dtufail/nuremberg-trials-corpus huggingface dataset:
SIR HARTLEY SHAWCROSS: The evidence that these territories were the scene of murder, slavery, terrorism, and spoliation on a scale without precedent in history, in breach of the most elementary rules as to belligerent occupation, has not really been seriously challenged. These crimes were in no sense sporadic or isolated depending on the sadism of a Koch here or cruelty by a Frank there. They were part and parcel of a deliberate and systematic plan of which their action in regard to slave labor was just a symptom. In order to establish the "1,000-year Reich," they set out to accomplish the extermination or permanent weakening of the racial and national groups of Europe or of those sections, such as the intelligentsia, on which the survival of those groups must largely depend. The origin of this terrible attempt upon the existence of free and ancient nations goes back to the whole Nazi doctrine of total war which rejected war as being merely against states and their armies, as international law provides. Nazi total war was also a war against civilian populations, against whole peoples. Hitler told Keitel at the end of the Polish campaign: "Prudence and severity must be the maxims in this racial struggle in order to spare us from going to battle on account of Poland again" (Document Number 864-PS). The aims of genocide were formulated by Hitler in the following words in his conversation with Hermann Rauschning: "The French complained after the war that there were 20 million Germans too many. We accept the criticism. We favor the planned control of population movements. But our friends will have to excuse us if we subtract the 20 millions else where. After all these centuries of whining about the protection of the poor and lowly, it is about time for the decision to protect the strong against the inferior. It will be one of the chief tasks of German statesmanship for all time to prevent, by every means in our power, the increase of the Slav races. Natural instincts bid all living beings not merely to conquer their enemies, but also destroy them.
SIR HARTLEY SHAWCROSS: In former days, it was the victor's prerogative to destroy entire tribes, entire peoples. By doing this gradually and without bloodshed, we demonstrate our humanity" (Document Number USSR-378). Himmler's vision was similar. I quote: "For us the end of this war will mean the open road to the East, the creation of the Germanic Reich in this way or that . . . the fetching home of 30 million human beings of our blood, so that still during our lifetime we shall be a people of 120 million Germanic souls. That means that we shall then be able to tackle the peace, during which we shall be willing for the first 20 years to rebuild and spread out our villages and towns, and that we shall push the borders of our German race 500 kilometers farther out to the East" (Document Number L-70). Their aims went beyond mere Germanization, the imposition of the German cultural pattern upon other peoples. Hitler was resolved to expel non-Germans from the soil he required but that they owned, and colonize it by Germans. This is plainly stated in Mein Kampf. I quote: "The Polish policy in the sense of a Germanization of the East, demanded by so many, was rooted unfortunately almost always in the same wrong conclusion. Here too it was believed that one could bring about a Germanization of the Polish element by a purely linguisitic integration into the German nationality. Here too the result would have been an unfortunate one; people of an alien race, expressing their alien thought in the German language, compromising the height and dignity of our own nationality by their own inferiority" (Document Number USA-256, Pages 429-430). Himmler put it even more clearly: "It is not our task to germanize the East in the old sense, that is to teach the people there the German language and the German law, but to see to it that only people of purely Germanic blood live in the East" (Document Number 2915-PS). The defendants were careful to conceal their true aims from their victims.
