dtufail/nuremberg-trials-corpus huggingface dataset:
HERR PELCKMANN: That was exclusively the Gestapo, In this state of affairs there is no doubt that those responsible, directly or indirectly, for all atrocities and murders which occurred in the concentration camps are to be found at the head, in these two offices, and among the concentration camp personnel. The witness Dr. Morgen, and many affidavits on concentration camps, emphasized however-I must point this out now for the purpose of further limitation-that the guards on principle had nothing to do with the internal administration of the camps, and that it was forbidden and impossible for them to enter the camps proper. Executions and shootings by order of the RSHA, and certainly those on the basis of the assumed right of the Commandant, were carried out by a detail of the Kommandantur staff, not by the guards. As distinct from the concentration camps we have the extermination camps. They were established after 1942, after Hitler had declared war on the United States and now wanted to take his most bloody revenge for this development of the war, for which he held the Jews throughout the world responsible. From the terrible descriptions of the witnesses Hoess and Morgen we still recall the technique of these mass killings. From the testimony and affidavits of Hoess and Morgen and the examination of Wisliceny before the Tribunal and the Commission, we have now obtained a comprehensive picture of this whole murder system. Hitler and certain offices of the Chancellery of the Fuehrer-with practice in murder from the extermination of the insane-employed the services of two experts, Reichsarzt; (Reich Physician) of the SS Dr. Grawitz and Kriminalkommissar Wirth. The one developed medically the best methods for killing, the other, the best technique of execution in deceiving the victims and the surrounding world. Aside from Wirth, the head of the extermination camp near Lublin, there was Hoess, the head of the extermination camp in Auschwitz, or rather Monowitz, who was at the same time head of the concentration camp at Auschwitz.
HERR PELCKMANN: one of the persons who brought in these victims was Eichmann, who was incorporated in the Gestapo, and up to Hitler's order for the "final solution," that is, killing, deported the Jews to camps in the East. The transports-as Wisliceny testified before the Commission on 5, 6, and 7 June-were accompanied only by police, including Slovakian and Hungarian police, and only in a single instance by SS men who had been drafted in Hungary as racial Germans. All these extermination installations and details can be traced back to special orders of Hitler, or the Chancellery of the Fuehrer, and were outside the framework of the normal concentration camp system. For that reason, they did not have the normal chain of command and organizational form. Wirth was Criminal Commissioner without being an SS member. Hoess received extermination orders, aside from Himmler, only from Eichmann personally, without being allowed to inform his immediate superior, Glucks, the Inspector of Concentration Camps, of then-L So Hoess testified on 15 April. Now what follows from all these terrible events-from concentration camp atrocities through the Einsatzgruppen to mass gassings -for the charge against the SS? The Prosecution says that all the crimes charged have been committed to such a great extent and in such vast proportions, that they and the criminal aims and methods must have been known to every member. The Prosecution thus says that knowledge of the criminal nature of these, tasks is a preliminary condition for the judgment, and the ruling of the Court of 13 March 1946 is in agreement. The assertion of the Prosecution is based upon the following arguments: Before, and particularly during the war, the press and the wireless, statements of official personalities and all manner of publications in the Allied countries widely informed the public of these states about the atrocities committed in the concentration camps and other crimes.
HERR PELCKMANN: Under these circumstances it would seem obvious to conclude that if in these countries such crimes were almost universally known, this must have been even more so the case in Germany, and particularly in the SS. The collective affidavits ,which have been submitted, and which are partly extensively proven, show that the majority of SS members deny any such knowledge. But, in addition, the defense has countered the charge with a comprehensive statement: the crimes committed within the limits of the German sphere of power were carried out under a minutely planned system of secrecy, so that the bulk of SS members not only did not know anything about them, but indeed could not possibly have done so. Whereas the charge of the Prosecution can only be made credible by the legally very doubtful use of deductions, the argument of the defense is proven by the facts. And such proof, Gentlemen of the Tribunal, has, in my opinion, been furnished by the defense. Let us start with the concentration camps. On the next pages-and I would ask the Tribunal to read them-I have described the veil of secrecy with all its regulations and circumstances preventing any publicity of the facts towards the outside world. On looking back we can easily detect the close veil of secrecy and deliberate deceit. In all this time only five or six camps were existent in Germany, with about 12,000 prisoners in 1936 and 21,000 in 1939. It is obvious that for this period the charge of the Prosecution is not valid, which maintains that on every one of his journeys every German passed many concentration camps on his way. But the relatively small number of concentration camp personnel, a few thousand, also makes a spread of information about circumstances In the concentration camps seem unlikely. The majority of this personnel-the guards-were not allowed to enter the camp proper.
