the above-mentioned euthanasia has been systematically practiced for months, approximately since February 1941. The fact has become known beyond the administrative district of Wiesbaden, because death certificates from a Registry Hadamar Moenchberg are sent to the home communities...." And I quote further: "Several times a week buses arrive in Hadamar with a considerable number of such victims. School children of the vicinity know this vehicle and say, 'There comes the murder box again.' After the arrival of the vehicle, the citizens of Hadamar watch the smoke rise out of the chimney and are tortured with the ever-present thought of the miserable victims, especially when repulsive odors annoy them, depending on the direction of the wind. "The effect of the principles at work here are: Children can each other names and say, 'You're crazy; you'll be sent to the baking oven in Hadamar.' Those who do not want to- marry or find no opportunity say, 'Marry, never!
DR. KEMPNER: Bring children into the world so they can be put into the bottling machine!' You hear old folks say, 'Don't send me to a state hospital! After the feeble-minded have been finished off, the next useless eaters whose turn will come are the old people.' ". . The population cannot grasp that systematic actions are carried out which, in accordance with Paragraph 211 of the German criminal code, are punishable with death! ... "Officials of the Secret State Police, it is said, are trying to suppress discussion of the Hadamar occurrences by means of severe threats. In the interest of public peace this may be well intended, But the knowledge and the conviction and the indignation of the population cannot be changed by it; the conviction will be increased with the bitter realization that discussion is prohibited with threats but that the actions themselves are not prosecuted under penal law." I quote the last paragraph of the letter, the postscript: "I am submitting copies of this letter to the Reich Minister for Church Affairs." Initialed by above. Nevertheless, the killings carried out in these institutions under the secret law created by Defendants Frick, Himmler, and others continued year after year.
THE PRESIDENT: Was any answer made to that letter?
DR. KEMPNER: No answer has been found. I have other letters which I am not able to quote here today which have the remark, "Please don't answer."
THE PRESIDENT: "Please don't answer"?
DR. KEMPNER: That it should be unanswered. Nevertheless, the killings carried out in these institutions under the secret law created by Defendants Frick, Himmler, and others continued year after year. I offer in evidence Document 3592-PS, Exhibit Number USA-718, which is a certified copy of the charge, specifications, findings, and sentence of the U.S. Military Commission at Wiesbaden, against the individuals who operated the Hadamar Sanatorium, where many Russians and Poles were murdered. In this particular proceeding seven defendants were charged with the murder in 1944 of 400 persons of Polish and Russian nationality, and three of the defendants were sentenced to be hanged; the other four were sentenced to confinement at hard labor. Now I come to the last page of my presentation, the final case of Frick's responsibility, which arises under his position as Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia for the period from August 20, 1943, until the end of the war. I think it is not necessary to say anything about the functions of the Protector of Bohemia and Moravia; these broad powers are known to the Court.
THE PRESIDENT: Before you pass from 3592-PS, is it clear that that trial relates to the killing of Polish and Russian nationals in nursing homes or institutions of that sort?
DR. KEMPNER: It is absolutely clear in this document, the sentence of the Military Commission of Hadamar for Wiesbaden.
THE PRESIDENT: Will you show me where that is? DR, KEMPNER: Document Number 3592-PS. I quote: "Specification: In that Alfons Klein, Adolf Wahlmann, Heinrich Ruoff, Karl Willig, Adolf Merkle, Irmgard Huber, and Philipp Blum, acting jointly and in pursuance of a common intent and acting for and on behalf of the then German Reich, did, from or about July 1, 1944, until about April 1, 1945, at Hadamar, Germany, wilfully, deliberately, and wrongfully aid, abet, and participate in the killing of human beings of Polish and Russian nationality; their exact names. and number being unknown, but aggregating In excess of 400, and -who were then and there confined by the German Reich as an exercise of belligerent control."
THE PRESIDENT: It doesn't show that it came within the jurisdiction of the Ministry of the Interior.
DR. KEMPNER: Some time ago I referred to the manual of the German administrative officials. This manual points out very clearly. that nursing homes, sanitaria, and similar establishments are under the supervision of the Ministry of the Interior.
THE PRESIDENT: I follow that, but this document does not refer to nursing homes. That is what I was asking you.
