dtufail/nuremberg-trials-corpus huggingface dataset:
SIR HARTLEY SHAWCROSS (Chief Prosecutor for the United Kingdom): But this Tribunal is to adjudge their guilt not on any moral or ethical basis alone, but according to law-that natural justice which demands that these crimes should not go unpunished, at the same time insists that no individual should be punished unless patient and careful examination of the facts shows that he shared the guilt for what has been done. And so, during these many months, this Tribunal has been investigating the facts and has now to apply the law in order both that justice may be done to these individuals as to their countless victims, and also that the world may know that in the end the predominance of power will be driven out and law and justice shall govern the relations between states. For the effects of this Trial will reach out far beyond the punishment of a score or so of guilty men. Issues are at stake far greater than their fate, although upon their fate those issues, in some measure, depend. In the pages of history it will count for nothing whether this Trial lasted for 2 months or for 10. But it will count for much that by just and patient examination the truth has been established about deeds so terrible that their mark may never be erased, and it will count for much that law and justice have been vindicated in the end. Within the space of a year evidence far exceeding that previously presented to any tribunal in history has been collected, sifted, and placed before you. Almost all of that evidence consists of the captured records and documents of the government to which these men belonged, and much of it directly implicates each one of them with knowledge of, and participation in one or other aspect of the crimes committed by the Nazi State. This evidence has not been refuted and it will remain forever to confront those who may hereafter seek to excuse or mitigate that which has been done. Yet now that this mass of evidence has been presented to you, I shall invite you for a little to detach your minds from its detail to consider the cumulative effect and to review this overwhelming case as a whole.
SIR HARTLEY SHAWCROSS (Chief Prosecutor for the United Kingdom): It is only by chance that their own captured papers have enabled us to establish these crimes out of the very mouths of the criminals. But the case against these men can be established on a broader basis than that, and must be looked at in the light of its historical background. When one considers the nature and the immensity of the crimes committed, the responsibility of those who held the highest positions of influence and authority in the Nazi State is, manifest beyond doubt. For years, in a world where war had itself been declared a crime, the German State was organized for war; in a world where we proclaim the equality of men, for years the Jews were boycotted, deprived of their elementary rights of property, liberty, life itself; for years honest citizens lived in fear of denunciation and arrest by one or other of the organizations, criminal as we allege them to be, through which these men ruled Germany; for years throughout the German Reich millions of foreign slaves worked in farm and factory, were moved like cattle on every road, on every railway ripe. These men, with Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, and a few other confederates, were at once the leaders and the drivers of the German people; it was when they held the highest positions of authority and of influence that these crimes were planned and perpetrated. If these men are not responsible, who are? If minions who did no more than obey their orders, Dostler, Eck, Kramer, and a hundred others, have already paid the supreme penalty, are these men less responsible? How can it be said that they and the offices of state which they directed took no part? Lammers, their own witness, head of the Reich Chancellery, said in 1938 (Document Number 3863-PS): "Despite the total concentration of power of authority in the person of the Fuehrer as a matter of principle, no excessively strong and unnecessary centralization of administration in the hands of the Fuehrer results in the governmental administration ....
SIR HARTLEY SHAWCROSS (Chief Prosecutor for the United Kingdom): "The authority of the subordinate leaders"-the Unterfuehrer-"directed downwards, forbids interference with every individual order he may issue. This principle is applied by the Fuehrer in his governmental leadership in such a way that, for example, the position of Reich ministers is actually much more independent today than formerly, even though today the Reich ministers are subordinated to the Fuehrer's unlimited power of command.... Willingness to bear responsibility, ability to make decisions, aggressive energy, and real authority-these are the qualities which the Fuehrer demands primarily of his subordinate leaders. Therefore he allows them the greatest freedom in the direction of their affairs and in the manner in which they fulfill their tasks." Let them now, accused murderers as they are, attempt to belittle the power and influence they exercised how they will, we have only to recall their ranting as they strutted across the stage of Europe dressed in their brief authority, to see the part they played. They did not then tell the German people or the world that they were merely the ignorant, powerless puppets of their Fuehrer. The Defendant Speer has said (Session of 21 June 1946): ". . . even in a totalitarian system there must be total responsibility... it is impossible after the catastrophe to evade this total responsibility. If the war had been won, the leaders would also have assumed total responsibility." Had the war been won is it to be supposed that these men would have retired to the obscurity and comparative innocence of private citizenship? That opportunity was not denied to them before the war had they wished to disassociate themselves from what was taking place. They chose a different path. From small beginnings, at a time when resistance instead of participation could have destroyed this thing, they fostered the Hitler legend, they helped to build up the Nazi power and ideology and to direct its activities until, like some foul octopus, it spread its slime over Europe and extended its tentacles throughout the world.
