dtufail/nuremberg-trials-corpus huggingface dataset:
THE PRESIDENT: Have you got that original, or is it with...
MR. DODD: There were a number of these made up, and they were all signed as originals. The first was the copy made with the typewriter, the others carbon copies. It was a joint British-American team that interrogated the witness, and this one copy was turned over to us, and we submitted it. That is the only one we have ever seen.
THE PRESIDENT: I see in the certificate of translation it refers to a certificate dated 14 October 1945, signed by Captain N. Webb . . .
MR. DODD: Yes.
THE PRESIDENT: You will find that at the end of the document, I think.
DR. BALLAS: As former counsel for Herr Krupp Von Bohlen, I wish to make a statement about this. In the Krupp file which the counsel for Krupp...
THE PRESIDENT: Wait a minute. What have you got to do with it? We are now considering the suggestion made by Dr. Servatius that this document, which we are now considering...
DR. BALLAS: I am sorry. I did not quite follow you, Your Honor.
THE PRESIDENT: We are now considering the Document Number D-288. You haven't anything to do with that document.
DR. BALLAS: Yes, this document does concern me. The Krupp portfolio . . .
THE PRESIDENT: Wait a minute. What right have you to speak about it? You are only a former counsel to Krupp.
DR. BALLAS: I want to help explain the matter. At present I am appearing for Dr. Siemers, counsel for Admiral Raeder.
THE PRESIDENT: But how can you help us about the framing of the affidavit of this witness by the Prosecution? You cannot do anything about that.
DR. BALLAS: I just wanted to refer to the different versions of the document. In the Krupp file there is a Document D-288 which is considerably shorter than this Document D-288 which has been submitted by the Prosecution in the case of Sauckel. At the time I called Dr. Servatius' attention to this difference, and we checked point by point just how far the deviations went. There are thus two documents-the one original Document D-288 and the one in the Krupp file which differs from the document presented in the case of Sauckel.
THE PRESIDENT: But this document was signed by this witness. There may have been some other document signed which was put in the Krupp file, but this witness has said that he signed this document. Therefore, it does not seem to me that it is material.
DR. BALLAS: I just wanted to call your attention to the fact that there are two different documents.
THE PRESIDENT: Yes; thank you. Is there any other member of the Defense that wants to ask questions of this witness? [there was no  response.] Then, Mr. Dodd, do you want to re-examine him?
MR. DODD: No, Sir-except that I would like to say, with respect to the Tribunal's question concerning this certificate of translation where the name Captain N. Webb appears, that I am informed that refers to a certificate which is attached to all British documents and that is a certificate which goes along for the purpose of the translators. Undoubtedly, that is what it is. However, I will have a search made in the document room and clear it up. It is better that way. But my British friends say that is so-they do send a certificate; and the only possible explanation is that it is the certificate with a mistake in the date. But in any event, I will look into it.
THE PRESIDENT: Has the witness had the original of that affidavit put to him?
MR. DODD: I believe he has. I understood he had the one which is before the Tribunal
THE PRESIDENT: Has he acknowledged the signature?
MR. DODD: Well, I understood so. I can inquire. [Turning to the witness.] Witness, you saw the signature? Is it your signature?
JAGER: Yes.
MR. DODD: As a matter of fact, I talked to you personally on this matter; and you told me that this was a statement you gave. Do you remember that? Do you recall when you and I talked, and you told me this was your statement? You looked it over and read it.
JAGER: Yes.
MR. DODD: You read English as well as German, do you not? You have some knowledge of English.
JAGER: Some knowledge, yes.
THE PRESIDENT: Witness, the document is being handed to you. It is in German, is it not?
JAGER: It is in German.
THE PRESIDENT: And it is signed by you, is it?
JAGER: Yes.
THE PRESIDENT: Is there any passage in it which you want to strike out of it?
JAGER: May I read the document first?
THE PRESIDENT: Yes; you may read it as quickly as you can.
