dtufail/nuremberg-trials-corpus huggingface dataset:
DR. SIEMERS: I now come to the charge of the Prosecution with regard to a war of aggression against Russia. The charge of the Prosecution on this subject cannot be very well understood. Land warfare only was concerned, so that the Navy did not have to make any preparations, with the exception of a few in the Baltic Sea. The Prosecution itself has furthermore stated that Raeder had been opposed to the war against Russia. The only thing which might be left of the charge of the Prosecution is its claim that Raeder had fundamentally been in favor of the war against Russia also and had only been opposed to Hitler with regard to the time factor. With reference to Document Number C-170 the Prosecution states that Raeder had only recommended the postponement of the war against Russia until after the victory over Britain. In the light of Document C-170 this actually might appear plausible. In reality, however, the case is different, and the true state of affairs has been cleared up by the detailed presentation of evidence. The witness Admiral Schulte-Monting has clearly stated, without being contradicted in cross-examination, that Raeder not only raised objections with regard to the time but that he argued with Hitler about a campaign against Russia and did so for moral reasons and reasons of international law, because he was of the opinion that the NonAggression Pact with Russia as well as the trade agreement should be observed under all circumstances. The Navy was especially interested in deliveries from Russia and always tried to observe the treaties strictly. Besides this basic principle of observing treaties, that is, besides this general reason, Raeder was of the opinion that a war against Russia would also be wrong from the strategic standpoint. His own testimony and that of Schulte-Monting show that in September, November, and December 1940 Raeder tried again and again to dissuade Hitler from contemplating a war against Russia. It is correct that in Document C-170 only the strategic justification for his opposition has been recorded.
DR. SIEMERS: However, this is not at all surprising because in the papers of the Naval Operations Staff naturally only justifications were recorded which were of naval-technical and strategic importance, but not political reasons. I have already shown that as a general principle Hitler did not permit Raeder, as Commander-in-Chief of the Navy, to intervene in questions concerning foreign policy, that is to say, in things which did not belong in his department. If Raeder did on occasion undertake this contrary to the will of Hitler in cases of special importance, then he could do so only privately, and was then unable to record these conversations in the War Diary. However, he always told everything to his Chief of Staff as his closest confidant. As a result Schulte-Monting could absolutely confirm that Raeder in this case opposed Hitler because of misgivings with regard to morality and international law, and furthermore also employed strategic reasons in the hope of thus being able to bring more influence to bear on Hitler. Schulte-Monting even stated-just like Raeder-that in November the latter had gained the impression, after a discussion, that he had dissuaded Hitler from his plans. I believe that this has clarified the matter, and only the tragic fact remains that Hitler paid just as little attention to Raeder's political objections with regard to Russia as with regard to Norway and France. A similar situation obtains with regard to the charge of the Prosecution referring to the war of aggression against the United States and the violation of the neutrality of Brazil. Both of these charges are sufficiently refuted within the framework of the evidence, so that I am only going to discuss them very briefly. According to the statement of the Prosecution, Raeder somehow collaborated in the plan to induce Japan to attack the United States. As a matter of fact no naval strategic conferences were held between Japan and Raeder. Raeder always held the conviction that a war against the United States must be avoided just as much as a war against Russia.
DR. SIEMERS: This attitude is understandable seeing that he had always held the opinion that Hitler should under no circumstances wage a war against Britain. Since the war against Britain had now come about, it was Raeder's duty as Commander-in-Chief of the Navy to use all his strength to fight successfully against Britain. Raeder knew the limitations of the fighting capacity of the Navy; and it was, therefore, quite out of the question that he should have collaborated in an extension of the naval war, considering, as he did, that the conduct of a war against Britain was already a too difficult task. Document C-152 submitted by the Prosecution therefore mentions only a proposition that Japan should attack Singapore and is based on the assumption that the United States should be kept out of the war. This suggestion made to Hitler that Japan should attack Singapore was correct in every respect. After all, we were at war with England, and Raeder was forced to try to concentrate all his forces against that country. He was thus justified in suggesting that Japan-as Germany's ally-should attack England. Moreover this, the only discussion by Raeder, was not held until 18 March 1941, while Hitler had already in his Directive Number 24 of 5 March 1941 established the guiding principle that Japan must attack Singapore, which he considered a key position of Britain (Document C-175). I should like to interpose one sentence here. It can be seen from the report by General Marshall that no common plan had been found to exist between Germany and Japan. As Schulte-Monting has affirmed, Raeder was just as surprised by the sudden attack by Japan on Pearl Harbor as every other German. The attempt of the Prosecution to discredit this statement during the cross-examination of Schulte-Monting by introducing a telegram from the naval attache in Tokyo to Berlin, dated 6 December 1941 (Document D-872), failed.
