dtufail/nuremberg-trials-corpus huggingface dataset:
SIR DAVID MAXWELL-FYFE: It is one of those things it is easy to talk about--'The Jewish race is being exterminated,' says every Party member, 'that is quite clear, it is our program, elimination of the Jews, and we are doing it, exterminating them.' And then they come, 80 million worthy Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. Of course the others are vermin, but this one is an 'A 1' Jew. Not one of all those who talk this way has witnessed it, not one of them has been through it. Most of you must know what it means when 100 corpses are lying side by side, or 500, or 1,000. To have stuck it out and at the same time-apart from exceptions caused by human weakness-to have remained decent fellows, that is what makes us hard" (1919-PS, USA-170, Page 65). Can you see him telling all the commanding officers of one of his divisions: "Anti-Semitism. is exactly the same as delousing. Getting rid of lice is not a question of ideology, it is a matter of cleanliness. In just the same way anti-Semitism for us has not been a question of ideology but a matter of cleanliness" (1919-PS, USA-170). If you can imagine so much, can you imagine what you would say of the officers and of the men that they commanded? Is it possible that officers and men in these Waffen-SS divisions who could be spoken to in such a way were high-minded, clean-living, decent, and honorable soldiers? Such men, be they from Germany or from any other country in the world, would not tolerate these words. Those speeches have become hackneyed enough during the course of this Trial, but they never lose their significance. They show that every member of those SS units was a prototype of his SS Fuehrer. If it were not so the Defendant Goering could not have said, after telling Mussolini the horrors of Germany's methods in fighting the partisans, I quote: "Members of the Party discharge this task much more harshly and efficiently.... The SS, the guard of the old fighters of the Party, who have personal ties with the Fuehrer and who form a special elite, confirm this principle" (729, GB-281).
SIR DAVID MAXWELL-FYFE: If it were not so the Defendant Hess could not have written: "The units of the Waffen-SS ... are more suitable than other armed units for the specific tasks to be solved in the Occupied Eastern Territories due to their intensive National Socialist training in regard to questions of race and nationality" (3245-PS, GB-267, Page 354). We know what Hitler had in mind as the future role of the Waffen-SS State Police: to impose German authority in the conquered countries; State Police who would never fraternize with the proletariat and underworld. That was their destined role which all the Army knew because, by order of, the OKW, it had received the "greatest publicity." We know enough of the Nazi State Police, of the education and training of the Waffen-SS and the practical application of that training during these years of war to fit them for the task that lay ahead of them, to know also the sort of methods which they would have employed. It is those men, the men who were intended and had been trained to police and terrorize Europe, who compose the organization of the SS which we ask you to convict as criminal. Such are the main considerations in connection with these three organizations, the Corps of Political Leaders, the SA and the SS to which I desire to draw your attention. It was these organizations which provided the machinery by which the crimes that these defendants conceived were executed. These three organizations were not separate and distinct from each other, as their counsel have attempted to portray them. It was their members who together constituted--and still do--the fundamental and dangerous core of National Socialism. As the separate branches of the National Socialist elite their aims and purposes were the same and they worked and co-operated with each other using the same methods which were criminal for all to see. From the outset this was so and continued so until the end.
SIR DAVID MAXWELL-FYFE: Nothing more clearly demonstrates these things than the evidence of how the National Socialist Party and Government debased the concepts of law and order and corrupted the judicial practice of their courts in order to protect themselves and their followers in the criminal courses they were pursuing. Hardly had the Nazi Government come to power when the Nazi ministers, Nazi police, and Nazi judiciary were condoning violence and murder committed by the SA and the SS and the Gestapo. And for what reasons--reasons which must have demonstrated to all Germany, and must demonstrate to all the world today, the very rottenness of National Socialism: "As the deed did not originate from ignoble motive"--I quote--"but rather served the achievement of an exceedingly patriotic aim and the advance of the National Socialist State, the quashing of the proceedings ... does not seem incompatible with the orderly administration of criminal justice" (D-923, GB-615). Such was the opinion of the Public Prosecutor to the Provincial Court in Nuremberg in respect of the SA men who had beaten a Communist to death--beaten him until the soles of his feet were so swollen, I quote: "...owing to the mass of blood gathered there, that after the blood had been drained off by incision, pockets nearly the size of a fist were formed (D-923, GB-615). In Munich the State Minister of the Interior was giving similar reasons for quashing proceedings against SS guards in Dachau who had beaten a prisoner on the head until he died, I quote again: "As a reason it is pointed out that the conducting of investigations would cause great harm to the prestige of the National Socialist State, since these proceedings would be directed against members of the SA and SS, and thus the SA and SS as the chief protagonists of the National Socialist State would be immediately affected" (D-926, GB-568). Nazi judges were suspending proceedings against members of the SA in agreement with the supreme leadership of that organization.