MR. DODD: While the witness is reading the document, I should like to inform the Tribunal that we made a call to the document room and have been told by the officer there that there is only one Document D-288, and this is it; there is no duplicate signed, as counsel for Krupp stated.
JAGER: Yes, here there is an alteration which is written in pencil, on Page 2. I crossed that out, but that was not written by me.
DR. SERVATIUS: Mr. President, may I submit the document which I received from the counsel for Krupp at the beginning? I also have here an English document, Document Number 288 and the passages which allegedly were crossed out at the time have been marked by me in red. I should like to submit this document for the information of the Court; I believe it will help in clarifying this matter. There are many passages struck out.
THE PRESIDENT: No, Dr. Servatius, that is a different document, as I understand it.
DR. SERVATIUS: Yes.
THE PRESIDENT: We do not need that. We have this document before us, signed by the witness; and we have asked him whether he has anything in it which he thinks did not form part of the original document which he signed.
JAGER: On Page 1 it says, 'conditions in all these camps were extremely bad." I would have probably limited this statement, because I...
THE PRESIDENT: Wait a minute, Witness, we do not want to know whether you think you expressed yourself too strongly. We only want to know whether the document represents the document which you signed-accurately represents the document which you signed. If there is anything which you want to change now, you can say what it is.
JAGER: The record, as it is before me, I would not change in any way.
THE PRESIDENT: Just one or two questions I want to ask you. Were prisoners of war employed at Krupp's during the time you were supervising these camps?
JAGER: I did not supervise the prisoner-of-war camps. That is a wrong expression. I received the permission to visit the prisoner-of-war camps which were under the sole jurisdiction of the Wehrmacht, and I was told that these prisoners of war were all working for Krupp.
THE PRESIDENT: Were any of the people who were working at the camps, which you mentioned in this, prisoners of war?
JAGER: In Hoagstrasse.
THE PRESIDENT: Prisoners of war were working there, were they?
JAGER: Yes. 3 June 4'
THE PRESIDENT: Krupp's?
JAGER: For the Krupp Works, yes.
THE PRESIDENT: What sort of work was it?
JAGER: These things were not under my jurisdiction. It depended on their trade-locksmiths probably worked in the locksmith shop But there were also many unskilled laborers. But I am natural!, not able to give you all the details; these matters were not uncle, my jurisdiction. I was concerned with these people only in my capacity as a physician.
THE PRESIDENT: Very well. [The witness left the stand.]
MR. DODD: Mr. President, I have found that certificate; and it it as I described it for the Tribunal. It is a certificate by Captain Weber of the British Army service that he received a copy of this document from the American team; and it is signed by him, Captain H. Weber, IMT Corps, British Army, European Sector.
THE PRESIDENT: Is that your case then, Dr. Servatius?
DR. SERVATIUS: Yes. There are two more witnesses, Biedermann and Mitschke. I can dispense with both of these witnesses. Then we still do not have the sworn affidavits, the interrogatories from Dr. Voss, Dr. Scharmann, a witness by the name of Marenbach and the witness Letsch, who was an expert in Sauckel's office. WE have received interrogatories from the witnesses Darre and Seldte, but these have not been translated as yet. I shall submit them al soon as they have been translated.
THE PRESIDENT: Very well.
DR. SERVATIUS: Then I have concluded my case.
THE PRESIDENT: Now, counsel for the Defendant Jodl.
DR. EXNER: Your Honors, with your kind permission I shall present my case in the following manner. First of all, I shall call the Defendant Jodl to the stand and use all documents, with a single exception, during his examination, and submit them to the Court. I do not need to bore the Tribunal with lengthy readings. I have three document books which are numerically arranged, Jodl 1, Jodl 2, and so forth-and I shall in each case quote the page which is found in the upper left-hand corner on every page of the translation. The numbering is the same as in the original; they correspond. I am sorry to say that the documents are not exactly in the order in which I shall read them, and this is due partly to the fact that they were received too late and partly to other factors. I still do not have several interrogatories, particularly one which is very important to me. I hope that I shall be able to submit them later. I was granted five witnesses, but I can dispense with one of them. The four remaining witnesses will take up little time. Now, with the kind permission of the Tribunal, I should like to call the Defendant Jodl to the witness box. [The Defendant Jodl took the stand.]