DR. KEMPNER: Yes, it says only Hadamar. It is, in fact, the Hadamar Nursing Home. This portion wasn't given by the Judge Advocate General, but I am willing to give later a more extended document that Hadamar is a common name for the so-called Hadamar killing mill, which is a nursing home. Now I come to the last paragraph of my presentation.
THE PRESIDENT: Wait a moment, Dr. Kempner. Counsel for the Defense wishes to speak. There is a gentleman standing by your side.
DR. PANNENBECKER: From Document 3592-PS, which was just read, I cannot find that the Defendant Frick is connected with the document in any way.
THE PRESIDENT: Surely it is not necessary for you to get up and repeat what I have just said.
DR. PANNENBECKER: I would like to add something else.
THE PRESIDENT: I beg your pardon.
DR. PANNENBECKER: I Would like to add that the Defendant Frick since August 1943 was not Minister of the Interior, and for that reason this document cannot be used against him.
THE PRESIDENT: And it does not give the date of the death of these people. At any rate, until Dr. Kempner produces something to show that this was a nursing home and in a time during which the Defendant Frick was Minister of the Interior, the Tribunal will not treat it as being evidence which implicates Frick.
DR. KEMPNER: I quoted this killing in Hadamar for two reasons: First, because the Ministry of the Interior has become acquainted, as I said before, with the letter of the Bishop of Limburg, in 1941, when Frick was Minister of the Interior and knew about these facts; and I quoted the military decision for this reason, that these killings were still going on in 1944 and 1945 under a law of which the Defendant Frick was the co-author. The final phase of Frick's responsibility arises under his position as Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia for the period from 20 August 1943 until the end of the war. I have not to prove his function but I shall mention one example, and I offer in evidence Document Number 3589-PS, Exhibit Number USA-720, which is a :supplement to an official Czechoslovak report on German crimes -against Czechoslovakia. I would like to quote only the following brief passage from this report: "During the tenure of office of Defendant Wilhelm Frick as Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia from August 1943 until the liberation of Czechoslovakia in 1945 many thousands of Czechoslovak Jews were transported from the Terezin ghetto in Czechoslovakia to the concentration camp at Oswieczim (Auschwitz) in Poland and were there killed in the gas chambers." Brought from the territory over which Frick was Protector to the gas chamber. Thus, we submit, it has been shown that the Defendant Frick was a key conspirator from 1923 until the Allied armies crushed the resistance of the Nazi Armed Forces. Frick's guilt rests on his own record and on the record of his co-defendants, for whom he is co- responsible under our Charter . I would like to express my appreciation for the assistance rendered in connection with the preparation of this case by my colleagues Mr. Karl Lachmann, Lieutenant Frederick Felton, and Captain Seymour Krieger. [The Tribunal adjourned until 17 January 1946 at 1000 hours.]
THE PRESIDENT: I call upon the Counsel for France.
M. FRANCOIS DE MENTHON (Chief Prosecutor for the French Republic): The conscience of the peoples, who only yesterday were enslaved and tortured both in soul and body, calls upon you to judge and to condemn the most monstrous attempt at domination and barbarism of all times, both in the persons of some of those who bear the chief responsibility and in the collective groups and organizations which were the essential instruments of their crimes. France, invaded twice in 30 years in the course of wars, both of which were launched by German imperialism, bore almost alone in May and June 1940 the weight of armaments accumulated by Nazi Germany over a period of years in a spirit of aggression. Although temporarily crushed by superiority in numbers, material, and preparation, my country never gave up the battle for freedom and was -at no time absent from the field. The engagements undertaken and the will for national independence would have sufficed to keep France behind General De Gaulle in the camp of the democratic nations. If, however, our fight for freedom slowly took the shape of a popular uprising, at the call of the men of the Resistance, belonging to all social classes, to all creeds and to all political parties, it was because, while our soil and our souls were crushed by the Nazi invader, our people refused not only to submit to wretchedness and slavery, but even more they refused to accept the Hitlerian dogmas which were in absolute contradiction to their traditions, their aspirations, and their human calling. France, which was systematically plundered and ruined; France, so many of whose sons were tortured and murdered in the jails of the Gestapo or in concentration camps; France, which was subjected to the still more horrible grip of demoralization and return to barbarism diabolically imposed by Nazi Germany, asks you, above all in the name of the heroic martyrs of the Resistance, who are among the greatest heroes of our national legend, that justice be done.