SIR HARTLEY SHAWCROSS: In January 1940 a captured report reads: "In order to relieve the living space of Poles in the Government General as well as in the liberated East, one should remove cheap labor temporarily by hundreds of thousands, employ them for a few years in the old Reich, and thereby hamper their native biological propagation at the same time," and it concludes: "Strictest care is to be taken that secret circulars, memoranda, and official correspondence which contain instructions detrimental to the Poles are kept rigidly under lock and key so that they will not some day fill the White Books printed in Paris or the U.S.A." (Document Number 661-PS). Again, the day before the appointment of Rosenberg as Minister for the East, Hitler told him in the presence of Keitel, Goering, and Bormann, I quote: "We ought to act here in exactly the same way as we did in the case of Norway, Denmark, Holland, and Belgium. In these -cases, too, we did not publish our aims and it is only sensible to continue in the same way. Therefore we shall emphasize again that we were forced to occupy, administer, or secure a certain area. It was in the interests of the inhabitants that we provided order, food, communications, et cetera. Hence our measures. Nobody shall be able to recognize that it initiates a final settlement. This should not prevent our taking all necessity measures-shooting, deportation, et cetera, and we shall take them" (Document Number ~221). Having given these words of caution to his confederates, you will remember how Hitler went on to elaborate his plans for the destruction of the Soviet peoples. The Crimea, he said, must be evacuated of all foreigners and settled by Germans only. "We now have to.
SIR HARTLEY SHAWCROSS: face the task of cutting up the giant cake according to our needs in order to be able: First, to dominate it, secondly, to administer it, thirdly, to exploit it." The pattern was exemplified in the infamous plan of Neurath and Frank for Bohemia and Moravia-the same Neurath whose counsel the day before yesterday asked you to respect the holiness of the individual" (Document Number 3859-PS). The pattern, I say, was exemplified in their plan for Bohemia and Moravia. No more terrible document has been put in evidence in this Trial nor one which more completely exposes the falsity of the slogan "Lebensraum," which constituted the excuse for the rape of Czechoslovakia. That plan required the elimination of the intelligentsia, the bearers of Czechoslovakian history and tradition, and, since the long-term solution of evacuating all Czechs completely from the country and replacing them by Germans could not be effected immediately because of shortage of Germans, a short term solution of germanizing the remainder of the population. This was to be done by rendering their language a dialect, by abolition of higher education, by instituting a stringent marriage policy after various racial examinations. You will remember Frank's summary. I quote: "Apart from the continuance of the propaganda for Germanization and the granting of advantages as an inducement, severest police methods with exile and special treatment for all saboteurs. Principle: 'Pastry and Whip' " (Document Number 3859-PS). You will remember too the plan for Poland discussed in Hitler's train on the 12th of September 1939 by Ribbentrop, Keitel, and Jodl, as described in the evidence of the witness Lahousen, and the discussion between Hitler, Schirach, and Frank 3 weeks later after dinner in the Fuehrer's apartment. ". . . there should be one master only for the Poles-the German; two masters side by side cannot and must not exist and therefore all representatives of Polish intelligentsia are to be exterminated. This sounds cruel but such is the law of life" (Document Number USSR-172).
SIR HARTLEY SHAWCROSS: Such were the plans for the Soviet Union, for Poland and for Czechoslovakia. Genocide was not restricted to extermination of the Jewish people or of the gypsies. It was applied in different forms to Yugoslavia, to the non-German inhabitants of Alsace-Lorraine, to the people of the Low Countries and of Norway. The technique varied from nation to nation, from people to people. The long-term aim was the same in all cases. The methods followed a similar pattern: First a deliberate program of murder, of outright annihilation. This was the method applied to the Polish intelligentsia, to gypsies, and to Jews. The killing of millions, even by the gas chambers and the mass shootings employed, was no easy matter. The defendants and their confederates also used methods of protracted annihilation, the favorite being to work their victims to death, hence Himmler's bond with the Minister of Justice in September 1942 under which antisocial elements were handed over to the SS "to be worked to death" (Document Number 654-PS). On the 14th of the same month Goebbels was recommending this method in terms: "With regard to the destruction of asocial life Dr. Goebbels has the opinion that the following groups should be exterminated: Jews and gypsies unconditionally, Poles who have to serve about 3 or 4 years of penal servitude, and Czechs and Germans who are sentenced to death or penal servitude for life or to security custody. The idea of exterminating them by labor is the best" (Document Number 682-PS). Another favorite technique of extermination was by starvation. Rosenberg, the great architect of this policy of national murder, told his collaborators in June 1941: "The object of feeding the German people stands this year without a doubt at the top of the lists of Germany's claims on the East, and there the southern territories and the northern Caucasus-will have to serve as a balance for the feeding of the German people. We see absolutely no reason for any obligation on our part to feed also the Russian people with the products of that surplus territory.