THE PRESIDENT: Will you state your full name?
ALFRED JODL (Defendant): Alfred Jodl.
THE PRESIDENT: Will you repeat this oath after me: I swear by God-the Almighty and Omniscient-that I will speak the pure truth-and will withhold and add nothing. [The defendant repeated the oath.]
THE PRESIDENT: You may sit down.
DR. EXNER: Generaloberst Jodl, in the English-American trial brief it says that you are 60 years old. That is a mistake. You became 56 recently. You were born when?
JODL: I was born in 1890 on 10 May.
DR. EXNER: You were born in Bavaria, and both of your parents are descended from old Bavarian families. You chose the military profession; what was the chief reason for your choice?
JODL: A great-grandfather of mine was an officer; my father was an officer; an uncle was an officer; my brother became an officer; my father-in-law was an officer-I can well say that the military profession was in my blood.
DR. EXNER: And now I should like to hear something about your political attitude. To which of the political parties which existed in Germany before 1933 were you closest in spirit?
JODL: As an officer all party politics were entirely remote to me; and especially the offshoots of the post-war period. If I look at the background from which I come, the attitude of my parents, I must say that I would have been closest to the National Liberal Party and its ideas. In any event, my parents never voted anything but National Liberal.
DR. EXNER: Tell us in a few words what your attitude was to the Weimar Republic.
JODL: True to my oath I served the Weimar Republic honestly and without reserve. If I could not have done that, I would have resigned. Moreover, a democratic system and a democratic constitution was not at all a foreign idea to us southern Germans, for our monarchy was also democratic.
DR. EXNER: And what were your relations to Von Hindenburg?
JODL: I knew Hindenburg. I was assigned to him after his first election to the Reich Presidency when he spent his first vacation in Dietramszell. Then I spent a day with the Hindenburg family at their Neudeck estate together with Field Marshal Von Manstein. I can only say that I admired him; and when he was elected Reich President for the first time, I considered that the first symptom of the German people's return to self-respect.
DR. EXNER: What was your attitude toward the National Socialist Party?
JODL: The National Socialist Party I hardly knew and hardly noticed before the Munich Putsch. It was this Putsch which dragged the Reichswehr into this internal political development. At that time, with few exceptions, it met this test of obedience. But after this Putsch there was a certain cleavage in the views of the officers' corps. Opinions varied as to Hitler's worth or worthlessness. I was still extremely skeptical and unconvinced. I was not impressed until Hitler, during the Leipzig trial, gave the assurance that he was opposed to any undermining of the Reichswehr.
DR. EXNER: Did you attend meetings at which Hitler spoke?
JODL: No, never.
DR. EXNER: Tell us which leaders of the Party you knew before 1933.
JODL: I knew only those who had previously been officers: for example, Epp, Huhnlein, and Rohm. But I no longer had any connection or contact with them after they had left the Reichswehr.
DR. EXNER: Before the seizure of power had you read the book Mein Kampf ?
JODL: No.
DR. EXNER: Did you read it later?
JODL: I read parts of it later. DR. EXNER; What was your opinion on the Jewish question?
JODL: I was not anti-Semitic. I am of the opinion that no party, no state, no people, and no race-not even cannibals-are good or bad in themselves, but only the single individual. Of course I knew that Jewry, after the war and in the moral disintegration that appeared after the first World War, came to the fore in Germany in a most provocative fashion. That was not anti-Semitic propaganda; those were facts, which were regretted very much by Jews themselves. Nevertheless, I was most sharply opposed to any outlawing by the state, any generalization, and any excesses.
DR. EXNER: The Prosecution asserts that all the defendants cried, "Germany awake; death to the Jew."
