dtufail/nuremberg-trials-corpus huggingface dataset:
DR. MERKEL: Thus the French, Constitutional Assembly, on 14 March 1946, decided to give the Constitution of the French Republic, as a preamble, a new formulation of the "Declaration of Human Rights." This declaration reads, in Article 10: "No one can be condemned or punished save on the strength of a law passed and published before the deed." According to this general international legal concept, the American Military Government in Germany ordered through Law Number 1, in Article 4: "A charge can only be pressed, sentence passed, and punishment executed, if the act at the time of its commission was expressly legally declared punishable." The same law prohibits the use of analogy or so-called sound national instinct. The American Military Government even considers the principle mentioned to be so important that it punishes its violation with the death penalty. Finally, may I be permitted in this connection to mention Article 43 of the Hague Convention of the year 1899, according to which the United States of America, as well as England and France, undertook the obligation toward the other states, in occupying a foreign country to observe the laws of that country unless a compelling obstacle existed. The United Nations have proclaimed that the goal of this Trial is to restore justice and respect for international law, and thus to promote world peace. They have acknowledged fundamental human rights and the recognized principles of international law. Stamping as criminal formerly legal political convictions, however, might be considered a limitation of this acknowledgment and shake confidence in fundamental human rights. As a precedent, such a judgment might well have disastrous consequences for the idea of justice and personal freedom. My previous statements concerned the admissibility of the charge against all organizations. For the Gestapo there are two further factors. The Gestapo was a State institution, an aggregation of State agencies.
DR. MERKEL: An agency, in contrast to a society or other private organization, pursues not self-chosen, but State-ordered aims; not with its own but with State means. It fulfills its function in the framework of the total activity of the State. Its actions and measures are State administrative acts. In the case of a State agency one cannot speak of submission to a common will of the agency nor of an association, more or less by agreement, for a common purpose. Thus there is lacking here the prerequisite for the concept of an organization or group, and of membership in the sense of the Charter. If private organizations cannot be considered responsible and subject to punishment, then State agencies and administrative offices certainly cannot. Only the State itself could be held responsible for its institutions, if that were at all possible, but never the institution itself. The institution of the police-including the political police belongs to the internal affairs of a state. A recognized international legal maxim, however, prohibits the interference of a state in the internal legal affairs of a foreign country. And so from this view point as well there are objections to the charge against the Gestapo which I consider my duty as counsel to point out. Finally, there is a further question to be examined: If the Gestapo is to be declared criminal one of the principal defendants should have been an official of the Gestapo. But was any one of the principal defendants ever an official, and thus a member, of the Gestapo? That this prerequisite for trial exists seems very doubtful for Goering, as Prussian Prime Minister, was Chief of the Prussian Secret State Police and could give orders to it, but he did not belong to it. His position as "Chief of the Secret State Police" was, moreover, eliminated with the appointment of the Chief of the German Police and with the incorporation of the Prussian Secret State Police in a Reich institution in the years 1936 and 1937.
DR. MERKEL: Frick, as Reich Minister of the Interior, was the competent minister for ' the Police but he was never an official of any particular branch of the Police. Kaltenbrunner, finally, testified that with his appointment as Chief of the Security Police and the SD he was not made Chief of the Gestapo, and in fact he was not-as Heydrich had been since 1934-the head of the Secret State Police Office. Nor was the Chief of the Security Police and the SD on the budget of the Secret State Police, but was carried on the budget of the Reich Ministry of the Interior. In the event, however, that the indictment and condemnation of the Gestapo should nevertheless be judged admissible, I now turn to the question of whether the substantive legal prerequisites exist for declaring it criminal. In other words, it must be examined whether the Gestapo as a whole was a criminal organization or group in the sense of the Charter. In the examination of this question I shall follow the conditions laid down and designated as relevant in the ruling of the Court of 13 March 1946. But before I go into this question I must point out a general error regarding the type and extent of the activity of the Gestapo. Among the German people, and perhaps even more abroad, it was customary to ascribe to the Gestapo all police measures, terror acts, deprivations of freedom, and killings, as long as they had any police connection at all. It became the scapegoat for all misdeeds in Germany and the occupied territories, and today it is made to bear responsibility for all evil. Yet nothing is more mistaken than that. The error arises from the fact that the whole police system, whether Criminal Police, Wehrmacht Police, Political Police, or SD, without distinction of the, branches, were considered Gestapo.