SIR DAVID MAXWELL-FYFE: I quote again: "The deed and intention of the SA men were only aimed at the well-being of the National Socialist movement. Political reason and the purity of intentions is thus beyond doubt" (D-936, GB-616). When judges not yet accustomed to these new conceptions of law did convict SA guards who, I quote, "not only attempted to wring confessions from inmates but acted in a sheer lust for torture," they were at once expelled from the Party; the prosecutor who happened himself to be a member of the SA was warned that he should resign and the Gauleiter wrote to the Supreme Court advising that a pardon should be substituted for the sentence that had been imposed. Can there be any doubt that candidates for membership of these organizations did not know that membership afforded the license to murder? Nor were these concepts of law confined to the State and Party courts; the military could not resist anything so attractive. By 1939 a military judge was granting to an SS man extenuating circumstances, I quote: "... because he was induced to participate in the shooting by a corporal handing him a rifle. He was in a state of irritation owing to numerous atrocities committed by Poles against persons of German race. As an SS man particularly sensitive to the sight of Jews and to the hostile attitude of Jewry to the Germans, he therefore acted quite thoughtlessly in youthful rashness" (D-421, GB-567). Those SS soldiers had been sentenced to imprisonment for "manslaughter" which the army commander refused to confirm. It was for "manslaughter" of a kind known only to National Socialists who, as we have seen in this Court, display a curious sensitiveness to the word "murder." This they called manslaughter: "After about 50 Jews, who had been used during the day to repair a bridge, had finished their work in the evening, these two men drove them into a synagogue and shot them all without reason" (D-421, GB-567).
SIR DAVID MAXWELL-FYFE: Let me conclude by reminding you of the opinion of the Supreme Court, the supreme guardian of National Socialist honor and discipline, to whose august authority and jurisdiction the members of all these organizations were subject. Of the murders committed during the 1938 demonstrations by Hoheitstraeger and members of the SA and SS, the investigation of which had been entrusted to the Secret State Police and Party jurisdiction of Gauleiter and other Political Leaders, it was pleaded that, I quote, "in such case's as when Jews were killed without an order or contrary to orders, ignoble motives could not be determined." The purpose of those proceedings in the Party Court were, I quote again, "to protect those Party comrades who, motivated by decent National Socialist attitude and initiative, had overshot their mark" (3036-PS, USA-332). In those few lines you have the secret of all the death and suffering, the horror and tragedy, that these defendants and the members of these organizations have brought upon the world. You see to what depths of evil they corrupted the human conscience. No ignoble motive--the murder of women and children through "decent National Socialist attitude and initiative." Such was the National Socialist creed which the members of these organizations fanatically accepted, the creed which--can one doubt--they still cherish and, given the opportunity to do so, would revive. With regard to the High Command and General Staff, it is not my intention to trespass on the ground which will be covered so well by my colleagues. Nevertheless I want to state, as clearly and emphatically as it, may be stated, that the British Delegation unreservedly joins them in the request for the condemnation of the group indicted under that name. The men involved have joined in wars which they knew were unjust wars of aggression. They have borne essential parts in the deeds which in the hands of their immediate perpetrators are undeniably war crimes and crimes against humanity. Yet they protest their innocence.
SIR DAVID MAXWELL-FYFE: Our case against them has as clear a basis on the facts of this case as in the lessons of history. They carried out orders which on the admission of many of them bit deep into the remnants of their consciences. They knew that they were doing what was wrong, but they now say "Befehl ist Befehl"--an order is an order. All decent men find it difficult to blame others for absence of moral courage--they are only too conscious of their own failings in that direction. But there comes a point when, faced with crimes which are obvious murder or barbarity, there is a higher duty. Even Dr. Laternser admitted this was so. His suggestion to the witness Schreiber that he ought to have protested at the Army Staff's proposals for bacteriological warfare came strangely on behalf of these men whose very defense has been to declare the impossibility and uselessness of protest. What nonsense--what utter nonsense--is this which you have been asked to listen to by these defendants and their generals when their own counsel, to discredit a witness, must ask the very question which the Prosecution have been asking of themselves since the day this Trial began. In fairness to all military tradition it should not go forth that soldiers have sheltered behind the letter of a command from facing moral problems--and deciding them, rightly or wrongly, as moral problems. Great captains are not automata to be weighed against a rubber stamp. I need not traverse the history of our military figures--the philosophy of Montrose, the brooding thoughts of Marshal Ney, the troubled heart of Robert E. Lee in 1861--to find examples. Two of the greatest names in German military history spring to one's mind: Von Clausewitz leaving the Prussian Army to serve in that of Russia; Yorck von Wartenburg making his decision of neutrality--both put what they deemed the needs of Europe and humanity above the orders of the moment.
