dtufail/nuremberg-trials-corpus huggingface dataset:
SIR HARTLEY SHAWCROSS (Chief Prosecutor for the United Kingdom): More and more the people must be separated 	from the churches and their organs, the pastors 	The persecution of the churches makes a melancholy story. From the abundance of evidence which has been submitted to the Tribunal it is perhaps permissible to quote from a complaint to Frick made early in 1936 (Document Number 775-PS): ". . . lately half the political police reports concern clerical matters. We have untold petitions from all kinds of cardinals, bishops, and dignitaries of the Church. Most of these complaints concern matters under the jurisdiction of the Reich Ministry of the Interior, although the respective rules were not decreed by it...." And then after referring to the chaos resulting from the division of authority between the various police forces, the report goes on to refer to the results of the religious struggle: "Instances of disturbances of congregations are mounting terribly fast lately, often necessitating the intervention of the emergency squad.... After discarding the rubber truncheon, the idea of exposing executive officials to situations in which, during interruptions of meetings, they may be forced to use cold steel, is unbearable." The diary of the Minister of Justice for 1935 provides ample instances of the sort of behavior which was being encouraged by the Hitler Youth under the Defendant Schirach and the Defendant Rosenberg. The Hitler Jugend, whose membership increased from just under 108,000 in 1932 to nearly 8 million in 1939, was organized on a military basis (Document Number 2435-PS). The close collaboration between Keitel and Schirach in their military education has been described; the special arrangement between Schirach and Himmler by which the Hitler Jugend became the recruiting organization for the SS is in evidence (Document Number 2396-PS). You will not have forgotten the words of Schirach's deputy (Document Number 1992-PS): "In the course of years we want to insure that a gun feels just as natural in the hands of a German boy as a pen." What a horrible doctrine!
SIR HARTLEY SHAWCROSS (Chief Prosecutor for the United Kingdom): The terrorization, murder; and persecution of political opponents, the dissolution of all organizations affording opportunity for opposition, criticism, or even free speech, the systematic perversion of youth and training for war would not, however, have sufficed without persecution of the Jews. Let no one be misled by the metaphysical explanations which are put forward for this most frightful crime. What Hitler himself in this very town described as the fanatical combat against the Jews was part and parcel of the policy of establishing "ein yolk"- "ein Herrenvolk," which would dominate Europe and the world. And so the persecution of the Jews was popularized throughout the country. It provided the cement which bound the people to the regime. It gave the youths a butt to bully and so to acquire practical schooling in brutality. With the accession to power the persecution of the Jews increased in violence. The final solution of mass murder had then been conceived. In Mein Kampf of Hitler, the bible of the Nazis, Hitler had regretted that poison' gas had not been employed to exterminate the German Jews during the last war, and as early as 1925 Streicher said (Document Number M-13): "Let us make a new beginning today, so that we can annihilate the Jew." It may be that he, even before Hitler, Himmler, or the others, had visualized the annihilation of the Jews, but the Nazis were not at first ready completely to defy world opinion and they confined themselves to persecution and to making life in Germany unbearable for Jews. To the never-ceasing accompaniment of the Sturmer and the official Nazi press the campaign of Jew-baiting was fostered and encouraged. Rosenberg, Von Schirach, Goering, Hess, Funk, Bormann, Frick joined hands with Streicher and Goebbels. The boycott in April 1933 celebrated the Nazi accession to power and provided only a taste of what was to follow. It was accompanied by demonstrations and window-smashing-"Action Mirror" as it has been referred to in this Court.
SIR HARTLEY SHAWCROSS (Chief Prosecutor for the United Kingdom): Accounts of typical incidents are given in the affidavit of the witness Geist who describes the events in Berlin on 6 March 1933 (Document Number 1759-PS): "Wholesale attacks on the Communists, Jews, and those who were suspected of being either; mobs of SA men roamed the streets, beating up, looting, and even killing persons." In 1935 followed the infamous Nuremberg Decrees. In 1938 the so-called spontaneous demonstrations ordered throughout Germany resulted in the burning of the synagogues, the throwing of 20,000 Jews into concentration camps with the accompaniment of penalties, of Aryanization of property, and the wearing of a yellow star. The cynicism of these men and the merciless character of their policy towards the Jews appeared at Goering's meeting of 12 November 1938, when they vied with each other in suggesting methods of degrading and persecuting their helpless victims. Neither Hitler nor Himmler, whom today they seek to blame, was present, but who, reading the record of that meeting, can doubt the end in store for the Jews of Europe? At that meeting Heydrich reported on the events which occurred on the night of 9 November: 101 synagogues destroyed by fire, 76 demolished and 7,500 stores ruined throughout the Reich. The Reichsmark approximate cost of replacing broken glass alone was estimated at 6 million and the damage to one store alone in Berlin at 1.7 million Reichsmark. Heydrich also reported 800 cases of looting, the killing of 35 Jews, and estimated the total damage of property, furniture, and goods at several hundred million Reichsmark. You' will recall Heydrich's order for the riot, including the arrests of the Jews and their removal to concentration camps. After referring to the fact that demonstrations were to be expected in view of the killing of a German legation official in Paris that night, he instructs the Police on the prospective burning of synagogues, destruction of business, and private apartments of Jews, and in their duty to refrain from hindering the demonstrators: ". . .