SIR HARTLEY SHAWCROSS (Chief Prosecutor for the United Kingdom): Were these men ignorant of the ends sought to be achieved during that period of the rise to power? Paul Schmidt, Hitler's interpreter, a witness of great knowledge, has testified (Document Number 3308-PS): "The general objectives of the Nazi leadership were apparent from the start-namely, the domination of the European continent, to be achieved first by the incorporation of all . , 26 July 46		1 German-speaking groups in the Reich, and secondly, by territorial expansion under the slogan of 'Lebensraum.' " l That slogan "Lebensraum"-that entirely false idea that the very existence of the German people depended upon territorial expansion under the Nazi flag-was from the earliest days an openly avowed part of the Nazi doctrine-yet any thinking person must have known that it would lead inevitably to war. It was the justification Hitler offered to his fellow conspirators at those secret meetings on the 5th of November 1937 (Document Number 386-PS), 23d of May (Document Number L-79), and 23d of 	November 1939 (Document Number 789-PS), at which the fate of so many countries was sealed. Although less concrete it was no less false than the demand for a revision of the Treaty of Versailles. The so-called injustice of Versailles, so cunningly exploited to provide a popular rallying point under the Nazi banner, had succeeded in uniting behind the Nazis many Germans who would not otherwise have supported some of the rest of the Nazi program. And the effect of that propaganda can be judged from the	repeated efforts here made by the Defense to develop the alleged injustice of the treaty. Unjust or not, it was a treaty and no government content to live at peace need have complained of its provisions. Even if the complaints were justified, there was comparatively soon no ground left for them. The provisions of the treaty could have been-in some respects they were-revised by peaceful negotiations. By 1935, 4 years before the world was plunged into war, these men had publicly renounced the treaty.
SIR HARTLEY SHAWCROSS (Chief Prosecutor for the United Kingdom): What miserable rubbish is the long tirade on behalf of the treaty, when one realizes that by 1939 not only, were they free of nearly all the restrictions of which they had complained, but they had seized territory which had never belonged to Germany in the whole of European history. The cry of Versailles was a device for rallying men to wicked and aggressive purposes. But it was a device no less diabolical than the cry of anti-Semitism and racial purity, by which these men sought both to rally and cement the various forms of public opinion in their own country and to sow discord and antagonism amongst the people of foreign lands. Rauschning reports Hitler's statement (Document Number 	USSR-378): "Anti-Semitism is a useful revolutionary expedient. Anti-Semitic propaganda in all countries is an almost indispensable medium in the extension of our political campaign. You will see how little time we shall need in order to upset the ideas and criteria of the whole world simply and solely by attacking Judaism. It is beyond question the most important weapon in our propaganda arsenal." And as a result of this wicked propaganda, I would remind you of the words of Bach-Zelewski who, when he was asked how Ohlendorf could admit that the men under his command had murdered 90,000 people, replied: "As to this I am of a different opinion. When, for years, for decades, the doctrine is preached that the Slav race is an inferior race and Jews are not even human beings, then such outburst is inevitable." (Session of 7 January 1946.) And so, from the earliest day, the aims of the Nazi movement were clear and beyond doubt: Expansion, European domination, elimination of the Jews, ultimate aggression, ruthless disregard of the rights of any people but themselves. Such were the beginnings.
SIR HARTLEY SHAWCROSS (Chief Prosecutor for the United Kingdom): I shall not pause to trace the Nazi Party's growth to power; how, as the writer of the history of the SA has said, they found that (Document Number 2168-PS) "...possession of the streets is the key to power in the state," or how, by the organized terror which the witness Severing has described the storm troops of Brown Shirts terrified the people whilst the Nazi propaganda, headed by Der Sturmer, vilified all opponents and incited people against the Jews. I shall not examine that period, grave as are the lessons which democratic peoples ought to learn from it, for it may not be easy to say exactly at what date each of these defendants must have realized, if, indeed, he had not known and gloried in it all from the beginning, that Hitler's apparently hysterical outpourings in Mein Kampf were intended in all seriousness and that they formed the very basis of the German plan. Some, no doubt, such as Goering, Hess, Ribbentrop, Rosenberg, Streicher, Frick, Frank, Schacht, Schirach, and Fritzsche, realized it, very early. In the case of one or two, such as Doenitz and Speer, it may have been comparatively late. Few can have been ignorant after 1933; all must have been active participants by 1937. When one remembers the apprehension caused abroad during that period there can be no doubt, in our submission, that these men, almost all of whom were the rulers of Germany from 1933 onward, Hitler's intimate associates, admitted to his secret meetings, with full knowledge of plans and events, not only acquiesced in what was taking place, but were active and willing participants. May I then examine in a little more detail the period of the "build-up"-the position of domestic government in Germany between 1933 and 1939, because what happened then makes clear the criminal involvement of these men in what was done later.