DR. MERKEL: When Heydrich said at the German Police Rally in 1941: "Secret State Police, Criminal Police and Security Service are enveloped in the mysterious aura of the political detective story," this characterized the almost legendary atmosphere by which the Gestapo in particular is surrounded to the present day. It was apparently in keeping with Heydrich's tactics to let the Gestapo appear in the opinion of people at home and abroad as an instrument of terror, to spread fear and horror of it, in order to create fear of engaging in activity hostile to the State. That the Gestapo was unjustly accused of many crimes may be shown by a few examples. One of the most disgraceful individual crimes during the wax was the murder of the French General Deboisse, at the end of 1944 or the beginning of 1945. The French Prosecution charges it to the Gestapo on the basis of Documents 4048 to 4052-PS. According to 4050-PS, however, Panzinger, who was entrusted with the execution of the plan, was at the time head of Amt V of the RSHAI, that is head of the Reich Criminal Police Office. Schulze, who is mentioned in 4052-PS, also belonged to the Reich Criminal Police Office. 4b48-PS, according to the file reference "V," was also drawn up ~y the Reich Criminal Police Office as Amt V of the RSHA. Amt IV of the RSHA-the Gestapo Office was thus not involved, but only the Reich Criminal Police Office which included the section charged with searching for prisoners of war. Himmler, who as Chief of the Replacement Army was also in charge of the Prisoners-of-War Organization, contacted Panzinger directly in this matter; Amt IV did not have knowledge of t1lis occurrence at any stage. Whether Kaltenbrunner knew anything, he will have to state himself. These facts are proved by Gestapo Affidavit Number 88. In the report on the condemnation of participants in German war crimes in the Russian city of Krasnodar (USSR-55), which was submitted by the Russian Prosecution, the commission of these terrible crimes is charged again to the Gestapo without further proof.
DR. MERKEL: In reality, this was the activity of an Einsatzkommando, not of the Gestapo. (See Gestapo, Affidavit Number 45). I would like to refer to the testimony of the witnesses Dr. Knochen and Franz Straub. It proves that in Belgium and France, as every~ where, the Gestapo was frequently unjustly accused of crimes. Through several witnesses (Dr. Knochen, Straub, Kaltenbrunner), it has been established, besides, that frequently in the occupied territories and in the home area swindlers and other shady characters appeared who, passed themselves off as Gestapo officials. Himmler himself demanded that such false Gestapo officials should be placed in concentration camps (see Exhibit Gestapo Number 34 and Gestapo Affidavit Number 68). As indicated, the Chief of the Security Police, Heydrich, was not entirely without responsibility for the wrong opinion concerning the Gestapo. Thus he deliberately furthered the rumor that the Gestapo knew everything politically suspicious because it spied on the population. This could not be true, as is proved by the fact that the approximately 15,000 to 16,000 Gestapo officials in question, even if they had watched and spied on the people, would have been far from adequate for this purpose (see statement of Dr. Best). The crimes which Gestapo members actually committed shall not be excused in- any way. But it is equally certain that many things occurred for which the Gestapo officials are not responsible, and that usually no effort was made to examine and differentiate whether certain deeds or misdeeds were carried out by members of the Gestapo* or the Kripo, the SS or the SD, or even by native criminals. If, in the interest of combating crimes, it is judged proper, in passing sentence at a trial, to establish a form of option as regards the deed, in the sense that punishment will be inflicted regardless of whether the established deed comes under this or that penal law, such an option can never be taken as regards the person of the perpetrator.