SIR HARTLEY SHAWCROSS (Chief Prosecutor for the United Kingdom): the Police has only to supervise compliance with the instructions." And finally (Document Number 3051-PS): "In all districts as many Jews-especially rich ones-are to be arrested as can be accommodated in the existing prisons. For the time being only healthy men, not too old, are to be arrested. Upon their arrest, the appropriate concentration camps should be contacted immediately in order to confine them in these camps as fast as possible." We now know from the evidence with regard to the seizure of the houses of Jews by Neurath and Rosenberg why the orders were to concentrate upon the richest (Document Number 1759-PS). These events are neither secret nor hidden. Ministers were writing to each other and discussing them. Long before 1939 they were common knowledge not only to Germany but to the whole world. Every one of these defendants must have heard again and again stories similar to that of Sollman. Almost all of them have sought to gain credit from helping one or two Jews; and you will remember the evidence of a special office in Goering's Ministry to deal with protests, and his witness Korner who stated with pride that Goering had always intervened on behalf of individuals (Session of 12 March 1946 a. m.). Perhaps it afforded them some gratification or eased their conscience in some way occasionally to demonstrate their influence by exempting some unhappy individual who sought their favor from the general horror of the regime which they continued to uphold. But these men participated in a Government which was conducted without any regard for human decency or established law. There is not one of them who, being a member of the Government during that period, has not got the blood of hundreds of his own countrymen on his hands. Goering and Frick established the concentration camps; the witness Severing and the documents quoted testify to the murders which took place in them at a time when these two were directly responsible. Even Goering could not defend all the murders of 30 June 1934.
SIR HARTLEY SHAWCROSS (Chief Prosecutor for the United Kingdom): He shares with Hess and Frick the responsibility for the Nuremberg Laws. The record of the meeting of 12 November 1938 (Document Number 1816-PS) and Goering's initials on Heydrich's order of the 9 November (Document Number 3051-PS) require no comment. As Ambassador in England, Ribbentrop must have been well aware of the facts, if only from the English papers, whilst his delegate Woermann assented to the atrocities reported to the meeting of 12 November 1938. The previous owner of his country house, Herr Von Remitz, was placed in a concentration camp, and he expressed his sentiments toward the Jews to M. Bonnet, on 8 December 1938 in the following terms (Document Number L-205): "The German Government had therefore decided to assimilate them"-the Jews-"with the criminal elements of the population. The property which they acquired illegally would be taken from them. They would be forced to live in districts inhabited by the criminal classes." Hess, who set up an office for racial policy in 1933, shares responsibility for the Nuremberg Decrees (Document Number 1814-PS). At the meeting of 12 November 1938 a full report was given of similar measures against the Jews in Austria (Document Number 1816-PS) and it seems certain that the Defendant Kaltenbrunner as a faithful member of the Party was giving full support to the necessary measures. The evidence that Seyss-Inquart was playing his part is before the Tribunal. Rosenberg was writing The Myth of the 20th Century and taking his full share in the struggle against the Church and in the anti-Semitic policy of the Government; whilst even Raeder on Heroes' Day 1939 was speaking of "the clear and inspiring summons to fight Bolshevism and international Jewry whose race-destroying activities we have sufficiently experienced on our own people." Frick, as Minister of the Interior, bears a responsibility second to none for the horrors of the concentration camps and for the Gestapo, whilst Frank, as Minister of Justice for Bavaria, was presumably receiving the reports on the murders in Dachau.