SIR DAVID MAXWELL-FYFE: How much more clear and obvious was the duty when the work of drafting, issuing, and carrying out the Nacht und Nebel Decree, the Commando Order, the Commissar Order, Hitler's order to murder our 50 Air Force officers, meant the defiling of every idea which every soldier cherishes and holds dear; when-as all of them who ever served upon the Eastern Front could see with their own eyes they were asked to support and co-operate in a calculated system of mass-extermination and utter brutality. These men, of all men, knew their leader to be a callous murderer, yet for years they had met in conference after conference to sit at his feet and listen to his words. They fed his lust for power and enslavement with the best of their professional skin. While the defenseless peoples of the East, the men, women and children of Poland, of the Soviet Union, and of the Baltic states, were being deliberately slaughtered and deported into slavery to allow for German "Lebensraum," these men talked of the necessities of war. When their own cities were bombed and Germans killed, they called it murder. Only in July 1944, when Hitler's star was dimmed, did three Field Marshals and five Colonel Generals recognize that he was murdering also their own country and took action. When that star was rising in victory they had hailed it and ignored the blood-red colour of the clouds from which it rose. So much for the facts and the merits. It is perhaps permissible to say one word on the construction of the Charter. The use of the two words "group" or "organization" surely connotes that the entity in question may have been either formally organized by the Nazis or selected by the Prosecution as a group which existed in living reality. This group was united by its special knowledge given at so many conferences, and voluntarily bound by the transmission of those criminal orders. For that reason we ask that it should be condemned.
SIR DAVID MAXWELL-FYFE: With regard to the Reichsregierung also I only desire to make it clear that the British Prosecution is again asking unhesitatingly for a conviction. Beyond this I wish to make two points only. Some question has been raised as to the position of those known Nazis who joined the Cabinet in 1933. If anyone in that Cabinet did not know to what he was committing himself on 30 January 1933, he had a very good idea in March when the Jews were attacked. His knowledge increased in April, when the whole nation was organized in boycotting the Jews and the official figures of 20,000 people under arrest were given in the German Press. In June 1934 he knew that murder was being used as an instrument of policy. In 1935 and 1936 he knew that the foreign policy was being carried on at the calculated risk of war. The other point on which I want to comment is the picture, given by the Defense, of ministers in complete ignorance of what was going on. In my submission, government does not function like that. Whether totalitarian or democratic, a government can only act by dealing with human beings. The lives of human beings are not lived in watertight compartments; their infinitely varying interests are inextricably interlocked. The most completely authoritarian minister must, as indeed Dr. Kubuschok in his speech was disposed to agree, consider the repercussions of his actions on the acts of his colleagues. In other words, he must know what is going on. It is because the men of this group knew what was going on, supported it and took the principal positions and richest rewards of the State for themselves as the price of such support, that we, ask for the conviction of the organization today. I have endeavored to show how the SD and the Gestapo fit into the scheme of the Nazi State. As one would expect, the evidence that I have mentioned introduces them in innumerable ways. Beyond once more emphasizing my support of my colleagues' plea for their conviction, I do not intend to comment further upon those organizations.
SIR DAVID MAXWELL-FYFE: My Lord, I am deeply conscious that one of the greatest difficulties, and not the least of the dangers, of this Trial is that those of us who have been engaged day in and day out for 9 months have reached the saturation point of horror. Shakespeare attempted to picture that saturation point in the memorable lines: "Blood and destruction shall be so in use And dreadful objects so familiar That mothers shall but smile when they behold Their infants quartered with the hands of war; All pity chok'd through custom of fell deeds." It is only when we stand a little apart from what has been our daily companion for 40 weeks that we realize that the "domestic fury and fierce civil strife," the results of which Mark Anthony was prophesying, are an inconsiderable bagatelle beside the facts which we have had to consider. It is not merely the quantity of horrors-although these organizations have been the instruments of death for 22,000,000 people it is the quality of cruelty which produced the gas chambers of Auschwitz or the routine shooting of Jewish children throughout a continent claiming to be civilized. There is not one of these organizations which is not directly connected with the sorry trade of murder in a brutal form. Who can doubt that the Reich Cabinet knew of the euthanasia used to conserve the physical resources of Germany for war? It is beyond question that the High Command and General Staff passed on these orders of which you have heard so much and which are all reduced in the end to plain murder; the Leadership Corps shared in killing Jews and ruining the bodies of slave laborers. I have simply to mention the SS and the crimes come unbidden into the mind without any words of mine. Conniving, assisting, and finding a reason for these crimes were the SD and the Gestapo. The SA trained its Baltic recruits to reach the SA standard which came to fruition in the ghetto of Kaunas or the pit at Vilna.