SIR HARTLEY SHAWCROSS: We know that this is a harsh necessity bare of any feelings. A very extensive evacuation will be necessary without any doubt and it is sure that the future will hold very hard years in store for the Russians" (Document Number 1058-PS). The method applied in Alsace was deportation. A captured report reads: "The first expulsion action was carried out in Alsace in the period from July to December 1940 in the course of which 105,000 persons were either expelled or prevented from returning. They were in the main Jews, gypsies and other foreign racial elements, criminals, antisocial, and incurably insane persons, and in addition Frenchmen, and Francophiles. The patois-speaking population was combed out by these series of deportations in the same way as the other Alsatians" (Document Number R-114). The report goes on to state that new deportations are being prepared and after reciting the categories affected, sums up the measures being taken: "...the problem of race has been given first consideration and this in such a manner that persons of racial value are to be deported to Germany proper and racially inferior persons to France." The Nazis also used various biological devices, as they have been called, to achieve genocide. They deliberately decreased the birthrate in the occupied countries by sterilization, castration, and abortion, by separating husband from wife and men from women and obstructing marriage. I quote: "We are obliged to depopulate"-said Miner to Rauschning- "as part of our mission of preserving the German population. We shall have to develop a technique of depopulation. If you ask me what I mean by depopulation, I mean the removal of entire racial units. And that is what I intend to carry out- that, roughly, is my task. Nature is cruel, therefore, we, too, must be cruel. If I can send the flower of the German nation into the hell of war without the smallest pity for the spilling of precious German blood, then surely I have the right to remove millions of an inferior race that breeds like vermin" (Document Number USSR-378).
SIR HARTLEY SHAWCROSS: You have seen Neurath's use of this biological device in his plan for Czechoslovakia. Listen to Bormann's directives for the Eastern territory summarized by one of Rosenberg's subordinates. I quote: "The Slavs are to work for us. Insofar as we do not need them, they may die. Therefore, compulsory vaccination and German health services are superfluous. The fertility of the Slavs is undesirable. They may use contraceptives or practice abortion; the more the better. Education is dangerous. It is enough if they can count up to a hundred. At best an education which produces useful stooges for us is admissible" (Document Number R-36). Himmler speaks with the same voice: "We must be honest, decent, loyal, and comradely to members of our own blood, to nobody else. What happens to the Russians, the Czechs, does not interest me in the slightest. What the nations can offer in the way of good blood of our type we will take, if necessary by kidnapping their children and raising them here with us. Whether nations live in prosperity or starve to death interests me only insofar as we need them as slaves for our Kultur; otherwise it is of no interest to me" (Document Number 1919-PS). The converse to methods designed to decrease the birthrate in occupied territories was the artificial increase in the birthrate of Germans. In February 1941 the Defendant Seyss-Inquart organized a system of giving away Dutch girls to German soldiers. In violation of Article 43 of the Hague Convention, he ordered changes in the law of the Netherlands so that he could assume parental and guardianship rights over girls, substituting himself for their parents if the parents refused their daughters permission to marry German soldiers. This policy of Seyss-Inquart's was later confirmed by the supreme authorities of the German Reich, Hitler, Keitel, and Lammers, on July 28th, 1942. A decree was issued granting subsidies and employment privileges for Dutch and Norwegian women bearing children to members of the German Armed Forces. And they have the impudence to talk now about the holiness of the individual.
