dtufail/nuremberg-trials-corpus huggingface dataset:
THE INTERPRETER: --"It showed that death was due to a brain injury owing to hemorrhage in the soft membrane and that this hemorrhage was caused by blows with a blunt instrument, which hit the skull particularly in the region of the left temple and the back of the head. In addition, profuse bleeding was established on the corpse round the left cheek, in the right shoulder and left upper arm regions, on the buttocks and the upper thigh and of the lower part of the left thigh -the results of blows on the body of the deceased with a blunt object, while alive. On the findings based on the post mortem, the preliminary medical opinion gave grounds for assuming outside responsibility. "I intend to continue the further necessary search for the per-petrators in collaboration with the Political Police." And it is brought to the attention, as you see, of the Prime Minister with a request to take note and forward to the Reich Governor in Bavaria. And then there is a notice given to the State Minister of the Interior. Then Document 11, Page 9 of the English text-proposal made by the Minister of the Interior to quash the inquiry into the deaths of the protective custody prisoners, Handschuch, Franz, and Katz. Handschuch, you'll remember, Witness, was the subject of the autopsy which indicated outside responsibility. This is a letter from Adolf Wagner to the Defendant Dr. Frank, the representative Nazi jurist. The letter, which has been in Court, is dated 29 November 1933. THE PRESIDENT: What Dr. Frank do you refer to? MAJOR JONES: That is the Defendant Frank, My Lord. THE PRESIDENT: Yes, go ahead. MAJOR JONES: "The Commander of the Political Police in the Ministry of the Interior presented to you, on 18 November 1933, a proposal according to which the inquiry into the cases of the prisoners in protective custody, Hugo Handschuch, Wilhelm Franz, and Delvin Katz, should be quashed for State political reasons. In connection with this case you sent to me the liaison man of the State Ministry of Justice with the Bavarian Political Police, Public Prosecutor Dr. Stepp.
THE INTERPRETER: Meanwhile, in a dis-cussion with the Commander of the Political Police, Reichsführer SS Himmler, I have ascertained once more that by the pursuance of this inquiry the reputation of the National Socialist State would greatly suffer, because this inquiry would be directed against members of the SA and SS, and thus the SA and the SS, as the main pillars of the National Socialist State, would be directly affected. For these reasons, I support the proposal of the Commander of the Political Police in the State Ministry of the Interior for quashing the inquiry presented to you on 18 November." I don't think I need trouble with the rest of that letter. It states that the inhabitants of the concentration camp are almost exclusively criminal types. The next document, Document 10 of the German pile ... THE PRESIDENT: Mr. Elwyn Jones, the document you have just been reading from, which is on Page 9 of the English text, is dated 29 November 1933. Is that a misprint? MAJOR JONES: No, My Lord, that ' is correct. THE PRESIDENT: The document on Page 5, which you read before, from the public prosecution, is dated 26 September 1936. Is that correct? MAJOR JONES: No, My Lord, that is a misprint and I should have called Your Lordship's attention to it. That should be 1933, My Lord, and I am much obliged. THE PRESIDENT: That is Page 5. In referring to the document, you should state that the pages which you did not refer to, Pages 3 and 4, show that the other dossiers, in connection with the public prosecutor, Provincial Court, Munich, were apparently lost and were not forthcoming and that inquiries were going on about them until 1935. MAJOR JONES: Yes, My Lord. Much obliged. I was trying to deal with the essential contents of the file. THE PRESIDENT: Go on then. MAJOR JONES: I want you, Witness, to look at Page 6 of the English text and Document 10 of your file. That is a memo from Dr. H.