SIR DAVID MAXWELL-FYFE: The late President Woodrow Wilson once said: "It is indispensable that the Governments associated against Germany should know beyond a peradventure with whom they are dealing." If Europe is to be cleansed of Nazi evil it is indispensable that you and the world should know these organizations for what they are. It has been our somber task to assist you to this knowledge; having done so, we sometimes wonder if the stench of death will ever wholly pass from our nostrils. But we are determined to do our utmost to see that it will pass from Germany, and that the spirit which produced it will be exorcised. It may be presumptuous for lawyers, who do not claim to be more than the cement of society, to speculate or even dream of what we wish to see in its place. But I give you the faith of a lawyer. Some things are surely universal: tolerance, decency, kindliness. It is because we believe that there must be a clearance before such qualities will flourish in peace that we ask you to condemn this organization of evil. When such qualities have been given the chance to flourish in the ground that you have cleared, a great step will have been taken. It will be a step towards the universal recognition that "...sights and sounds all happy as her day, And laughter learnt of friends, and gentleness, And hearts at peace...." are not the prerogative of any one nation. They are the inalienable heritage of mankind.
THE PRESIDENT: The Tribunal will adjourn. [A recess was taken.]
MR. THOMAS J. DODD (Executive Trial Counsel for the United States): Since the 20th day of November 1945, this International Military Tribunal has been in almost continual session. In these many months, a record of more than 15,000 pages has been compiled. Over 300,000 affidavits have been submitted; about 3,000 documents have been offered and oral testimony has been heard from some 200 witnesses. This great mass of evidence, oral and written, almost exclusively of German origin, has established beyond question the commission of the crimes of criminal conspiracy, aggressive war, mass murder, slave labor, racial and religious persecutions, and brutal mistreatment of millions of innocent people. The four prosecuting powers have indicted and hold responsible for these 'frightful 'crimes as individuals the 22 defendants named in the Indictment. But the four prosecuting powers, recognizing that the 22 individual defendants could not by themselves alone accomplish the execution of these enormous crimes, have also named in the Indictment the Nazi organizations as the principal media by and through which these transgressions were effected. These organizations--some Nazi-created, some Nazi-perverted--were the agencies upon which the defendants relied and through which they operated for the accomplishment of their criminal purposes over the complacent people of Germany and over the conquered peoples of Europe. The named organizations fall into two classes: in the first class are those which are peculiarly Nazi creations, having no counterpart outside the Nazi regime and which had no intrinsically legitimate purpose. This group includes the Politische Leiter, the SA, and the SS. In the second class are those which existed in one form or another before the Nazi regime, but which were corrupted by the Nazis. This group includes the Reich Cabinet, the High Command and General Staff, and the Gestapo.
MR. THOMAS J. DODD (Executive Trial Counsel for the United States): As to, this second class, it is not our contention that the institutions themselves were basically criminal, but rather that they became criminal under Nazi domination, although, by its very nature as a secret political police system, the Gestapo was the most easily adapted to criminal purposes and became one of the most effective of all instruments of Nazi criminality. It would be a mistake to consider these organizations named in the Indictment as isolated, independently functioning aggregations of persons, each pursuing separate tasks and objectives. They were all a part of, and essential to, the Police State planned by Hitler and perfected by his clique into the most absolute tyranny of modem times. That Police State was the political Frankenstein of our era, which brought terror and fear to, Germany and spread horror and death throughout the world. The Leadership Corps of the Nazi Party was its body, the Reich Cabinet its head, its powerful arms were the Gestapo and the SA, and when it strode over Europe its legs were the Armed Forces and the SS. It was Hitler and his cohorts who created this police state monster, and it brought Germany to shame and the nations of Europe to ruin. It would likewise be erroneous to view the structure of this police system as something casual, or its growth and development as normal political phenomena. For it was planned from the earliest days by the conspirators. The Nazi "old fighters" had a design for despotism. They built the SA at the outset as a private band of strong-arm men to wield the club against the political opponent, and the whip against the Jew. They established the SS as the dread guard of the Fuehrer and of themselves. When they seized power they abolished police protection and substituted police persecution as the mission of the Gestapo. They wiped out all semblance of free government and set themselves up in the Reich Cabinet with plenary powers. They depraved the highest traditions of military ethics and substituted "willing tools" for ranking men at arms.