M. FRANCOIS DE MENTHON (Chief Prosecutor for the French Republic): France, so often in history the spokesman and the champion of human liberty, of human values, of human progress, through my voice today also becomes the interpreter of the martyred peoples of western Europe, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, peoples more than all others devoted to peace, peoples who are among the noblest of humanity by their aspirations and their worship of the values of civilization, peoples who have shared our sufferings and have refused, like us, to give up liberty and to sacrifice their souls before the assault of Nazi barbarism. France here becomes their interpreter to demand that real justice be done. The craving for justice of the tortured peoples is the basic foundation of France's appearance before Your High Tribunal. It is not the only one, nor perhaps the most important one. More than toward the past, our eyes are turned toward the future. We believe that there can be no lasting peace and no certain progress for humanity, which still today is torn asunder, suffering, and anguished, except through the co-operation of an peoples and through the progressive establishment of a real international society. Technical procedures and diplomatic arrangements will not suffice. There can be no well balanced and enduring nation without a common consent in the essential rules of social living, without a general standard of behavior before the claims of conscience, without the adherence of all citizens to identical concepts of good and of evil. There is no domestic law which, in defining and punishing criminal violations, is not founded on criteria of a moral order which is accepted by all-in a word, without a common morality. There can be no society of nations tomorrow without an international morality, without a certain community of spiritual civilization, without an identical hierarchy of values; international law will be called upon to recognize and guarantee the punishment of the gravest violations of the universally accepted moral laws.
M. FRANCOIS DE MENTHON (Chief Prosecutor for the French Republic): This morality and this international criminal law, indispensable for the final establishment of peaceful co-operation and of progress -on lasting foundations, are inconceivable to us today after the experience of past centuries and more especially of these last years, after the incredible and awesome sacrifices and the sufferings of men of all races and of all nationalities, except as built on the respect of the human person, of every human person whosoever he may be, as well as on the limitation of the sovereignty of states. But in order that we may have the hope of founding progressively an international society, through the free co- operation of all peoples, founded on this morality and on this international law, it is necessary that, after having premeditated, prepared, and launched a war of aggression which has caused the death of millions of men and the ruin of a great number of nations, after having thereupon piled up the most odious crimes in the course of the war years, Nazi Germany shall be declared guilty and her rulers and those chiefly responsible punished as such. Without this sentence and without this punishment the people would no longer have any faith in justice. When you have declared that crime is always a crime, whether committed by one national entity against another or by one individual against another, you will thereby have affirmed that there is only one standard of morality, which applies to international relations as well as to individual relations, and that on this morality are built prescriptions of law recognized by the international community; you will then have truly begun to establish* an international justice. This work of justice is equally indispensable for the future of the German people.
M. FRANCOIS DE MENTHON (Chief Prosecutor for the French Republic): These people have been for many years intoxicated by Nazism; certain of their eternal and deep seated aspirations, under this regime, have found a monstrous expression; their entire responsibility is involved, not only by their general acceptance but by the effective participation of a great number of them in the crimes committed. Their re-education is indispensable. This represents a difficult enterprise and one of long duration. The efforts which the free peoples will have to make in order to reintegrate Germany into an international community cannot succeed in the end if this re-education is not carried out effectively. The initial condemnation of Nazi Germany by your High Tribunal will be a first lesson for these people and will constitute the best starting point for the work of the revision of values and of re-education which must be its great concern during the coming years. This is why France sees fit to ask the Tribunal to qualify juridically as crimes, both the war of aggression itself and those acts in violation of the morality and of the laws of all civilized countries which have been committed by Germany in the conduct of the war, to condemn those who are chiefly responsible, and to declare criminal the members of the various groups and organizations which were the principal perpetrators of the crimes of Nazi Germany. Your High Tribunal, established by the four nations signatory to the agreement of 8 August 1945, acting in the interests of all the United Nations, is qualified to mete out to Nazi Germany the justice of the free peoples, the justice of liberated humanity. The establishment by our four governments of a Tribunal competent to judge the crimes committed by those principally responsible in Nazi Germany is based solidly on the principles and usage of international law. As an eminent British jurist has recently reminded us: *The practice and the doctrine of international law have always given to belligerent states the right to punish enemy war criminals who fall into their power.