THE INTERPRETER: Frank, the defendant, dated 2 December 1933, to the Prime Minister, and the subject is "Quashing of criminal proceedings": "A merchant's wife, Sophie Handschuch, of Munich, in a writ- ten accusation received by the public prosecution at the Provincial Court Munich II, on 18 September 1933, stated that her son, Hugo Handschuch, taken into protective custody on 23 August 1923"-that should be 1933-"died of heart failure in Dachau Camp on 2 September 1933. In the inquest certificate, heart failure following on a concussion of the brain was given as the cause of death. The body was not shown to the relatives and was released only after great difficulties on condition that the coffin would not be reopened. The lid of the coffin was so firmly nailed down that it was impossible to reopen it. The writer asked that the coffin be opened and a judicial post mortem held, as she wanted the body identi-fied and the cause of death established. "In order to clear up the matter, the public prosecutor at the Provincial Court, Munich II, at first personally questioned the plaintiff, Sophie Handschuch, and the flanc6e of the deceased, Thea Kink. From their evidence, the assumption seemed justified that already on the day of his arrest, on 23 August 1933, Handschuch was badly mauled in the Braune Haus in Munich; and in connection with the further established fact that the relatives of the deceased were expressly refused per-mission to view the body, sufficient grounds were given for the suspicion that Handschuch did not die a natural death. In order to establish the cause of death beyond all doubt, the body was exhumed in Dachau on 23 September 1933, and a judicial autopsy carried out on the orders of the public prose-cutor.
THE INTERPRETER: It showed that death was caused by injury to the brain, as a result of a hemorrhage of the soft membrane of the brain and that this hemorrhage originated from blows with a blunt object which hit the skull particularly on the left temple and at the back of the head." Then there follow further details of the autopsy which have been given in another document I have read. The findings of the judicial autopsy gave ground for assuming outside responsibility. Paragraph H: "In the forenoon of 19 October 1933 the public prosecution at the Provincial Court, Munich II, was informed by telephone through the Bavarian Political Police that in the afternoon of 17 October 1933, Wilhelm Franz, of Munich, a prisoner in protective custody, born on 5 June 1909, and that in the night of 17 to 18 October 1933, Dr. Delvin Katz, of Nuremberg, a prisoner in protective custody born on 3 August 1887, hanged themselves in their solitary confinement cells in Dachau Con-centration Camp. The public prosecution on the same morning ordered a legal examination to be held in the camp, followed by a post mortem. The corpses had already been removed from the cells and were lying on stretchers in a locked shed ,of the camp. With the exception of the feet they were com-pletely stripped. In Franz' cell fresh blood spots and splashes were observed on the plank bed." And then it goes on to say that a judicial autopsy was ordered on 20 October. In the next paragraph there is the autopsy7 "The autopsy gave grounds for a well-founded suspicion that in the case of both corpses force by an outside hand had been applied. According to the preliminary opinion of both coroners  (Landgerichtsarzt Dr. Flamm and Gerichtsarzt Dr. Nieden-thal) death by suffocation, as a result of strangulation and throttling, was established in both cases. The strangulation marks found on the neck do not correspond to observations in the case of persons hanged. In respect to Franz!s body, it is also stated in the preliminary opinion that fat embolism is not, prima facie, to be excluded as a contributing cause of death.
THE INTERPRETER: On this corpse fresh weals were found on the thick head of hair and especially on the body and the arms, accom-panied by profuse hemorrhages and ruptures of the fat tissue. Besides the injuries on the neck, the body of Katz showed also bruises, abrasions, and cuts of the skin. "At the examination, the public prosecution had demanded the production of both belts with which Franz and Katz had allegedly hanged themselves; they could not be handed over at once. The Dachau lower court had ordered the confiscation of the belts in accordance with the application. Until now, the objects confiscated had not yet been received by the public prosecution." Then Paragraph III: "In each case I informed the Ministerpräsident, and through him, the Reichsstatthalter in Bavaria, as well as the State Minister of the Interior, of the public prosecution's reports. "In a letter of 29 November 1933, addressed to me, the State Minister of the Interior proposed that, for State political reasons, the inquiry pending at the public prosecution of the Provincial Court, Munich II, into the death of Hugo Hand-schuch, Wilhelm Franz, and Delvin Katz, former prisoners in protective custody, should be quashed. As a reason it is pointed out that the conducting of investigations would seriously injure the prestige of the National Socialist State, since these proceedings would be directed against members of the SA and SS, whereby the SA and the SS, as the chief pillars of the National Socialist State, would be immediately affected." And then Frank goes on to give an opinion in law that the Reichs-statthalter in fact has the right of pardoning. He states that in the last part of the last paragraph but one: "The Constitutional Deed of the Free State of Bavaria of 14 August 1919 forbade the quashing of criminal investiga-tions. The law of 2 August 1933 regarding the quashing of criminal investigations removed the ban of quashing.
