dtufail/nuremberg-trials-corpus huggingface dataset:
MR. THOMAS J. DODD (Executive Trial Counsel for the United States): The Gestapo accepted his application and in that way he became a member of the organization. There was nothing to prevent a Gestapo official from resigning his position if the aims and activities and methods of the organization became repugnant to, him. The witness Tesmer testified before the Commission that if an officer refused to carry out a criminal order he probably would be removed from his employment. Even after the war began, when all governmental officials were more or less frozen in their positions, members of the Gestapo were able to resign. The witness Tesmer himself resigned from the Gestapo during the war, and the witness Straub testified that a person could resign his position in the Gestapo at the risk of going to the front on active military service. Surely this was not compulsion in any legal sense. The sacrifices which members of the political police might face upon resignation, such as loss of seniority and forfeiture of pension rights, may have seemed decisive to those who remained in the Gestapo, but such considerations could under no circumstances be construed as legal compulsion justifying continued membership in an organization of such notorious criminality. There may be particular instances where some members of the Army Secret Field Police were later transferred from the military to the Gestapo. In such instances, these individuals may have gained on the basis of military orders a personal defense to the crimes committed by the Gestapo during the period of their membership. But such special instances, justifiable in subsequent proceedings, can in no way affect the basic character of the Gestapo as a single department of the Government with no greater degree of compulsion to join, and no greater legal restraint from resigning, than any other department of the State. Now, it takes character to stand up against great evil--this has always been so. It may be necessary for a man to brave some humiliation and some sacrifice in order to refuse to do the evil bidding of an evil master.
MR. THOMAS J. DODD (Executive Trial Counsel for the United States): But responsibility for the crimes of these organizations should not be evaded by the application of a dry, technical, or meaningless concept of compulsion. From the establishment of the Nazi Party in 1920 until the conclusion of the war in 1945, these organizations were used by the conspirators for the execution of their schemes, and each committed one or more of the crimes described in Article 6 of the Charter, and participated in the general conspiracy. The Leadership Corps was the first of the organizations to appear on the stage. The next step was the creation, in 1920, of a semi-military organization, the SA, to secure by violence a predominant place for the Party in the political scene. Out of this group, the more select and fanatical SS was formed in 1925, to replace the SA while the latter was banned, and then to join with it in laying the groundwork for the revolution. Upon the seizure of power in 1933, the next organization, the Reich Cabinet, took its place in the conspiracy. With the Government in their hands, the conspirators hastened to suppress all potential opposition, and to that end they created the Gestapo, and the SD. Internal security having been guaranteed, they then obtained for promotion of their plans of aggrandizement the last of their implements in the form of the Military. Each of these was necessary to the successful execution of the conspiracy--the Leadership Corps to direct and control the Party through which political power had to be seized; the SA and SS to oppose political opponents by violence and, after 1933, to fasten the Nazis' control on Germany by extra-legal activities; the Cabinet to devise and enact the laws needed to ensure continuance of the regime; the Gestapo and the SD to detect and suppress internal opposition; and some servile soldiery to prepare and carry out the expansion of the regime through aggressive war. Each of the organizations continued to play a necessary and vital part at all times throughout the conspiracy. The program of the Nazi regime stemmed from the Nazi Party.
MR. THOMAS J. DODD (Executive Trial Counsel for the United States): As Hitler said in 1933: "It is not the State which gives orders to us, it is we who give orders to the State." And later in 1938 he added: "National Socialism possesses Germany entirely and completely since the day when, 5 years ago, I left the house in Wilhelmsplatz as Reich Chancellor.... The greatest guarantee of the National Socialist revolution lies in the complete domination of the Reich and all of its institutions and organizations, internally and externally, by the National Socialist Party" (Document 2715-PS). It was the Leadership Corps that formulated the policy of that Party. It was the Leadership Corps that held the Party together. It was the Leadership Corps, through its descending hierarchy of leaders, down to the Blockleiter who controlled 40 households, that kept a firm grip upon the entire populace. Every crime charged in the Indictment was a crime committed by a regime controlled by the Party, and it was the Leadership Corps which controlled the Party and made it function. While the Party, through the Political Leaders, gave orders to the State, it was the Reich Cabinet--the law-making, executive, and administrative representative of the State--that transformed those orders into laws. Just as the Leadership Corps made the Party function, so the Cabinet made the State function. Every crime which we have proved was a crime of the Nazi State, and the Reich Cabinet was the highest agency for political control and direction within the Nazi State. But policy and laws are not enough. They must be put into effect and carried into operation. The four other organizations were the executive agencies of the Party and the State. When it was a question of enforcing laws, of detecting, apprehending, imprisoning, and eliminating opponents or potential opponents, the SD, the Gestapo, the SS, and the machinery of concentration camps came into play.