DR. SIEMERS: In the first place Raeder probably only received this telegram after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December had already started; and besides, Pearl Harbor is not mentioned at all in the telegram. The charge of the Prosecution with regard to Brazil has been refuted just as effectively because, after my statements during the hearing of evidence, the Prosecution did not revert to this point in any of the cross-examinations of Raeder, Schulte-Monting and Wagner. The charge was that, according to Jodl's diary, the Naval Operations Staff authorized and approved the use of arms against Brazilian warships and merchant vessels fully 2 months before the outbreak of war between Germany and Brazil (Document 1807-PS). Apart from the testimony of witnesses, this case is refuted by documents, namely, the complete excerpt from Jodl's diary which I submitted as Exhibit Number Raeder-115, as well as by Documents Number Raeder-116 to 118. These documents reveal that Brazil had violated the rules of neutrality by permitting the United States to make use of Brazilian airfields as a base for attacks on German and Italian U-boats. The Brazilian Air Ministry had furthermore officially announced that attacks had been made by the Brazilian Air Force. Considering such conduct, which is against all the rules of neutrality, the demand of the Naval Operations Staff for armed action against Brazilian vessels is justified. So here again the Prosecution failed to prove Raeder to have committed a crime or even a violation of international law. The Prosecution has very painstakingly submitted an exceedingly large amount of material, and the wealth of detail called for great care in the submission of evidence for the Defense. I have endeavored to deal with all the charges in the submission of evidence or in my final plea, and have made efforts to show as clearly as possible that none of them, partly on factual, partly on legal grounds, comply with the requirements of a criminal case within the meaning of this Charter.
DR. SIEMERS: Insofar as I have not, in spite of my desire for great exactitude, dealt with certain documents, it was because they seemed to me of small importance and in any case of no importance in criminal law; for instance, the many cases in which Raeder was only mentioned because-without officially taking any part-he received a copy of the documents for routine reasons. It would have been tedious to go into such recurrent cases, even if the Prosecution reiterated these formal indications, so that one was often tempted to recall the saying of Napoleon that repetition is that turn of speech which acts as the best evidence. I further believe that in my final plea for Admiral Raeder I may forego argumentation regarding genuine war crimes, the crimes against humanity, since I am unable to establish any connection between these and Raeder from the material submitted by the Prosecution. Also no particular charge is made against Raeder in this connection, with the exception of the two cases connected with the Commando Order, namely, the shooting of two soldiers in Bordeaux and the shooting of the British soldier Evans, who was made a prisoner by the SD on the Swedish border after he had previously participated in the midget submarine attack on the Tirpitz. Thus far the charge has been refuted by testimony insofar as it concerns the Navy. Both cases did not come, or came only later, to the knowledge of the Naval Operations Staff-just before Raeder's departure. In both cases action was taken on the basis of the Commando Order by Hitler himself or by the SD without the knowledge and will of the Naval Operations Staff; and what is most important, in both cases the documents of the Prosecution showed that these soldiers were in civilian clothes and, therefore, were not entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention (Document Number D-864, Exhibit GB-457 and Document UK-57, Exhibit GB-164). All the other criminal facts which the Prosecution submitted, especially applying to the East, ~ need not deal with, as Raeder did not participate in them.
DR. SIEMERS: I hope that here also I shall have the approval of the Court in mentioning the handling of the Katyn case, in which the Court pointed out that Raeder was not involved and therefore refused to allow me to act as defense counsel in this connection; from this I draw the legal conclusion that Raeder cannot even by implication through the conspiracy be considered as burdened with these criminal facts, since he did not know of these events and had nothing to do with them. The case for the Prosecution is founded on a desire to see its basic theory accepted and acknowledged, namely, the conception that so many crimes cannot have emanated from the will of a single individual but rather that they result from a conspiracy, a plot, involving many persons. These conspirators could logically, in the first place, only have been Hitler's own collaborators, that is to say, the real National Socialists. Since however, Hitler wished to achieve and did achieve concrete results of military and economic import, something peculiar transpired: There were no specialists among the National Socialists for these tasks. Most of the National Socialist collaborators had not previously followed a trade providing technical education. Hitler, therefore, despite his desire to have only National Socialists around him, took on as key people in particular fields specialists who were not National Socialists, such as for instance Neurath for politics, and Schacht for economics; and for military tasks, Fritsch for the Army and Raeder for the Navy.