SIR HARTLEY SHAWCROSS (Chief Prosecutor for the United Kingdom): He was the leading jurist of the Party, a member of the Central Committee which carried out the boycott of the Jews in March 1933 and he spoke on the wireless in March 1934 justifying racial legislation and the elimination of hostile political organizations. He also was present at Goering's meeting. The Tribunal will not require to be reminded of the part played by Streicher. It was in March 1938 that the Sturmer began consistently to advocate extermination, the first article of a series which was to continue throughout the next 7 years, beginning with an article signed by Streicher ending with the words: "We are approaching wonderful times-a Greater Germany without Jews." Funk, as Vice President of the Reich Chamber for Culture from 1933, had participated in the policy for the elimination of the Jews (Document 3505-PS); he was present and assented to the recommendations at Goering's November meeting in 1938 at which it will be remembered Goering suggested that it would have been better to kill 200 Jews, whereupon Heydrich mentioned that in fact the number was a mere 35 (Document 1816-PS). Schacht himself admitted that as early as the second half of 1934 and the first half of 1935 he found that he was wrong in thinking that Hitler would bring the "revolutionary" force of the Nazis into a regulated atmosphere, and that he discovered that Hitler, having done nothing to stop the excesses of individual Party members or Party groups, was in fact pursuing a "policy of terror." Nevertheless he remained in of lice and Schacht accepted the Golden Party Badge in January 1937 when Von Eltz refused it. Schirach has confirmed his part in insuring that the younger generation of Germany grew up rabid anti-Semites under his teaching. He cannot escape responsibility for training the youth to bully Jews, to persecute the Church, to prepare for war. This perversion of children is perhaps the basest crime of all. Sauckel, who had joined the Party in 1921, filled the post of Gauleiter of Thuringia (Document Number 2974-PS).
SIR HARTLEY SHAWCROSS (Chief Prosecutor for the United Kingdom): He cannot have been ignorant of the persecution of the churches, of the trade unions, of other political parties and of the Jews, taking place throughout this important Gau, and there is every reason to suppose that he gave the fullest support to these policies and thus enhanced his reputation with the Nazis. Papen and Neurath were in a better position to judge these matters than any of the other defendants, since it was their political associates who were being persecuted; whilst, in the case of Papen, some of his own staff were killed and he himself arrested and was lucky to escape with his life. Neurath's attitude to the Jews is shown by his speech in September 1933: "The stupid talk about purely internal affairs, as for example the Jewish question, will quickly be silenced if one realizes that the necessary cleaning up of public life must temporarily entail individual cases of personal hardship but that nevertheless it only serves to establish all the more firmly the authority of justice and law in Germany." What prostitution of these great words! Of the remainder, all were men of intelligence and already held positions of considerable authority. None of them can have been ignorant of what the whole world knew, yet not one of them has suggested that he made any effective protest against this regime of brutality and terror. All of these men continued in their spheres of government and in the highest positions of responsibility. Each in his part-and such a vital part-these men built up the evil \ thing, the ultimate purpose of which was so well known to them, and instilled the evil doctrines which were essential to the achievement of that purpose. It was Lord Acton-that great European- who, 80 years ago, in expressing his conviction of the sanctity of human life, said: "The greatest crime is homicide.
SIR HARTLEY SHAWCROSS (Chief Prosecutor for the United Kingdom): The accomplice is no better than the assassin; the theorist is the worst." I shall return if I may, later, to the question of conspiracy and to the part these men played in it, but no conclusion upon the conspiracy charge in the first Count of the Indictment is really possible until the specific Crimes set out in the subsequent counts have been considered. And first of these is the Crime against Peace, set out in Count Two. I say first, first in its place in the Indictment. Moralists may argue which is greatest in moral guilt. But this perhaps should be said at the very outset. It is said that there is no such crime as a crime against peace, and those superficial thinkers who, whether in this Court or in armchairs elsewhere, have questioned the validity of these proceedings, have made much of this argument. Of its merits I shall have something to say presently. But let it be said plainly now that these defendants are charged also as common murderers. That charge alone merits the imposition of the supreme penalty and the joinder in the Indictment of this Crime against Peace can add nothing to the penalty which may be imposed on these individuals. Is it, then, a mere work of supererogation to have included this matter in the Indictment at all? We think not, for the very reason that more is at stake here than the fate of these individuals. It is the crime of war which is at once the object and the parent of the other crimes; the Crimes against Humanity, the War Crimes, the common murders. These things occur when men embark on total war as an instrument of policy for aggressive ends. , Moreover, taking this crime, the Crime against Peace, in isolation, it was responsible for the deaths in battle of 10 million men, and for bringing to the very edge of ruin the whole moral and material structure of our civilization.