MR. THOMAS J. DODD (Executive Trial Counsel for the United States): The close relationship between the SD and the Gestapo, and the importance of the former in selection of Nazi officials, is disclosed by the Defense affidavit of Karl Weiss, who averred that all political police officials were screened by the SD before being accepted into the Gestapo. And the SD violated the integrity of German elections by reporting how the people voted in secret ballots. When the policy called for war, the para-military organizations like the SA and SS laid the foundation, and top militarists prepared the plans for a powerful German army. When it became a question of exterminating the population of conquered territories, of deporting them for slave labor, and of confiscating their property, the OKW and the SS had to plan joint operations and, in collaboration with the Gestapo, to carry them into effect. Thus, the Party planned, the Cabinet legislated, and the SS, SA, Gestapo, and the military leaders executed. The manner in which this was done can be illustrated by taking up a number of the principal crimes alleged in the Indictment and showing how the five organizations participated in the commission of each crime. The basic program for aggression is to be found in the Nazi Party Program of 25 points, proclaimed by Hitler in 1920 and declared unalterable. It included demands for the unification of all Germans in Greater Germany, for the abrogation of the treaties of Versailles and St. Germain, for land and colonies, and for the creation of a national army. As the Party Manual shows, this platform was the table of commandments, and from it was drawn the dogma for every Political Leader. All members of the Leadership Corps bound themselves to follow these precepts and to spread this doctrine. As early as April 1933, the Cabinet by resolution created the Reich Defense Council, a body of Cabinet members whose function was to prepare the nation for war. In October 1933, the Cabinet proclaimed Germany's withdrawal from the League of Nations and the Disarmament Conference.
MR. THOMAS J. DODD (Executive Trial Counsel for the United States): A year and a half later, in March 1935, it re-established the Wehrmacht and provided for compulsory military service. Its war-planning measures were carried further by its enactment, in May 1935, of a secret unpublished Reich Defense Law, providing for the appointment of a Plenipotentiary General for War Economy with sweeping powers, and its decision that the plenipotentiary should begin his work at once, even in peacetime. In February 1938, on the eve of the seizure of Austria, a second component of the Reich Cabinet, the Secret Cabinet Council, was created to advise Hitler in conducting foreign policy. And it was the Defendant Von Neurath, the president of that council, who took diplomatic steps to justify and excuse this aggressive action. After the seizure had been accomplished, it was the Cabinet which provided for the reunion of Austria with the Reich. Six months later, by another secret and wholly unpublished law, the Cabinet provided for a Three Man College of plenipotentiaries whose function it was to have prepared at all times complete plans and ready measures for the sudden and not-to-be-declared war. In November 1938, it was a Cabinet law which provided for the integration of the Sudetenland with Germany, and in March 1939 for the incorporation of Memel into Germany. The Tribunal will remember the dramatic meeting of the Reich Defense Council held in June of 1939, where preparations were completed for the coming war and detailed plans were approved, such as using prisoners of war and concentration camp inmates for war production, compulsory work for women in wartime, and the bringing of hundreds of thousands of workers from the Protectorate to be housed together in hutments. In August 1939, on the eve of the attack on Poland, the Ministerial Council for the Defense of the Reich, the third component of the Reich Cabinet, was created out of members of the Cabinet to act as a smaller working group in the exercise of legislative and executive wartime powers.
MR. THOMAS J. DODD (Executive Trial Counsel for the United States): Thereafter, it was this component of the Reich Cabinet, rather than the ordinary Cabinet, which enacted most of the legislation for carrying on the war, but with the knowledge and participation of the entire membership of the ordinary Cabinet. While the Cabinet was thus preparing the legal and administrative framework for aggression, the other organizations were actively engaged in related preparations to the same end. An aggressive militaristic psychology on the part of the people and the building-up of a powerful army were essential to prepare the nation for war. To the attainment of these ends, the SA assiduously devoted itself. First in 1933 by engaging in an intensive propaganda campaign demanding colonies, "Lebensraum," the abrogation of the Treaty of Versailles, falsely attributing aggressive designs to Germany's neighbors and generally spreading the now well-known Party bromides. Almost simultaneously, it organized a training program. for German youth in the technique of modem war, at first in dark secrecy, but finally in the open, when it felt itself sufficiently prepared and was sure of no outside interference. But the SA did not confine itself to mere preparations. When the first aggressive action, that against Austria, was taken, units of the SA marched through the streets of Vienna and seized the principal government buildings, and in the plans for the seizure of the Sudetenland the SA formed a part of the Henlein Free Corps and furnished it with supplies and equipment. The activities of the SS were similar to the SA, and even more widespread. Like the SA, it served as a para-military organization in the years preceding 1933. Like the SA, it participated in the aggression against Austria and in the conspiracy to undermine Czechoslovakia through the Henlein Free Corps. Its activities are distinguishable from those of the SA in these matters only because it played the more important part. Its professional combat forces joined with the Army in marching into the Sudetenland and Bohemia-Moravia, and in the invasion of Poland.