HERR PELCKMANN: Characteristic of the deception of the public are the statements of Himmler made at an inspection of a concentration camp by Wehrmacht officers, which are contained in the collection "National Political Course of Instruction". (Document 1992A-PS). The prisoners consisted of Communists and criminals, who were, in part assigned to the camp only for a few months, in part for a longer time. He mentions the cleanliness in the camp, the frequent washings and change of linen, and the use of toothbrushes. Thus the impression-had to be given to the visitors that the criminals were really an anti-social element of the lowest grade who had a bearable life in the camp. Numerous affidavits declare that visitors, precisely from SS circles, for example in visits of Junker schools, found orderly conditions and the prisoners in a satisfactory state of nutrition. The greatest secrecy prevailed in these camps. Not only the official execution of death sentences of courts, but also the execution instructions of the RSHA, which began only at the beginning of the war, and certainly the murders resulting from the lust for power of the commandants, were not undertaken publicly. Dr. Morgen describes this in detail in his Affidavit Number SS-66. In his examination he described all the clever methods to disguise murders as natural deaths, and thus to deceive the civil courts and, from 1940 on, the SS courts. I ask the Tribunal to consider in these questions for once, that the deaths and mistreatments began on a larger scale only with the beginning of the war. The obligation to absolute secrecy was incumbent not only upon the personnel but also upon released prisoners. The affidavits of prisoners, which the Prosecution has submitted, frequently emphasize this order for secrecy, but it is striking that they themselves do not claim to have violated this order (Document 2334-PS). According to our professional experience these orders of secrecy had a very strong effect even where a condition of great confidence existed.
HERR PELCKMANN: The fear of being returned to the camp for any indiscretion was too great. Since the use, in 1934, of the Death's Head Units as camp personnel, the General SS, and later the Waffen-SS, no longer had anything to do with the concentration camp affairs and certainly not with the Kommandantur personnel in personnel or legal questions. The Amtsgruppe D of the VFVTHA, with their small group of 30,000 men of the above-mentioned nominal Waffen-SS, had become an independent and separate system with their own telephone and teletype net and their own couriers to the concentration camps. Only the Gestapo had a channel into the concentration camp, into the so-called political department, which was subordinate to it and usually run by an investigation secretary. Here also there was no connection with the rest of the SS. It is important for the question of secrecy that, as Kaindl explains in Affidavit SS-68, the staffs of the Kommandanturen were until the middle of 1942 made up of the same personnel which they had had at the beginning of the war. Thus, too, knowledge of the conditions and events could not be spread before 1942. From a psychological point of view one must consider that the persons responsible for orders issued or received did not have the slightest reason to talk about their sinister acts. Owing to lack of time I shall have to skip the next pages and would ask the Tribunal to take notice of them. They deal in detail with the counter-propaganda deliberately undertaken by the German side, and provide a large quantity of evidence from affidavits and testimonies before the Commission. The same is true of the mass extermination camps at Auschwitz, Monowitz, Treblinka, and so forth. In my opinion, the witness Dr. Morgen has described authentically by vivid examples how difficult it was to look behind the scenes.
HERR PELCKMANN: He has explained in, detail how, through the co-operation of commandant, physician, and prison, director, often together with devoted "Kapos," any crime could be concealed in such a way that neither the judicial authorities up to 1939, nor later the SS courts, nor the other prisoners, noticed anything. These conditions led to terrible murders and mistreatments. But in the interest of objective determination of the truth, and to evaluate these events in the light of the collective guilt question, I must emphasize Dr. Morgen's statement that we encountered camp commandants and physicians who did everything humanly possible for the prisoners. And I may recall the answer of the President to Mr. Dubost in the session of 18 January 1946, that prisoners of all camps would have to be examined if he wished to prove that things had been so murderous and inhuman everywhere. I do not intend to defend the SS courts here. Their fate is not an issue at the moment. But does it not give cause for reflection if even they recognized -only in 1943-and that by accident-that the so carefully camouflaged deaths were in reality murder? Does it not give cause for reflection if one sees the resistance of influential people-Pohl, Kaltenbrunner, Muller-which went so far that Pohl, during the investigations, issued an order to all commandants that SS judges were to be permitted to enter the concentration camps only with his express approval? The Prosecution have not attempted to shake the testimony of Dr. Morgen on this essential point of secrecy. It appears to be unable to do so although it apparently is in the possession of all files of the WVHA, and probably also those of the Main Office SS Courts since it published in a pamphlet the text of the testimony of Mrs. Eleonore Hodis, which she gave to the former investigation judge Dr. Morgen against Hoess in the autumn of 1944. That the Prosecution has absolutely no possibility of refuting the testimony of Dr.