DR. MERKEL: In other words, it would not be just to ascribe a deed to the Gestapo as long as the guilt of its members is not absolutely established. As already stated, the Gestapo is no union of persons in the technical sense of the word, and probably also not in the sense of the Charter. Its constitution, its aims and tasks, and the methods employed by it cannot fundamentally be designated as criminal. The position of the Political Police, its special tasks, and the measures to be taken by it of course demanded the form of organization especially adapted to these purposes. In this connection I consider a terse but still comprehensive presentation of the organizational and personnel structure of the Gestapo to be all the more important, since the Court by its rulings of 14 *January and 13 March 1946 showed that it might be inclined to ascribe decisive importance to the clarification of this question. Your Lordship, in order not to tire the Court with the presentation of the organizational structure and the personnel setup, I shall not read the next nine pages, but shall ask the Court to take judicial notice of them. I draw the special attention of the Court to Pages 20 to 24. They deal with the fundamental difference between administrative and executive civil servants, the technical personnel, the employees, the emergency draftees, and the groups of persons who were taken over as units into the Gestapo-the Secret Field Police, the Customs Border Guards, the Military Counter-Intelligence, and affiliated units. In the development of the, German Political Police from 1933 until the end of the war, three periods can be noted from the organizational point of view: (1) The time from the so-called seizure of power until Himmler's appointment as Chief of the German Police, that is, until June 1936. In this Connection I refer to Document 2073-PS, Exhibit Number Gestapo-12.
DR. MERKEL: The characteristic aspect of this developmental period, which was not entirely alike everywhere, was the police sovereignty of the individual Linder of the German Reich resulting from their political independence. This decentralization was, however, limited when Himmler gradually, in 1933 and the beginning of 1934, became Police Commander in all Linder of the German Reich with the exception of Prussia. In the spring of 1934 Himmler was also appointed Deputy Chief of the Prussian Secret State Police, which meant that Himmler had obtained influence over the Secret State Police of all Linder of the German Reich. Until June 1936 the Secret State Police was on the budget of the Linder. (2) The second period is introduced by the appointment of Himmler as Chief of the German Police on 17 June 1936. A few days later SS Gruppenfuehrer Heydrich was appointed Chief of the Security Police, which included the Secret State Police and the Criminal Police; while Police General Daluege was appointed Chief of the Regular Police, which included Municipal Police, Gendarmerie, and Communal Police. Thus, the German Police had been made uniform throughout the Reich. The central office of the Secret State Police for the whole Reich was the Secret State Police office, Berlin, to which all agencies of the Secret State Police In the Reich were subordinate. These subordinate agencies were Secret State Police main agencies at the seats of the Provincial Governments, and Secret State Police agencies with almost all Regierungspr5sidenten or parallel administrative offices in Prussia and the Linder. (3) With the creation of the RSHA, announced on 27 September 1939, the third and last period was introduced. Chief of the Security Police Heydrich, by a merger of Party organizations and State Police agencies-that is to say, heterogeneous elements-in the RSHA realized a plan of long standing, and it is true that for an outsider it was completely impossible to distinguish whether Heydrich in any given case was acting as chief of a State agency or as chief of a Party office.