SIR HARTLEY SHAWCROSS: This was simply a plan to transfer, as if it were some mercantile commodity, the biological resources of Holland and Norway to the use of the German people. Himmler was one of the advocates of stealing children; as he said on the 14th of October 1943: "Obviously in such a mixture of peoples there will always be some racially very good types. In these cases I think that it is our duty to take their children with us to remove them from their environment, if necessary by robbing or stealing them.... Either we win over any good blood that we can use for ourselves and give it a place in our people or... we destroy this blood" (Document Number L-70). In the case of Russia, Keitel, who had learned the phrase "shrewdness and severity" as the maxim for the exploitation of Poland, paved the way by his orders of the 13th of May and 23d of July 1941 (Documents Number C-50 and C-52). I quote from the latter, drafted on his own admission by Jodl: "In view of the vast size of the occupied areas in the East the forces available for establishing security in these areas will be sufficient only if all resistance is punished not -by legal prosecution of the guilty but by the spreading of such terror by the occupying power as is appropriate to eradicate every inclination to resist among the population. The competent commanders must find the means of keeping order... not by demanding more security forces but by applying suitable Draconic methods..." (Document Number C-52). The immediate needs of the war machine no doubt saved the western territories from similar destruction, but the Tribunal have an ample evidence of the plunder of France, the Low Countries, and the other territories which these men exploited to the utmost possible extent. In view of the nature of their murderous policy, it is not surprising that the men charged by the defendants to carry it out were brutes.
SIR HARTLEY SHAWCROSS: In Rosenberg's domain, for instance, there was Koch, who was recommended by Rosenberg for the post of Commissar in Moscow because of the very fact of his "absolute ruthlessness." It was Koch who caused the slaughter of several hundred innocent human beings in the Buman wood area so that he could have a private hunting reserve. Another of Rosenberg's agents was Kube, who wrote: ". . . we have liquidated in the last 10 weeks about 55,000 Jews in White Ruthenia. In the territory Minsk-Land Jewry has been eliminated without endangering the manpower demands. In the pre-eminently Polish territory Lida, 16,000 Jews, in Slonim 8,000 Jews and so forth have been liquidated" (Document Number 3428-PS). As in Poland the orders given to Frank were as follows: "Ruthless exploitation... reduction of entire Polish economy to absolute minimum necessary for bare existence... The Poles shall be the slaves of the greater German world empire" (Document Number :E:C-344). And we know how he carried it out. In January 1940 he records: "Cheap labor must be removed from the Government General by hundreds of thousands. This will hamper the native biological propagation..." (Document Number 2233-PS). In May he speaks of: "...taking advantage of the focusing of world interest on the Western Front by liquidations of thousands of the Poles, first the leading representatives of the Polish intelligentsia." And in December: "Poles must feel they have only one duty; to work and to behave. We must carry out all measures ruthlessly; rely on me..." We who try to understand the problems of eastern Europe must try to understand this; the details of the martyrdom of Poland simply cannot be described; a third of the people murdered; millions left impoverished, sick, maimed, and helpless; liberation was just in time to save this ancient people from the terrible fulfillment of the program which these men had plotted. Would that be a convenient moment to...
THE PRESIDENT: Certainly. [A recess was taken.]
SIR HARTLEY SHAWCROSS: There is one group to which the method of annihilation was applied on a scale so immense that it is my duty to refer separately to the evidence. I mean the extermination of the Jews. If there were no other crime against these men, this one alone, in which all of them were implicated, would suffice. History holds no parallel to these horrors. As soon as the prospect of a second World War became a certainty, Streicher, who had preached this infamous doctrine as far back as 1925, began in earnest to advocate annihilation (Document Number M-13). As he, on his own admission, had been instrumental in effecting the Nuremberg Decrees by years of propaganda in favor of racial laws, so now, in January 1939, anticipating the war which was to come, he began, in articles published in the Sturmer with "the full support of the highest Reich authority," to demand with all vehemence the physical extinction of the Jewish race. Unless words have completely lost their meaning, what do these words mean but murder: "They must be exterminated root and branch" (Document Number D-811). "Then will the criminal Jewish race be forever eradicated" (Document Number D-813). "Then will they slay the Jews in masses" (Document Number D-817). "Prepare a grave from which there can be no resurrection" (Document Number M-148). Almost immediately after the war had started the organized extermination of the Jewish race began: Hoess has told you: "The final solution of the Jewish question means the complete extermination of all Jews in Europe. I was ordered to establish extermination facilities in Auschwitz in June 1941. At that time there were already in the Government General three other extermination camps: Belzek, Treblinka, and Wolzek." Already the Jews in Germany and Poland had been concentrated in the ghettos of the Government General. Over dinner in the Fuehrer's apartment in October 1940, Frank had explained and I quote: "The activities in the Government General could be termed very successful.