M. FRANCOIS DE MENTHON (Chief Prosecutor for the French Republic): It is an immutable rule of international law which no author has ever contested. It is not a new doctrine. It was born with the birth of international law. Francisco de Vittoria and Grotius laid its foundations. The German authors of the 17th and 18th century developed the doctrine. Thus Johann Jacob Moser, a positivist writer of the 18th century said: "Enemy soldiers who act in violation of international law, should they fall into the hands of their adversaries, are not to be treated as prisoners of war. They can suffer the same fate as thieves or murderers." The prosecutions which the United States, Great Britain, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and France are today carrying out against the men and the organizations appearing before Your High Tribunal under the Indictment read in Berlin on 18 October 1945, therefore have an unimpeachable juridical foundation: The right, universally recognized by international doctrine, of bringing, war criminals before a punitive jurisdiction. This right is strengthened by legal considerations that are perhaps even more irrefutable. The principle of the territorial application of penal laws gives to every state the right to punish crimes committed on its territory. The application of the territorial principle covers the violations of international law in territory subject to military occupation; these violations are the chief source of war crimes. But the crimes committed by the defendants were not directed against any given state, in any given occupied territory. The National Socialist conspirators, against whom we ask that justice be done, directed the policy of the Third Reich. All the states which were occupied and temporarily enslaved by their armed forces have been equally victims both of the illicit war which they launched and of the methods used by them in the conduct of this war. There is therefore no single state which could legitimately claim the privilege of trying these criminals.
M. FRANCOIS DE MENTHON (Chief Prosecutor for the French Republic): Only an International Tribunal, emanating from the combined United Nations, which were yesterday at war With Germany, can rightly claim this privilege. This is why the declaration on enemy atrocities made at the end of the Moscow Conference in October 1943 had provided that the leaders of Nazi Germany Would, after the joint victory of the Allies, be brought before an international jurisdiction. There is, therefore, nothing new from a juridical point of view in the principle of justice which you are called upon to render. Far from being merely an affirmation of power on the part of the victors, your competence is founded on the recognition by international law of the territorial jurisdiction of sovereign states. The transfer by these states of their juridical power to an international court constitutes a notable progress in the setting up of an inter-state punitive procedure. It does not constitute any innovation in the legal foundation of the justice which you are called upon to render. The penal qualification of the facts may seem more open to juridical objections. This horrible accumulation and maze of Crimes against Humanity both include and go beyond the two more precise juridical notions of Crimes against Peace and War Crimes. But I think-and I will revert later separately to Crimes against Peace and War Crimes-that this body of Crimes against Humanity constitutes, in the last analysis, nothing less than the perpetration for political ends and in a systematic manner, of common law crimes such as theft, looting, ill treatment, enslavement, murders, and assassinations, crimes that are provided for and punishable under the penal laws of all civilized states. No general objection of a juridical nature, therefore, appears to hamper your task of justice. Moreover, the Nazis accused would have no ground to argue on alleged lack of written texts to justify the penal qualification that you will apply-to their crimes.
M. FRANCOIS DE MENTHON (Chief Prosecutor for the French Republic): Has not the juridical doctrine of National Socialism admitted that in domestic criminal law even the judge can and must supplement the law? The written law no longer constituted the Magna Charta of the delinquent. The judge could punish when, in the absence of a provision for punishment, the National Socialist sense of justice was gravely offended. How could a judge under the Nazi regime supplement the law? In his search for a semi-legal solution he acted in the manner of a legislator. Proceeding from the firm basis of the National Socialist program, he sought the rule which he would have proclaimed had he been a legislator. The Defendant Frank, in his speech at the Juristentag in 1936, declared: "Say to yourself at each decision you have to make: How would the Fuehrer decide in my place? For every decision which you have to make, ask yourself: Is this decision in accordance with the National Socialist conscience of the German people? Thus you will have a firm basis of conscience which will also bear for all time, in your own sphere of decisions, the authority of the Third Reich, based on the popular National Socialist unity and on the recognition of the will of the Fuehrer Adolf Hitler." To those who tomorrow will render justice in the name of human conscience, the Defendant Frank and his accomplices would be ill advised to protest against a lack of written texts with appropriate sanctions, especially since, in addition to various international conventions, these texts, though they be not codified in an inter-state penal code, exist in the penal code of every civilized country. Mr. Justice Jackson has given you the details of the various phases and aspects of the National Socialist plot, its planning and its development, from the first days of the conspiracy of Hitler and his companions to rise to power, until the unleashing of innumerable crimes in a Europe almost entirely at their mercy.