DR. MERKEL: The RSHA in its most extensive development included the following offices: Amt I Personnel (State agency) Amt II Administration (State agency) Amt III SD Domestic (Party organization) Amt IV Secret State Police (Gestapo; State agency) Amt V Reich Criminal Police Office (State agency) Amt VI SD Foreign (Party organization) In 1944 the Military Intelligence Service was added. Amt VII: SD Scientific Exploitation (Party organization) Amt N : Technical Communications (State agency). Thus the RSHA was not a unified agency but only the collective agency of the various offices which did not change as to their legal structure. The individual parts of the RSHA remained what they had been before, that is: a) as far as the individual offices sprang from the Reich Ministry of the Interior, such as Amt I, Personnel, and Amt II, Administration, they remained branches of that Ministry; b) Amter IV and V, that is, the Secret State Police Office and the Reich Criminal Police Office, remained as such; c) the parts coming from the former SD Main Office, Amter III, VI, VII remained an organization of the SS and the Party. Nor did the tasks change their State or Party character. Not the RSHA as such was a Main Office of the SS, but only the parts of it formed from the former SD Main Office. Amt IV of the RSHA-the Secret State Police Office, the chief of which was SS-Gruppenfuehrer Heinrich Himmler-was changed several times in its organizational structure during the time from 1939 to 1945, and at the end of 1944 included the following special departments: IV A 1 Leftist and Rightist opposition IV A 2 Anti-Sabotage operations JV A 3 Counter-Intelligence IV A 4 Jews, Churches IV A 5 Special assignments IV A 6 Protective Custody IV B 1 Occupied Western Territories IV B 2 Occupied Eastern Territories IV E 3 Occupied Southeastern Territories IV B 4 Passes and Identification IV Ba A Basic questions of the employment of foreign workers IV G Customs Border Protection (Zollgrenzschutz), Border Inspections.
DR. MERKEL: On the whole nothing was changed from the state of affairs before 1939 in the organizational structure of the subordinate agencies, that is, of the Gestapo Leitstellen with the Governments of the Lander and the most important provinces of Prussia as well as the local Gestapo offices. A distinction must be made between the organization of the Gestapo presented here and the Einsatzgruppen and Einsatzkommandos established for Security Police purposes in case of war. In them the term "Security Police," which in peacetime had appeared only in the titles of the Chief of the Security Police and the inspectors of the Security Police, had assumed a character which differed in its nature from the branches of the Gestapo and the Kripo from which part of the personnel was taken. In the employment of the Security Police and the SD in the occupied territories, a distinction must be made between a) the employment of the Sipo and the SD in troop formation, that is, in Einsatzgruppen and Einsatzkommandos under the orders of the Wehrmacht, and b) employment after the establishment of a military or civil administration The stationary agencies were subordinate to the Higher SS and Police Leaders who were in a position to give the most extensive orders to their subordinate commanders of the Sipo and the SD. In many cases the Reich Commissioner took an important part in the giving of orders, for example Terboven in Norway and Burckel in Lorraine. It must also be pointed out that the Higher SS and Police Leaders frequently reported directly to Himmler and received 'orders from him directly instead of through the Chief of the Sipo and the SD. The agencies of the Sipo and the SD in the occupied territories were organized with reference to Amter Ila or VI (SD), IV (Gestapo), and V (Criminal Police), but the appointment of personnel as well as the activity of the individual sections of a local office was subject to difficulties brought about by war conditions.
DR. MERKEL: Thus members of the Criminal Police, which is not charged, were given Gestapo tasks, and vice versa members of the Gestapo were given purely Criminal Police tasks. The necessity, arising since 1942 from the lack of trained personnel, of taking more and more members of the Secret Field Police of the Wehrmacht into the Security Police as emergency draftees, although they had practically no specialized police knowledge-in addition to emergency draftees from the Reich and employees from the country in question-must be mentioned here in order to be able to judge correctly the activity of the Security Police in the occupied territories. This condensed survey of the structure of the organization offers a basis for the judgment only in connection with the survey of the organization of personnel. The following are the groups of persons composing the staff of the Gestapo according to their training and assignments: Administrative officials. They were not police officials under the German Police Officials' Law. Paragraph 1 of this law, Document Number Gestapo-9, states that the law applies to executive officials of the Municipal Police, Criminal Police, Gendarmerie, and the Gestapo. The administrative officials of these police branches had neither a criminal nor a municipal police training, and they were never-not even exceptionally-used for executive duties. Neither were they auxiliary employees of the public prosecutor's office. Their training and activities were the same as those of all other branches of the administration. The activities of administrative officials consisted of personnel matters; economic matters, such as setting up budgets, housing, clothing, cashiers' office duties, et cetera. The administrative officials h4d the same duties abroad. They were what would be called in the Armed Forces, on the front as well as in task forces, quartermasters and paymasters. Towards the end of 1944 the number of administrative officials amounted to approximately 3,000, which was roughly 10 percent of the total regular personnel of the Gestapo.