DR. SIEMERS: The Prosecution followed this process from the angle of its conspiracy theory, without paying attention to the fact that these people, not being National Socialists, could in no way be counted among the conspirators and without taking into account that Hitler used these non-National Socialists only as technicians in a well-defined field, and only as long as it seemed absolutely necessary to him; therefore he agreed to the departure of these men, who were essentially not in sympathy with him, as soon as the differences between them seemed unbridgeable, which was bound to happen sooner or later with each of them, depending on the particular field. involved. By this all-embracing conception of the idea of conspiracy and by this extension of the Prosecution's fight to non-National Socialists, the Prosecution abandoned the basic concept formerly propagated abroad, namely, that of fighting National Socialism but not against the whole of Germany-two ideas which at no time and in no place have been really identical, as the Prosecution now tries to make out. I do believe that thereby the Prosecution is also going back on President Roosevelt's basic idea. Yet another factual and legal point of view has not been taken into consideration by the Prosecution. I mean the concept of the division of competence under state law, that is to say the subdivision into individual departments. This division of competence, founded on the idea of division of labor, is essentially separative in character; it divides the field of work according to local, functional, and technical points of view. Thereby it defines positively the limits within which each division is to become active, and at the same time it defines negatively the boundaries of such activity by specifying which problems no longer concern the agencies in question, that is to say, where they must not exercise any official activity.
DR. SIEMERS: In a democracy additional contacts exist by virtue of general Cabinet meetings and through the Prime Minister, the Reich President, or the Reich Chancellor, as the case may be. In a dictatorship it is different, particularly if the dictator, as was the case with Hitler in the National Socialist State, exploits the segregation of the various departments with extreme skill and sees to it that they are kept as isolated as possible, with the result that all power of decision rests finally with him as the dictator, who may even play off one department against the other. The strict partitioning into governmental departments as carried out in the National Socialist State in itself refutes the concept of conspiracy and renders it extremely difficult for the individual to exceed the limits of his own department in any manner. This significance may be illustrated by the following example: The maintenance of political relations with other states, the contracting or cancellation of agreements or alliances with other states, the declaration of war and conclusion of peace, are matters within the jurisdiction of the authority directing foreign affairs; but they are not within the jurisdiction of the agencies concerned with domestic tasks, such as for instance the Reich Finance Administration, Justice, or the Military. Thus, since the decision concerning war and peace is not a matter for the military, the military has to accept the decisions made by the political leadership, decisions which have a binding material effect on the military authorities. The military commander must assume for his department the consequences resulting from the decision. As soon as war is declared, the military forces must fight. They do not bear any responsibility for the war, since they were not able to take part in the decision that war should be declared. Consequently, for an army the concept of war of aggression exists in the strategic sense only.
DR. SIEMERS: Aside from that, any war it may be obliged to wage is, to the army, simply war, regardless of how it may be qualified legally (Article 45 of the Reich Constitution). Responsibility, from the point of view of state law and criminal law, is in proportion to the extent of jurisdiction. Therefore, if the commander-in-chief of a branch of the Armed Forces is responsible solely for the waging of war, though not for the causes leading to 17 July war, his responsibility in respect to a strategic plan must be confined to the plan as such, but not to the possible origin of the war for which the strategic plan was worked out. This officially and legally important segregation of governmental departments and the distribution of authority was, in the interest of strengthening his own power in a particularly emphatic manner, carried out by Hitler in many domains, such as for instance the creation of the "Delegate for the Four Year Plan," whose field of work should have belonged to the Ministry of Economics; the creation of Reich Commissioners in the occupied territories, whose activity really should have come under military administration; and, finally, a fact of interest in the Raeder case, the very precise delimitation of the three branches of the Armed Forces and the elimination of the Reich Defense Minister or Minister of War who held the three branches of the Armed Forces together and unified them. The greater the number of governmental departments became, the stronger Hitler became as dictator, being the only person with authority over all the innumerable agencies. But along with this the official as well as the legal responsibility for strategic plans on the part of any one individual department decreased; in this instance, that of the Navy. Consequently, the commander-in-chief of a branch of the Armed Forces, for instance the Navy, can in case of strategic planning only be responsible for the planning of naval strategy; he is not afforded an over-all picture of the total plan.