JODL: As far as I am concerned, that assertion is wrong. At every period of my life I associated with individual Jews. I have been a guest of Jews, and certain Jews have visited my home. But those were Jews who recognized their fatherland. They were Jeers whose human worth was undisputed.
DR. EXNER: Did you on occasion use your influence on behalf of Jews?
JODL: Yes, that too.
DR. EXNER: Did you know that the Reich Government in the year 1932 counted on the possibility of attempts to overthrow it and sought to save itself in this direction?
JODL: I certainly knew that, for when I came to Berlin at that time I did not find in the later operational division any preparations for war; but I found preparations for the use of the Reichswehr in the interior of the country, against the extreme leftists as well as the extreme rightists. There were plans for maneuvers of some sort in that connection in which I myself participated.
DR. EXNER: What was your attitude to the appointment of Hitler as Reich Chancellor in the year 1933?
JODL: The appointment of Hitler as Reich Chancellor was a complete surprise to me. That evening when I was returning home with a comrade, through the excited crowds, I said to him, "This is more than a change of government; it is a revolution. Just how far it will lead us we do not know." But the name of Hindenburg, who had legalized this revolution, and the names of such men as Von Papen, Von Neurath, Schwerin-Krosigk exerted a reassuring influence on me and gave me a certain guarantee that there would be no revolutionary excesses.
DR. EXNER: At this point I should like to read a part of General Vormann's interrogatory. This is Page 208 of the third volume of my document book. I should like to call the attention of the Tribunal to the fact that Page 208 in the upper left hand corner- I submit the original-refers to the period from 1933 on. Jodl was then at the group headquarters (Gruppenamt), and Vormann was in his group. I read under Figure 2: "Jodl, who at that time was a major on the General Staff, was my group (Gruppe) leader in 1933. He shared completely the view of the Chief of the Army Command at that time, General Von Hammerstein, and was thoroughly opposed to Hitler and the Party." I shall now skip a few lines; they are not so important. Then in the center of the page, I continue:
SIR DAVID MAXWELL-FYFE: Well, I have certainly got an English-I have read the English translation of it, My Lord' so I assume that it has been translated into the other languages. The next, applications from the Defendants Hess and Frank to put an interrogatory to General Donovan. If I may put the objection quite shortly, that raises the same point as the application on 2 May 1946 for Mr. Patterson of the United States War Department. The objection of the Prosecution is the same as I made on that occasion, that when you are cross-examining a witness as to credibility you are bound by his answer, and should not, in the opinion of the Prosecution, be allowed to call evidence to contradict him. So it is on exactly the same point, the relationship between the witness Gisevius and the United States Office of Strategic Services. The next application is on behalf of the Defendant Speer for the approval of certain documents which are in his possession. The Prosecution have no objection to the application. They reserve the right to make any individual objection when the documents are produced at the Trial. My Lord, the next is a purely formal application on behalf of the Defendant Jodl, whose case is now before the Tribunal, to use an affidavit of Dr. Lehmann. There is no objection to that. Next is the application on behalf of the Defendant Hess. ..
THE PRESIDENT: Sir David, that application we have already heard. We have heard the arguments for that in full and the Tribunal will consider that.
SIR DAVID MAXWELL-FYFE: If Your Lordship pleases. Then I think that only leaves an application of the Defendant Keitel for the use of a decree of Hitler of 20 July 1944, and the Prosecution has no objection to that. My Lord, I think I have dealt with every one except the first one, which my friend General Rudenko will deal with-the application of the Defendant Goering.