THE INTERPRETER: Accord-ing to the Bavarian State law at present valid, the legal possibility therefore exists of quashing individual criminal proceedings by means of an administrative act in the form of a pardon." And then he states that this right is vested in the Reich Governor of Bavaria, and goes on to suggest that "in view of this legal posi-tion the proposal of the State Minister of the Interior be submitted to the Council of Ministers." The next document, Page 10 of the English text, Document 12 of the German text, indicates that the Council of Ministers was not prepared to countenance the quashing. Page 10 of the English text, My Lord-and it states: "The proposal of the State Minister of the Interior that the inquiry pending at the public prosecution at the Provincial Court, Munich II, into. the death of the prisoners Handschuch, Franz, and Katz, who were in protective custody, be quashed was the subject of a debate during the meeting of the Council of Ministers of 5 December 1933. As a result, the State Minis-ter of Justice communicated the following to the undersigned official: "'The criminal proceedings regarding the happenings in the Dachau Concentration Camp are to be continued with all determination. The facts are to be cleared up with the utmost speed.'" Then there are various instructions with regard to the inquiries. The next step of this story is Document 12 of the German file, Page 11 of the English text: "Presented to the State Minister with the request that he take note. The note of the first public prosecutor, Dr. Stepp, regarding the carrying out of his instructions is attached with the request that note be taken.... "By order of Ministerial Counsellor Döbig, I communicated to the Reichsführer SS Himmler the decision taken yesterday by the Council of Ministers concerning the cases of Hand-schuch, et cetera. The Reichsführer SS told me that the mat-ter chiefly concerned the Chief of Staff of the SA, Reich Minister Röhm.
THE INTERPRETER: He (Himmler) had to discuss the matter with Röhm first." Then Röhm gives certain" instructions which this correspondent, Dr. Stepp, writes down from memory: "The Dachau Camp is a camp for prisoners who were appre-hended for political reasons and are kept in protective custody. The incidents concerned are of a political nature and must be decided under all circumstances first of all by the political authorities. To my mind they are not suited to be dealt with by the legal authorities. This is my opinion as Chief of Staff and also as a Reich Minister who is interested in the Reich not suffering politically because of the proceedings in question. "I shall get the Reichsführer SS to issue an order that no investigating authorities may enter the camp for the time being and that people in the camp may not be interrogated for the present." Then there is a note: "The Chief Prosecutor, Munich, was instructed by a directive from the Minister to refrain for the time being from making an application for the opening of preliminary investigations." Then follows the next document, Document 13, a letter to the public prosecution on the death of these men Franz and Katz: "With regard to the above-mentioned matter I have, as in-structed, on 12 July 1934 requested the Bavarian Political Police to clear up the matter further in conjunction with the commander's office of the Concentration Camp Dachau, and to endeavor to find out the persons who are suspected of having been the culprits. In this request I mentioned also that I have not yet received the legally confiscated instruments of suicide (belt and braces) of the dead men.