SIR HARTLEY SHAWCROSS: The Jews in Warsaw and other cities were now locked up in ghettos, Krakow very shortly would be cleared of them. "Reichsleiter Von Schirach... remarked that he still had more than 50,000 Jews in Vienna whom lair. Frank would have to take over from him" (Document Number USSR-172). When the order actually came, therefore, the preparatory measures, so far as they affected Poland and Germany, had already been taken. Of the destruction of the ghettos and the slaughter of their populations General Stroop's report on the Warsaw action is eloquent evidence (Document Number 1061-PS). But the fate of the Jews in Warsaw was only typical of the fate of the Jews in every other ghetto in Poland. When they were not slaughtered in the ghettos themselves they were transported to the gas chambers. Hoess, Commandant of Auschwitz, described' the procedure: "I visited Treblinka to find out how they carried out their exterminations. The camp commandant at Treblinka told me that he had liquidated 80,000 in the course of one half-year. He was primarily concerned with the liquidation of the Jews from the Warsaw ghetto." Hoess describes the improvements that he made at Auschwitz. He introduced the new gas, Cyclone B which-I quote: ". . . took from 3 to 15 minutes to kill the people in the death chamber, depending upon climatic conditions. We knew when the people were dead because their screaming stopped.... Another improvement we made over Treblinka was that we 	built our gas chambers to accommodate 2,000 people at a time, whereas at Treblinka their 10 gas chambers accommodated only 200 people each." And he describes the selection of the victims from the daily transports that arrived: "Those who were fit for work were sent into the camp. Others were sent immediately to the extermination plants. Children of tender years were invariably exterminated since, by reason of their youth, they were unable to work.
SIR HARTLEY SHAWCROSS: Still another improvement we made over Treblinka was that at Treblinka the victims almost always knew they were to be exterminated and at Auschwitz we endeavored to fool the victims into thinking that they were going through a delousing process. Of course, frequently they realized our true intentions. Very frequently the women would hide their children under the clothes but of course when we found them we would send the children in to be exterminated. We were required to carry out these exterminations in secrecy, but of course the foul and nauseating stench from the continuous burning of bodies permeated the entire area and all of the people living in the surrounding communities knew that exterminations were going on at Auschwitz." So also must they have known in the districts surrounding Belzek, Treblinka, Wolzek, Mauthausen, Sachsenhausen, Flossenburg, Neuengamme, Gusen, Nataweiler, Lublin, Buchenwald, and Dachau. I do not repeat these things in order to make the blood run cold. It is right that a few of these typical matters should be extracted from the great mass of the evidence which is accumulated here so that one may see this thing in its true perspective and appreciate the cumulative effect of what has been proved. Whilst the German armies surged into Russia and the Baltic States, the Einsatzkommandos followed in their wake. Their dreadful work had been planned and prepared in advance. In the file describing the operations of the Task Force A there is a map of the Baltic countries showing the number of Jews that were living in each state who were to be hounded out and killed (Document Number L-180). Another map shows the results achieved after those 2 or 3 months' work-a total of 135,567 Jews destroyed. In another report on their operations during October 1941 it is proudly stated that they continued "on the march with the advancing troops into the sectors which have been assigned to them" (Document Number 2273-PS). These actions were not only the work of the SS and Himmler.