MR. THOMAS J. DODD (Executive Trial Counsel for the United States): One of its main departments, the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle, was a center for Fifth Column activities. The SD of the Reichsfuehrer SS operated a network of spies throughout the world, and its agents were spying in the United States before Germany declared war upon America- The largest branch of the SS, the Waffen-SS, was created and developed for the sole purpose of carrying on the war and participated, as an SS army, in all phases of the war in the East and in the West. Its shameful record of war atrocities needs no amplification here. The Gestapo and SD were likewise involved in the commission of crimes against the peace. The very incident that served as an excuse for the invasion of Poland, and thus set off the entire war, was executed by the Gestapo and the SD. I refer to the simulated Polish attack on the radio station at Gleiwitz. where concentration camp prisoners were dressed in Polish, uniforms, murdered, and left as evidence of a Polish raid, so as to afford Hitler a justification for the attack upon Poland. Of course the professional military clique planned and participated in all aggressions from the militarization of the Rhineland in 1936 to the attack on Soviet Russia in 1941. The waging of these wars of aggression was possible for Germany only by the utilization of millions of enslaved workers, and the slave labor program was possible only with the assistance of these organizations. Sauckel was the master slaver, but he needed a million Party whips to enforce his merciless dictates. The SS, the Gestapo, and the SD at his bidding drove the foreign serfs within the Reich borders under the lash of deceit, of kidnapping, of heart breaking family separations, of arson, of torture, and of murder. The Leadership Corps, in co-operation with the Nazi Labor Front and with industrial management, were Sauckel's receiving agents for these unfortunate ones.
MR. THOMAS J. DODD (Executive Trial Counsel for the United States): At the Reich level and at the Gau level members of the Leadership Corps helped arrange for the conditions of bedding, feeding, and restraining these wretched humans, giving them less attention and less decent concern than primitive man often gave to his brutes. The Gauleiter, functioning as Reich Defense Commissioners, at the order of Speer and Sauckel, and under the most revolting conditions of conveyance shunted the slaves from receiving depots to armament industries where like stanchioned beasts they were submitted to sub-human indignities and worked to death. Medical care and even the most simple medical supplies were refused them. Denied even the social advantages of the barn yard, they struggled under less than good stable standards. With a crassness unknown to ordinary domestic animal care, directives providing for the abortion of female laborers were distributed to Gauleiter and Kreisleiter and their staffs. Their keepers were of the SD and the Gestapo, and the cell blocks of the concentration camp awaited any who chafed under the cruelty. Urged on by Speer, the Gauleiter utilized prisoners of war for slave labor purposes, and Rosenberg's minions in the Eastern territories under the spur of Sauckel's demands gleaned new millions for thralldom. The Army harnessed thousands for the construction of military fortifications and for military production, and Keitel carried out Hitler's order by hitching honorable soldier war prisoners to machines that made materials for war. The greedy Goering sought war prisoner slaves for his air armament industries and suggested new, uses for old orders violating recognized codes of warfare, and his aid Milch thought of the forced use of Russian prisoners of war to man anti-aircraft batteries as comedy relief for the oppressive madness of the times. Depravity supplanted degradation, and death became the declared objective of concentration camp labor establishments under the SS.