THE INTERPRETER: "The Political Police have apparently transmitted the files without any written direction to the political department of the Concentration Camp Dachau...." The first paragraph of this letter reads: "The latest application by the Public Prosecution, Munich II, for production of evidence shows what far-fetched means are employed in order to saddle the Concentration Camp Dachau with allegedly perpetrated crimes." In the second paragraph of the letter regret is expressed that the two dead men were able by their suicide to escape impending punishment for smuggling letters. The third paragraph refers to the confiscation' and reads: "After the two corpses had been dissected according to law and had been released, the commander's staff had no further interest in the preservation of the instruments with which the men had hanged themselves. The commander's staff do not belong to those, that loathsome type of cultured people, who preserve such articles as souvenirs, as was done in America in the Dillinger case." The letter is signed on behalf of the camp commandant by SS Obersturmbannführer Lippert. Then there is a request by the public prosecution for action. In the next letter there is a reference to this letter from the camp commandant of Dachau, which shows that the request of the Oberstaatsanwalt arose from the impartial observation of his official duty and then the file closes with this entry: "Munich, 27 Septem-ber 1934, Public Prosecution" It is a letter from -the Oberstaats-anwalt to the Generalstaatsanwalt at the Court of Appeals Munich: "Subject: Death of the prisoners in protective custody, Wil-helm Franz and Dr. Katz, in the Concentration Camp Dachau. "I have quashed the proceedings, as the investigations have not produced sufficient grounds for the assumption of outside guilt in the deaths of the two prisoners in protective custody." MAJOR JONES: Well now, Witness, I have taken some time to read that document.
THE INTERPRETER: That is a characteristic Mustration of the fact that the SA and SS abominations in the camps were protected by the highest authorities of the Third Reich, is that not so? REINECKE: This document is from the year 1933, at a time when the Concentration Camp Dachau was not manned exclusively by SS men. The document indicates that the prosecution of the Provincial Court in Munich suspected, for given reasons, that some persons in protective custody had been murdered. MAJOR JONES: Are you suggesting that conditions improved after the SS men took complete charge of running the camps? REINECKE: I want to point out that this document contains in-dividual cases of the year 1933. But conclusions on the general con-ditions in concentration camps, particularly in the coming years, cannot be drawn from the document. MAJOR JONES: Did you know that the Waffen-SS was making quite a profitable business out of killing people in concentration camps? Did you know that? Did you know that? REINECKE: No. MAJOR JONES: I want you to look at the Document D-960, which will be Exhibit GB-569. It is a very short document, this one, it is from-it is headed: "Waffen-SS, Natzweiler Concentration Camp, Commander's office, 24 March 1943. "Bill to the Security Police and SD, Strasbourg. "For the 20 prisoners executed and cremated in this concentration camp, costs amounting to 127,05 Reichsmark arose. The Commander's office of the Natzweiler Concentration Camp requests the early payment of the above-mentioned sum." The tariff for killing was very low in Natzweiler, wasn't it- -- 6 marks 38 pfennigs for each dead man? Did you know that moneys were paid to the funds of SS for activities of that kind? REINECKE: No. And as I understand it, this document does not show that at all. The concentration camp command here uses the stamp "Waffen-SS," but in this connection I must refer to what I said yesterday, that the term "Waffen-SS" is misleading insofar as the concentration camp organization was an independent police institution.
THE INTERPRETER: This document seems to support my statement, since it shows that this horrible bill here was sent to the Security Police, that is, again to an executive organ. The Waffen-SS ... MAJOR JONES: Just a moment. Assuming that the Security Police paid this bill, where would the money have gone to? It would have gone back to Natzweiler. What would have happened to it? Would it have been credited to the funds of the Waffen-SS or not? REINECKE: The commands of the concentration camps, includ-ing Natzweiler, settled their accounts with the Reich, not with the Waffen-SS. I cannot say how this money was used and for what purposes it was spent, because ... MAJOR JONES: Do you know-you have no knowledge of the financial arrangements of these camps vis à vis the Waffen-SS, have you? If you have not that suffices for me for the moment. REINECKE: No, no. From my activity in the head office "SS Courts" I happen to know a little about the economic control of the concentration camps, and as to this point here, I know that the commands of concentration camps settled their accounts directly with the agencies of the German Reich and had no connection at all with other treasuries or agencies of the Waffen-SS as such. MAJOR JONES: If you please. Now you said in your testimony that the guards in concentration camps had not committed crimes, that whoever else was responsible, Pohl and one or two others, certainly it was not the SS guards. Were you serious when you said that, Witness? REINECKE: In order to avoid misunderstanding, I should like to make it clear here that when I spoke of guards, I meant only those persons who guarded a concentration camp from the outside in contrast to the personnel of the concentration camp who were employed in the command and on the command staff; that is to say, people who had the control within the camp. MAJOR JONES: But both those categories of guards were SS men, were they not? REINECKE: As I have already said, they belonged to the so--called nominal Waffen-SS without having anything to do with it organically.