GENERAL R. A. RUDENKO (Chief Prosecutor for the U.S.S.R.): Members of the Tribunal, the Soviet Prosecution have several times expressed their view respecting the application of Defense Counsel to call witnesses with regard to the mass shooting of Polish officers by the Fascist criminals in Katyn Forest. Our position is that this episode of criminal activity on the part of the Hitlerites has been fully established by the evidence presented by the Soviet Prosecution, which was a communication of the special Extraordinary State Commission investigating the circumstances of the mass shooting of Polish officer prisoners of war by the German Fascist aggressors in Katyn Forest. This document was presented by the Soviet Prosecution under the Document Number USSR-54 on 14 February 1946, and was admitted by the Tribunal; and, as provided by Article 21 of the Charter, it is not subject to argument. Now the Defense once again are putting in an application for the calling of three supplementary witnesses-a psychiatrist, Stockert; a former adjutant of the Engineer Corps, Bohmert; and a special expert of the staff of the Army Group Center, Eichborn. We object to the calling of these three witnesses for the following reasons: r The calling of the psychiatrist Stockert as a witness must be considered completely pointless as the Tribunal cannot be interested in the question of how the commission drew its conclusion-a conclusion which was published in a Hitlerite White Book . No matter how this conclusion was drawn, the fact of the mass shooting of Poles by Germans in Katyn Forest has been unequivocally established by the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission. Stockert himself is not a doctor of forensic medicine but a psychiatrist-at that time a member of the Hitlerite commission, not on the basis of his competence in the field of forensic medicine, but as a representative of the German Fascist military command. The former adjutant, Captain Bohmert, is himself a participant in the crimes of Katyn Forest, having been a member of the Engineer Corps which carried out the executions.
GENERAL R. A. RUDENKO (Chief Prosecutor for the U.S.S.R.): As he is an interested party, he cannot give any useful testimony for clarifying the circumstances of this matter. Third, the expert of the staff of the Army Group Center also cannot be admitted as a witness because he, in general, knew nothing at all about the camp of the Polish prisoners of war, and could not have known all that pertained to the matter. The same reasons apply to his potential testimony to the fact that the Germans never perpetrated any mass shooting of Poles in the district of Katyn. Moreover, Eichborn cannot be considered an unprejudiced witness. Regardless of these objections which express the opinion of all the prosecutors, the Soviet Prosecution especially emphasize the fact that these bestial crimes of the Germans in Katyn were investigated by the special authoritative State Investigating Committee, which went with great precision into all the details. The result of this investigation has established the fact that the crimes in Katyn were perpetrated by Germans, and are but a link in the chain of many bestial crimes perpetrated by the Hitlerites, a great many proofs of which have previously been submitted to the Tribunal. For these reasons the Soviet Prosecution categorically insists on the rejection of the application of the Defense Counsel. I have finished my statement.
THE PRESIDENT: Counsel for Kaltenbrunner, Sir David was right, was he not, in saying that you were only asking for crossinterrogatories, which the Prosecution do not object to?
DR. KURT KAUFFMANN (Counsel for Defendant Kaltenbrunner): Mr. President, I have no objection to questionnaires, but I would then ask that these witnesses be heard in my presence outside this courtroom; and then, on the basis of this interrogation, questionnaires can later be submitted to the Tribunal.
THE PRESIDENT: But are the witnesses here?
DR. KAUFFMANN: Mr. President, I do not know.
THE PRESIDENT: We granted interrogatories, and you now ask for cross-interrogatories; that is all you ask for, and that does not involve bringing the witnesses here at all. The cross-interrogatories will be sent to them; they will answer them. If, for any reason, on the cross-interrogatories being answered, you want to make further application, you can always do so.
DR. KAUFFMANN: The rule of the Court so far was, as I understood it, that I have the right to cross-examine in this courtroom if the Prosecution submits affidavits of these witnesses here. That has, so far, been the ruling of the Court.
THE PRESIDENT: I think it depends on what the substance of the affidavit is. If it is a matter of importance, no doubt we-we have never made any general rule, but we have generally allowed the witness to be brought here for cross-examination if the matter is of importance; but if the matter is of less importance, then we have very frequently directed that there should be cross-interrogatories.
DR. KAUFFMANN: May I add to this last sentence? I consider this testimony extremely important. The Court will probably know the contents.