DR. SIEMERS: The total plan was discussed nowhere; politically and militarily it was in Hitler's hands exclusively, because he alone was the center where all threads, all activities of the individual departments joined. May I add a sentence here and remind you that, for instance, in the case of the Norway action even Goering was not informed until March 1940, which is one proof of the extreme segregation of the individual departments within the Armed Forces. In addition, purely strategic planning as such cannot be criminal, because it is customary in every country and because in every country the military commander of a branch of the Armed Forces does not and cannot know to what end the political leadership will use the plan prepared by him, whether for a war of aggression or a defensive war. The documents submitted in my document books prove convincingly that the military agencies in Allied countries as well as in Germany worked out strategic plans in the same manner, for the same areas, and at the same times, namely, in regard to Norway, Belgium (Documents Number Raeder-33 and 34), Holland, Greece, Romania; moreover, the Allied plans included the destruction of the Romanian oil fields and especially of the oil sources in the Caucasus (Document Number Ribbentrop-221 and Number Raeder-41). Particularly the plans concerning the Caucasus on the part of the Supreme Council, that is, the combined British and French General Staff, show the correctness of the statements. The Supreme Council would certainly refuse to be made politically responsible for these strategic plans, although the Soviet Union was still neutral at the time and the execution of the plans was to strike a blow not only at an enemy country, Germany, but also at a neutral, the Soviet Union, as the documents show. The similarity of the documents concerning such plans is absolutely convincing and shows a strong parallel trend.
DR. SIEMERS: May I point in this connection to statements I made here on occasion of the comprehensive discussion regarding the relevance and admissibility of the documents submitted by me; may I point, in addition, to Document Number Raeder-130, the letter of the Foreign Office, in which submission of the British Admiralty files is refused but in which the plans in regard to Norway and the whole of Scandinavia are admitted, with the remark that the plan was not put into effect, which fact was due only to Germany's having forestalled the execution of the plan. Anyone is entitled to be a pacifist and, therefore, basically opposed to the military. However, one must be consistent and take a stand not only against German military force but against any military force. One may condemn the fact that the military, as the operational authority, prepares military plans; and one may for the future insist that such planning shall be punishable. But in that case not only German military planning, but foreign military planning also must be punishable. These points show that the Prosecution misjudges both actual and legal conditions in desiring to make Raeder responsible for political decisions, although he had nothing to do with them but always worked simply as a soldier. Just as there could be no suggestion 130 years ago of bringing before a court an admiral of Napoleon, the dictator, it is impossible now to condemn an admiral of Hitler, the dictator. With dictators, in particular-and this the Prosecution overlooks-not only the power and the influence of a military commander diminishes, but his responsibility must also diminish to the same extent, for the dictator will have seized all power and with it all responsibility-especially if he is possessed of such an extraordinary will and such immense power as Hitler.
DR. SIEMERS: The French prosecutor stated literally and very aptly on 7 February 1946 before this Tribunal: '`Hitler was actually the incarnation of all will." The resulting strength and power has not been sufficiently appreciated by the Prosecution, and has certainly not been taken into consideration in the presentation of the facts and the legal conclusions. How great this power is, Gustave le Bon shows in his famous book Psychology of the Masses (published by Alfred Kroner) in the chapter entitled, "The Leaders of the Masses." I quote from it: "Within the class of leaders quite a strict division can be made. The energetic people with strong wills but without perseverance belong to the one kind; the people with a strong, persevering will belong to the other kind, which is much rarer.... The second class, those with a persevering will, exercise a much greater influence in spite of their less brilliant appearance." Hitler belongs to this second class of leaders, who, in accordance with this quotation, exercised an immense influence while, on the other hand, he was definitely unimpressive in his brown uniform. Gustave le Bon continues: "The unyielding will which they possess is an exceedingly rare and exceedingly powerful attribute which subdues everything. One does not always realize what a strong and persistent will can achieve Nothing can resist it, neither nature, nor gods, nor men." These words make it clear enough that Raeder could not resist either. Accordingly, only the question remains: Is it ever a soldier's duty to revolt-to resort to open mutiny? This 'question will be denied by every commander all over the world and likewise by every other person with a sole exception, namely, if it concerns the case of a dictator commanding the commission of a crime, the criminality of which is recognized by the military commander himself. Accordingly Raeder could be made responsible for a military crime only, but not for a political one, because for the political crime the dictator himself must answer.