THE INTERPRETER: MAJOR JONES: Well, I shall return to that point in a moment. First of all, I want you to look at Document D-924, which will give you a picture of the humanity and ethical attitude of SS guards. I am using a phrase which you used yourself vis à vis the SS. That is Exhibit GB-570, My Lord. It is a report this time from a Dutch source of the evacuation of the Rehmsdorff Camp to Theresienstadt. The first page is a statement by Peter Langhorst, who says: "I am an ex-political prisoner and I have been detained in various prisons and concentration camps, finally in the Rehms-dorff Camp. "At the approach of the Allied armies this camp was evac-uated and the prisoners, about 2,900 men, were put on transport from Rehmsdorff to Theresienstadt. "Mostly these prisoners were Czechs, Poles, Russians, and Hungarian Jews, while there were only a few Dutchmen among them. "Of these prisoners only some 500 men actually reached Theresienstadt; the others were simply killed off during the transport by the so-called 'shot in the neck.' "The corpses were thrown into mass graves which were filled up afterward." Then-I need not trouble you with the rest of the statement, but you see a further statement with regard to that matter by Baron Van Lainsweerde of Amsterdam, who was on this transport, who says that-at the end of the second paragraph: "Finally, on 12 November 1944, 1 was imprisoned in the Concentration Camp Rehmsdorff where I stayed until my escape on 20 April 1945.' At the approach of the Allied Forces, the camp at Rehmsdorff was evacuated in great haste and the political prisoners of this camp were transported to the Theresienstadt Camp. "At first the prisoners were transported by train and in goods vans. We arrived by train at Marienbad, where, for causes I do not know, we had a delay of about one week. The vans with the prisoners were kept standing at the station. In the course of that week Allied bombers attacked the Marienbad station and in the confusion some 1,000 prisoners escaped into the surrounding woods.
THE INTERPRETER: Naturally the entire local service (the SS, Volkssturm, and Hitlerjugend) was set to work to recapture the escaped prisoners, and practically all prisoners, who of course wore their camp clothes and could easily be recognized, were recaptured. These prisoners, about a thousand men, were led back in groups to Marienbad station and there they were killed by the SS guards by a shot in the neck. As both engines of the train had been wrecked during the air attack, the prisoners had to walk all the way from Marienbad to Theresienstadt, Many among them were unable to go so far, and fell down along the road, totally exhausted; without an exception these prisoners were murdered by the guards by a shot in the neck. That evening their bodies were removed by lorry and buried in mass graves in the woods." -- And he says he thinks that he could identify where it was. -- "I am fully prepared to assist in tracing them. When the transport started I heard the SS guards saying that the total number of prisoners amounted to 2,775. Only some 500 of these prisoners reached Theresien-stadt. The others were murdered during the transport. Near Lobositz, about 7 kilometers from Theresienstadt, I myself escaped. The leader of the transport was SS Ober-scharführer Schmidt, one of the hangmen of Buchenwald, who also there behaved in a most scandalous way toward the prisoners, and who was known to be a sadist." Do you still, say that the SS guards betrayed the characteristics of decency? REINECKE: I should like to emphasize that I did not say that the SS guards had the characteristics of SS members. I said that our investigations showed that the actual crimes in the concentration camps were committed by members of the commands and that we found no evidence that the guards had any part in them, and ... MAJOR JONES: Then let me show you-let me show you another document, the Document D-959-it will. be Exhibit GB-571-which is a report to the Ministry of the Interior of the Czechoslovak Republic.