SIR HARTLEY SHAWCROSS (Chief Prosecutor for the United Kingdom): What I say now has some special reference to the first Count in the Indictment, for it is against this general background that we must consider the allegation that these men were common conspirators to commit the crimes (such as Crimes Against Peace, and the Crime Against Humanity), which are more specifically charged in the later Counts. Totalitarian government brooks no opposition. Any means justifies the end and the immediate end was ruthlessly to gain complete control of the German State and to brutalize and train its people for war. What stood in the way in January 1933? First, the members of the other political parties; secondly, the democratic system of election and of public assembly, the organization of trade unions; thirdly, the moral standards of the German people, and the churches which fostered them. Accordingly the Nazis set out, quite deliberately, to eliminate this opposition: first, by imprisoning or terrorizing their opponents; second, by declaring illegal all elements of tolerance and liberalism, outlawing trade unions and opposition parties, reducing the democratic assembly to a farce and controlling elections; third, by systematic discouragement and persecution of religion, by replacing the ethics of Christianity with the idolatry of the Fuehrer and the cult of the blood and by rigidly controlling education and youth. Youth was systematically prepared for war and taught to hate and persecute the Jews; the plans for aggression required a nation trained in brutality and taught that it was both necessary and heroic to invade the peoples of other countries. It is a measure of the wickedness and effectiveness of this domestic policy that, after 6 years of rule, the Nazis found little difficulty in leading a perverted nation into the greatest criminal enterprise in history. It is perhaps worth considering from the evidence a few examples of how this policy developed during these 6 years. They are examples of what was happening in every German town and village.
SIR HARTLEY SHAWCROSS (Chief Prosecutor for the United Kingdom): It must be remembered here that in the need to avoid cumulative evidence you have, in the result, been deprived of its cumulative effect (Document Number D-911). First then, the elimination of political opponents. Within 6 weeks of the Nazis coming to power in January 1933, the German newspapers were quoting official sources for the statement that 18,000 Communists had been imprisoned whilst the 10,000 prisoners in the jails of Prussia included many Socialists and intellectuals. The fate of many of these men was described by Severing, who estimated that at least 1,500 Social Democrats and a similar number of Communists were murdered in concentration camps recently established by Goering as Chief of the Gestapo. These camps, controlled by the Party organizations, were deliberately so run as to strike terror throughout the country. In the words of the witness Severing, the concentration camps represented for the people "the incarnation of all that was terrible." Goering has said: "We found it necessary-that we should permit no opposition," and he admitted that there were arrested and taken into protective custody people who had committed no crime. It might have been well if at that time they had read the maxim of which they spoke yesterday, nulla poena sine lege. Goering added: ". . . if everyone knows that if he acts against the State he will end up in a concentration camp that is our advantage." The camps were at first run indiscriminately by the SA and the SS, and according to Goering were created ". . . as an instrument which at all times was the instrument of power for home politics." Gisevius, who at that time had recently joined the Gestapo, you remember, gave the following description: "I was hardly more than 2 days in that new police office when I had discovered already that incredible conditions existed there. There was no police which interfered against crimes, against murder, against arrests, against burglary. There was a police organization which protected just those who committed such crimes.