HERR PELCKMANN: Morgen, I should like to conclude from the fact that it attempted at one time to end my examination ,of the witness by saying that I was acting in this examination only in favor of the Prosecution, whereupon, in contradiction to this, the Prosecution did not care to proceed to a cross-examination of the witness, stating that his evidence had been refuted by all evidence taken before. No, I do not have the least doubt that the men in charge tried with an the means at their command to shroud the crimes in the concentration camps with ever-increasing secrecy-and I believe to be in a position to prove that they succeeded in doing so. in the case of the mass killings particular caution is required. On this point the evidence given by the witnesses Hoess, Wisliceny, and Morgen is practically in agreement. There did exist special channels of command from the Reich Chancellery to Wirth, or from Himmler to Eichmann and Hoess. All those witnesses agreed that only a very few were employed and initiated. For the case of Auschwitz, Hoess speaks of about 60 men; for the entire process of extermination Dr. Morgen, in Affidavit SS-65, speaks of only a few hundred. Wisliceny also affirms a number of about 100 for the Eichmann case. The pretense of a mere deportation, which was kept up among the Jews and the personnel accompanying them from the beginning until the horrible end, and the fact that confidence men from among the victims themselves were used, made possible the inconceivable fact that hundreds of thousands were murdered without the outside world knowing anything of it. All witnesses stated that the landscape there is deserted and bleak, with occasional chimneys of factories. I shall not re-enumerate the devilish tricks by which primarily the victims themselves, but at the same time the external world and the German people, were deceived.
HERR PELCKMANN: May I also refer to the evidence given by the witness Von Thadden, who, upon command of the German Foreign Office, visited camps accompanied by numerous foreigners so that they and he himself might become convinced that there was no truth to the rumors about the complaints. Theresienstadt was also visited as an example of one planned separate Jewish settlement and, as the witness Hoess said, conditions there were found to be satisfactory. In 1942 there -%vas published, in the so-called Protectorate, a law concerning the formation of a closed settlement at Theresienstadt (Document SS-95). Thus all the world had to assume that the claims concerning deportation were correct. Why should the SS men, too, who had nothing to do officially with these matters and did not know more than others, fail to believe this? Whether the so-called "Urnsledlung," that is, the deportation, constituted a crime as defined by the Charter, that is another question which will be dealt with later. Above all, one should not forget that all this happened during the war. The bulk of the SS men were continually employed at the front. The witnesses Brill and Blume gave their total strength at the end of the war as approximately 580,000. Entirely occupied by the action in the field, they knew nothing of what was going on behind their backs. It it was known at all that men in the same uniform served in the concentration camps, they felt no inner relationship to them and had no inner or external contacts with them (witness Hausser; Affidavit Gille and Affidavit Steiner). Quite infrequently personnel was transferred from concentration camps to the front. The fact that there did not exist in Germany any free dissemination of news was necessarily supplemented by a strict prohibition of the import of foreign newspapers and the listening to foreign stations. Generally speaking, the Government succeeded with those measures.
HERR PELCKMANN: The official statements that the foreign news services contained nothing but propaganda were believed in the Waffen-SS too, because occasionally enemy news had proved to be incorrect. This the Defendant Fritzsche has explained. Finally, this system of prohibition was -supplemented by a well-calculated positive German official propaganda. In 1942 Himmler himself declared, in a speech before the Junker School at T61z, that there were found in the concentration camps mainly criminal elements who, if treated decently, could be educated through positive work to become useful members of society (Affidavits SS-119-122, Von Saucken). Such a contention had to be believed, since the ever-increasing shortage of manpower made it essential to save every human life and to exploit to the utmost all available manpower. Particularly typical in this connection is the Affidavit Rothemund (Affidavit SS-12), because it shows how expedient this explanation was considered by all authorities concerned since it established confidence. This witness testified that at the end of 1943, in his capacity as assistant to the Chief of the SS Personnel Main Office with the RSHA, Amt IV, and with the WI.THA, Amtsgruppe D, he had inquired whether the rumors about the killings of Jews were true. He was answered that that was mere enemy propaganda. The WVHA added that the prisoners were indispensable manpower for the armament industry, without whom Germany could not get along. Not even the highest authorities of the Reich were in a position to gain insight into the true situation. The witness Von Thadden has given details how, by clever play with truths and untruths, Eichmann succeeded in deceiving the Foreign Office. The examinations of the Jewish camps by the witness, whether alone or in the company of representatives of the protective powers or the Red Cross, gave no reason to suspect the mass killings.