MR. THOMAS J. DODD (Executive Trial Counsel for the United States): Of necessity all of this went on with high Cabinet approval as the impact of this whole terrible program created new problems for Germany. So the slaves suffered in the midst of the German population as thousands of them were farmed out for better or for worse to householders, to great and to small industries, until at last, in the closing hours of the conflict, under pressure of the grim necessities of the war situation and solely to increase the war effort, the Nazi Government itself was forced to issue an order to slacken the violence against those who were in chains. The great significance of this order cannot be overstated. By its own terms, it makes perfectly clear that cruelty to the slaves was a State policy carried out by the German people. It is damning evidence against the whole German nation. It is, in our judgment, one of the most important documents in this case and it is shocking to realize that it came from the Party Chancellery and the Reich Security Main Office-both high State agencies; and it was directed, in writing, to all Political Leaders down to Ortsgruppenleiter, and to the lowest level of German society by word of mouth. The sweep of the crimes committed against the Jewish people is too great for the human mind to grasp completely. Our whole experience in living conditions, our mental processes, make it so We shudder at one bestial murder, we shrink from a few disgusting crimes, but when confronted with mass horror, we find ourselves groping for adequate reaction. We simply cannot comprehend six million murders. In the regular course of life it is good that this is so; but in weighing the evidence in this case it is something of a handicap for all parties except the guilty. Of some facts, however, we do have full knowledge and full understanding. They are an in evidence before this Tribunal. We know that these indicted organizations all share responsibility for the vast crimes committed against the Jewish people. We know that the evil geniuses of the Nazi plan understood how to nurture a nation for hatred.
MR. THOMAS J. DODD (Executive Trial Counsel for the United States): They began easily by having the Leadership Corps write into the Party platform that only a member of the race could be a citizen. Thus they laid the groundwork for the basic premise upon which Jews were deprived. of human rights in Germany. Then the same Leadership Corps began the work of directing a campaign of abuse against the whole Jewish people. Every man's failure, all worry, each disappointment, any fear, was resolved in the crucible of Jewish responsibility. Throughout the Reich, Jew-baiting committees were established under the direction of various Political Leaders. Led by Gauleiter Streicher, Party members engaged in open violence against Jews and their property by destroying the synagogue here in Nuremberg. Then came the hideous occurrences on the night of 10 November 1938 under the incitement of Party Propaganda Leader Goebbels, and with the open assistance of the Leadership Corps and the SA. To add mockery to malefaction, the Nazis set up a Supreme Party Court to investigate these outrages, and although it found that instructions for carrying out these pogroms had been telephoned by the Gauleiter to their subordinate leaders, it ruled that in the killing of Jews without orders or contrary to orders, "at heart the men were convinced that they had done a service to their Fuehrer and to their Party," and under the guise of this judicial hypocrisy none of the participants were so much as expelled from the Party. Throughout the years, as this hate movement progressed, all manner of discriminatory legislation was enacted to restrict the mobility of the Jew, to impoverish him, and to degrade him. Great numbers of these legislative monstrosities, all the creations of the Reich Cabinet, are in evidence in this record. With quickened pace the Nazis moved to new cruelties and from a mixed-up policy which demanded the departure of the Jew and called for his detention in German concentration camps, they approached the depths of shame in a Reich Cabinet proposal for the sterilization of even half-Jews.
MR. THOMAS J. DODD (Executive Trial Counsel for the United States): In a cold setting of sadism and sin, the Reich Cabinet reviewed the manner in which half-Jews were to be treated, and then recommendations of the Cabinet were submitted to Hitler for final action. The SA men were among the first to apply direct force and brutality against the Jewish people in Germany. The witness Severing has told the Tribunal from the witness stand that during the years after 1921 the SA engaged in organized terror against the Jews. These street ruffians, having nearly completed their orgies against ordinary political opponents, now found new uses for their clubs and whips and new outlets for their perverse propensities. Any Jew was fair game and it was open season the year round for Jew-hunting. They smashed into private homes and abused the terrified Jewish inhabitants without any pretense of cause or provocation. And they interlaced their physical violence with their constant tirade of slanderous anti-Jewish propaganda. The oppression, persecution, discrimination, and brutality at the hands of the Leadership Corps, the Reich Cabinet, and the SA were only the beginnings of the dreadful fate that the Nazis prepared for the Jews. In this fashion, the way was paved for the sinister activities of the Gestapo when it came into play. Now these secret policemen moved in with their wraith-like methods. Trembling Jews were hauled from their beds in the middle of the night and dispatched without semblance of accusation to concentration camps, and often their family members awoke to find them missing. Thousands of Jewish people so disappeared never to be seen or heard of again, and all over Europe today surviving family remnants with aching hearts are seeking clues or indications of the fate that befell them. Sad to relate, the only answer to most of the searching is to be found in the records of this Tribunal, in the captured documents of the SS, the SD, and the Gestapo, and in the death books of the gas chambers, the mass graves, and the crematoria. By this time the Nazis were astride much of Central Europe.