SIR HARTLEY SHAWCROSS (Chief Prosecutor for the United Kingdom): Those arrested were not those who were guilty of such crimes; they arrested these who sent their cries for help to the police. It was not a police which interfered for protection, but a police whose task, it seemed, was in fact to hide, to cover up, and to sponsor crimes; those commandos of the SA and SS who played police were encouraged by that so-called Secret State Police and all possible aid was given to them.... "Special concentration camps for the Gestapo were installed, and their names will remain as a terrible shame in history. They were Oranienburg and the private prison of the Gestapo, in the Papestrasse, the Columbia House, or, as it was called cynically, the 'Columbia Diele'.... I asked one of my colleagues, who was also a professional civil servant.... 'Tell me, please, am I here in a police office or in a robber's cave?' The answer that I received was: 'You are in a robber's cave and you can expect that you will see much more yet.' " Gisevius went on to describe Goering's order to murder the National Socialist Strasser and how he gave "blank authority" for murder to the political police by signing a form granting amnesty to the policeman, leaving a blank space for the name of the murdered person in respect of whom the amnesty had been granted. If confirmation of the evidence of these defense witnesses were required, it is to be found in the series of reports dated in May and June 1933, from the Munich Public Prosecutor to the Minister of Justice, which are in evidence recording a succession of murders by SS officials in the concentration camp at Dachau (Documents 641, 642, 644, 645-PS). In 1935 the Reich Minister of Justice is writing to Frick (Document Number 3751-PS). He is protesting against numerous instances of ill-treatment in concentration camps, including: "Beating as a disciplinary punishment...
SIR HARTLEY SHAWCROSS (Chief Prosecutor for the United Kingdom): "Ill-treatment-mostly of political internees-in order to make them talk."-and-"Ill-treatment of internees arising out of wantonness or sadistic motives." He went on to complain that: "The beating of the Communists held in custody is regarded as an indispensable police measure for a more effective suppression of Communist activities." And after citing instances of torture, he concludes: "These few examples show a degree of cruelty which is an insult to German sensibility...." Frick's sensibility was apparently not so tender. The very next year he received a similar protest from one of his own subordinates and shortly afterward he issued a decree making all police forces subordinate to Himmler, the very man whom he knew to be responsible for these atrocities (Document Number 775-PS). These brutalities, well known to ministers, as we suggest they were, were not confined to the privacy of concentration camps. It is perhaps worth quoting one instance from the thousands who suffered from the policy which was being pursued. The Tribunal will remember the account by Sollman, a Social Democrat, and member of the Reichstag from 1919 to 1933. He spoke of the incident on 9 March 1933 when, to quote his own words (Document Number 3231-PS): ". . . members of the SS and SA came to my home in Cologne and destroyed the furniture and my personal records. At that time I was taken to the Brown House in Cologne, where I was tortured, being beaten and kicked for several hours. I was then taken to the regular Government prison in Cologne where I was treated by two medical doctors and released the next day. On 11 March 1933 I left Germany...." The second object, the suppression of all democratic institutions, was comparatively simple. The necessary laws were passed to outlaw trade unions. The Reichstag became a farce directly the opposition parties had been dissolved and their members had been put in concentration camps. The witness Severing has spoken of the treatment of the Reichstag members.
SIR HARTLEY SHAWCROSS (Chief Prosecutor for the United Kingdom): In 1932, on Von Papen's 	order he, who was chief of the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, 	was forcibly removed from his office. It was not long after the 30th of January 1933 that the Communist and Social Democratic 	parties were decreed illegal and all form of public expression, other than by the Nazis, was prevented. This action resulted from 	deliberate planning. Frick has said as far back as 1927 (Document Number 2513-PS): "The National Socialists longed for the day when . . ."-they-  	". . . could put an inglorious but well-deserved end to this 	infernal sham (the Reichstag) and open the way for a 	national dictatorship." At this time when democratic government is seeking to re	establish itself throughout the world, the Nazi attitude to elections 	is not to be forgotten. Free elections could not, of course, be 	permitted. Goering had told Schacht in February 1933 when 	seeking money for the Party from industry, and I quote (Document Number D-203): "The sacrifice asked for will surely be so much easier for 	industry to bear if it is realized that the election of 5 March will be the last one for the next 10 years, probably for the 	next 100 years." In these circumstances it is not surprising to find that there 	after, as the evidence such as the SD report on the conduct of the 	plebiscite at Kappel makes clear, the occasional votes of the people, 	always announced as triumphs for the Nazis, were conducted  	dishonestly (Document Number R-142). I turn to the third class of opposition, the churches-Bormann's 	memorandum sent in December 1941 to all Gauleiter and distributed to the SS sums up the Nazi attitude to Christianity (Document Number D-75): "National Socialist and Christian concepts are irreconcilable	If therefore in the future our youth knows nothing more of this Christianity whose doctrines are far below ours, 	Christianity will disappear by itself	All influences which might impair or damage the leadership of the people exercised by the Fuehrer with the aid of NSDAP must be 	eliminated.