SIR HARTLEY SHAWCROSS (Chief Prosecutor for the United Kingdom): Although it may be that it may add nothing to the penalty which may be imposed upon these men, it is a fundamental part of these proceedings to establish for all time that international law has the power, inherent in its very nature, both to declare that a war is criminal and to deal with those who aid and abet their states in its commission. I shall come back to the law. Let me first refer to the facts. You have had from Defense Counsel an elaborate, but a partial and a highly controversial account of foreign relations leading up to 1939. I do not propose to follow them in that examination, nor am I concerned to say that as events have turned out, the policies pursued by the democratic powers may not sometimes have been 448	, weak, vacillating, and open to criticism. Defense Counsel have sought to base some argument on the protocol attached to the German-Soviet Pact. They argue that it was wrong. I am not concerned with that, and, of course, I do not concede it. But let them argue that it was wrong. Do two wrongs make a right? Not in that international law which this Tribunal will administer. The review which Defense Counsel have made entirely overlooks the two basic facts in this case, that from the time of Mein Kampf on, the whole aim of Nazi policy was expansion, aggression, domination, and that the democratic powers had to deal with a Germany of which that was, in spite of occasional lip service to peace, the fundamental aim. If peace was contemplated at all, it was peace only at Germany's price. And knowing that that price would not be and could not be paid voluntarily, the Germans were determined to secure it by force. Whilst the German people were being psychologically prepared for war, the necessary measures of rearmament were taken simultaneously. At his conference on the 23d of November 1939, Hitler summed up this period of preparation in these words (Document Number 789-PS): "I had to reorganize everything beginning with the mass of the people extending it to the Armed Forces.
SIR HARTLEY SHAWCROSS (Chief Prosecutor for the United Kingdom): First internal reorganization, eradication of appearances of decay and of defeatist ideas, education for heroism. While reorganizing internally, I undertook the second task to release Germany from its international ties . . . secession from the League of Nations and denunciation of the Disarmament Conference... After that the order for rearmament . . . In 1935 the introduction of compulsory armed service. After that militarization of the Rhineland..." The conspirators set out first to get rid of the political restraints which prevented rearmament. In October 1933 Germany left the League of Nations and in March 1935 renounced the armament clauses of Versailles and informed the world of the establishment of an air force, of a large standing army, and of conscription. Already the Reich Defense Council had been set up and its Working Committee had had its second meeting as early as 26 April 1933 with representatives from every department. It is difficult, is it not, to believe that reading the minutes of these meetings, as they must have done, Neurath, Frick, Schacht, Goering, Raeder, Keitel, and Jodl, the last two being generally present, can have supposed that the regime did not intend war. On the economic side Schacht, already President of the Reichsbank and Minister of Economics, was made General Plenipotentiary for War Economy in May 1935. The appointment was to be a complete secret (Document Number 2261-PS). His contribution is best expressed in his own words (Document Number EC-611): "It is possible that no bank of issue in peacetime carried on such a daring credit policy as the Reichsbank since the seizure of power by National Socialism. With the aid of this credit policy, however, Germany created an armament second to none and this armament in turn made possible the results of our policy." Schacht's speech on 29 November 1938 is seen to be no boast when the report of his deputy, which has been put in evidence, is considered.
SIR HARTLEY SHAWCROSS (Chief Prosecutor for the United Kingdom): That report shows that under Schacht's guidance, 180,000 industrial plants had been surveyed as to usefulness for war purposes (Document Number EC-258). Economic plans for the production of 200 basic materials had been worked out. A system for the letting of war contracts had been revised, allocations of coal, motor fuel and power had been determined, 248 million Reichsmark had been spent on storage facilities alone, evacuation plans for skilled workers and war materials and military zones had been worked out; 80 million wartime ration cards had already been printed and distributed to local areas and a card index on the skill of some 20 million workers had been prepared. The most detailed and thorough preparations which that report sets out were not made without the knowledge of every member of the Government and no more graphic illustration of the common purpose and awareness of the aim which permeated all departments of the State is to be found than the second meeting of the Reich Defense Council itself held on 25 June 1939, under the presidency of the Defendant Goering, the head of the Four Year Plan. The Defendants Frick, Funk, Keitel, and Raeder were present and Hess and Ribbentrop were represented. The methodical detail in the plans which were being worked out-the preparation in respect of manpower involving the use of concentration camp workers and the unfortunate slaves of the protectorate are eloquent testimonies to the size of the struggle upon which these men knew that Germany was about to embark. The major share in rearmament must be attributed to the Defendants Goering, Schacht, Raeder, Keitel, and Jodl, but the others, too, each in his sphere, played their parts: Rosenberg, Schirach, and Streicher in education, Doenitz in the preparation of the U-boat fleet, Neurath and Ribbentrop in the field of foreign affairs. Funk and Fritzsche were reorganizing propaganda and news systems until the former succeeded Schacht and became Minister of Economics and in September 1938 General Plenipotentiary for Economics.