DR. MERKEL: To prove the above-mentioned facts I refer to the affidavits introduced as Numbers Gestapo 17, 18, 19, 20, 31, 34, and to the testimony of the witnesses Oldach, Albath, Tesmer, Hoffmann, and Best before the Commission or the Tribunal. (2) officials of the Executive formed the second group of persons, which amounted towards the end of 1944 to 40-45 percent of the total regular personnel of the Gestapo. They were subdivided as follows: Civil servants of the senior grade: Regierungs- and Kriminalrat. Civil servants of the higher service beginning with Criminal Inspector. Civil servants of the medium grade beginning with Criminal Assistant. At the beginning the employment of executive officials took place in the actual Political Police departments, as I have introduced them with my description of the organization of Amt IV of the RSHA. The so-called Counter-Intelligence Police also figured among the executive organizations of the Gestapo. This, formerly Amt III of the Secret State Police Department, later IVA 3 of Department IV of the RSHA, had the task of discovering and clearing up all crimes of high treason from the Criminal Police point of view. In Affidavit Number Gestapo-89 the number of the members of the Counter-Intelligence Police is estimated at 2 or 3,000. (3) The Border Police also belongs to the executive organizations of the Gestapo. The tasks and personnel conditions of the Border Police have been made clear through testimony and affidavits of the witnesses Best and Goppelt (Affidavit Number 22) and Document Number Gestapo-18. The approximate strength can be estimated at having reached the figure of 3,000, which includes the total figure of executive officials. (4) A further part of the Gestapo are the employees and persons on the payroll who-including those persons allocated for work in the Gestapo by the Labor Offices and the emergency draftees-numbered approximately 13,500, thus reaching almost the same figure as the executive officials.
DR. MERKEL: (5) Furthermore, the Gestapo operated a special service in which technical personnel, numbering approximately 500, were working who were responsible for the installment, maintenance, and servicing of the telephone and telegraph installations. (6) If I have spoken above of the "regular" personnel of the Gestapo, then the group of persons of which I am about to speak, though formerly belonging to the Gestapo, was nevertheless incorporated in the Gestapo during the second half of the war under circumstances which cannot leave the least possible doubt as to the nonvoluntary character of their membership in the Gestapo, about which I shall have to speak further at the proper time. a) With regard to the chronological sequence I shall, first of all, have to deal with the above-mentioned emergency draftees. As the witness Krichbaum has explained, the Secret Field Police of the Armed Forces released, beginning in 1942, In France, 23 groups; then in Belgium, 8; in Denmark and Serbia, I each;, and in the East, 18 groups; that is to say, altogether 51 groups with a total strength of at least 5,500 men by order of the OKW. All were released simultaneously from the Armed Forces and thereafter used as so-called emergency draftees by the Security Police in occupied territories. The emergency draftees were used by the Security Police in all spheres, as well as by the Gestapo, the SD, and the Criminal Police, who are not included in the Indictment. b) The Military Counter-Intelligence organization of the OKW was transferred by Hitler's orders to the Security Police or the SD, respectively, in the spring of 1944, and the Defensive Counter-Intelligence to Department IV, that is, the Gestapo. The other remaining parts were then formed into a department of their own which was given the designation "Amt Mil.11 in the RSHA. The total number of transferred personnel amounted to approximately 4 or 5,000.