HERR PELCKMANN: Eichmann knew how to forestall further examinations in those camps where exterminations of Jews were carried out by the irrefutable contention that there highly secret armament orders were placed, namely, the production of V-weapons, and that therefore no access could be given to those camps. I have, furthermore, given proof that the Gestapo, in reply to official inquiries in 1942 or 1943, told the Ministry of Justice, personified by the expert for the prosecution of rumor-mongers, Kuehn, that the rumors about the extermination of the Jews in the Eastern territories were mere inventions. This affidavit has been rejected by the Commission on the grounds that it did not concern the SS. May I now apply for the admission of this document? The Defendant Fritzsche as a witness has also given a number of clear examples how he, in his official position, did not succeed in obtaining a verification of the rumors concerning the persecution of the Jews, but that he had to conclude the opposite as a result of his examination. Nothing has been given as proof that the bulk of the SS knew anything of the activity of the Einsatzkommandos. To refute the question of whether knowledge existed of the biological experiments in the concentration camps I. wish to point only to what I consider a grotesque fact-that extensive testimony was taken on the question of whether the witness Goering had known of them. I might state those experiments were carried on only in a few camps and that, as proven by various affidavits, they were carried out only after the prisoners had voluntarily agreed to them; but I am not going to do so because I am not willing to defend them at all, and I do not wish to create such an impression. I am content to, refer to the argument about the knowledge or ignorance of G6ring in this matter, and to the question as to what evidence has been taken in favor of the unknown SS man.
HERR PELCKMANN: There can be no doubt that through the carrying-out of criminal experiments, and through his knowledge thereof, the director of the Ahnenerbe, the witness Sievers, is charged with guilt, but certainly not his co-workers, since those, experiments constituted about one percent of the total research program. Finally, I would like to quote in regard to the knowledge of those crimes an article which I found in the Berliner Blatter, 1946, Number 1, Page 54. From an article by Oskar Gotz, entitled "The Jew in the Third Reich," I quote: "We, for instance, in Camp Theresienstadt, considered the gassings in Auschwitz, the other crimes in the death camps of Mauthausen, Maidanek, Ravensbruck, and Buchenwald to be only rumors, in fact, immeasurably exaggerated rumors. The things that actually happened in Auschwitz, for example, did not authentically come to our attention in Theresienstadt before the spring of 1945, when a few survivors returned from Auschwitz after th.6 camp was dissolved. In the interest of a just evaluation of one's contemporaries one must be factual, and should desire to be factual. No guilty person should go free, but no innocent one should be burdened with guilt. "And in the interest of calming public opinion in the future, a greater measure of objectivity is urgently required." I wish that this example of objectivity, which someone who was humiliated by the Nazi regime and the SS still managed to preserve, might become ark inspiration to others. If now one were to reach the conclusion that, apart from a certain definable, or more or less definable, group of culprits-the witness Dr. Morgen mentioned certain circles of culprits within the concentration camp system-the great mass of the SS had no knowledge of the crimes-although most of them, as well as the rest of the Germans, had no knowledge even of the deportations this fact could be considered criminal under Article 6a of the Charter only if it were in connection with a war of aggression.
HERR PELCKMANN: I have already mentioned before that the bulk of the SS were not aware that they were waging a war of aggression. Your Honors, President Roosevelt declared in his speech of 25 October 1941, on the occasion of the shooting of hostages by German forces of occupation: "Civilized nations for a long time upheld the principle that none should be punished for the deeds of another person." Justice Jackson declared on 28 February 1946, that: "The aim of declaring the organizations criminal is to punish assistance in these crimes, though the real authors could never be found nor identified." Can they really not be found? Is the contrary not proved by the great number of trials, whi6h I just mentioned before, for concentration camp crimes before Allied military courts, which pronounced 153 death sentences out of 241 defendants? Does the Prosecution still maintain that they have not yet found the real authors, though for more -than a year all persons who had anything to do with the concentration camps are under arrest, and though all detainees are today grouped in organizations and are at any time at the disposal of the Tribunal as witnesses? All files and documents, too, are in the hands of the Allies. Despite that, and despite the discrepancy of these two quotations by Roosevelt -and Jackson, I shall assume for a moment the point of view of the Prosecution that such a collective criminality exists. Then within its framework the principle still stands that none shall be held responsible for a crime which he did not commit. It means that in this case, too, the number of accused should be held as low as possible. This limitation can be made in two ways, either separately or combined, according to: 1. The degree of responsibility, that is, the position or the rank held in office; 2. The subdivisions of the whole organization known as SS. The Prosecution have, to my knowledge, already made this first limitation in their charge against the Party and the Government.