dtufail/nuremberg-trials-corpus huggingface dataset:
M. DUBOST: It -seems even proved that the causes of the massacre of Oradour-sur-Glane are remote. The unit which perpetrated this crime apparently did so as an act of vengeance, because of an attempt against it about 50 kilometers further away. The German Army ordered a judicial inquiry. Document F-673, already submitted as RF-392, so indicates; Pages 175 and 176. This document is dated 4 January 1945. There were no Germans in France at that time, at least not in Oradour-sur-Glane. The version given by the German authority is that the reprisals appear to be absolutely justified for military reasons. The German military commander who was responsible for it fell in combat in Normandy. We shall remember the phrase "The reprisals appear to be absolutely justified for military reasons." Therefore, in the eyes of the German Army, the crime of Oradour-sur-Glane which I have described to you plainly, is a crime which is fully justified. The guilt of Keitel in all these matters is certain. In Document F-673, Exhibit Number RF-392-and this will be the end of my statement-there is a -strange document which is signed by him. It was drawn up on 5 March 1945. It concerns alleged executions, without trial, of French citizens. You will find it on Page 177. It will show the Tribunal the manner in which these criminal inquiries were conducted, on orders, by the German Army, following incidents as grave as that of Oradour-sur-Glane, which had to be justified at any price. In this document, which should be cited in its entirety, I wish only to look at the next to the last paragraph. It was in the German interest to answer these reproaches as promptly as possible.
THE PRESIDENT: This is not a document of which we can take judicial notice and therefore if you want to put the whole document in you must put it in.
M. DUBOST: I am surprised, Your Honor; you have already accepted it. This is Document F-673. It was submitted as Exhibit Number RF-392 and is the whole bundle of documents of the Wiesbaden German Armistice Commission.
THE PRESIDENT: Yes, but is it a public document? It is not a public document, is it?
M. DUBOST: Am I to understand that the Tribunal wants me to read it in its entirety?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, F-673 seems to be a very large bundle of documents. This particular part of it, this document signed by Keitel, is a private document.
M. DUBOST: It is a document. which comes from the German Armistice Commission in Wiesbaden, which was presented several hours ago under Exhibit Number RF-392, and you accepted it.
THE PRESIDENT: I know we accepted its being deposited, but that does not mean that the whole of the document is in evidence. I mean, we have ruled over and over again that documents of which we do not take judicial notice must be read so that they will go through the interpreting system and will be interpreted into German to the German counsel.
M. DUBOST: I am therefore going to give you the reading of the whole document.
THE PRESIDENT: Very well.
M. DUBOST: "The High Command of the Wehrmacht, Headquarters of the Fuehrer, 5 March 1945. WFST Qu 2 (1) Number 01487/45-g; By Captain Cartellieri. Secret. Subject: Alleged executions of French citizens without trial. "I. German Armistice Commission. "2. High Command West. "In August 1944, the French Commission attached to the German Armistice Commission addressed a note to the latter, giving an exact statement of incidents concerning alleged arbitrary executions of Frenchmen from 9 to 23 June 1944. "The information given in the French note was for 'the most part so detailed that verification from the German side was undoubtedly possible. "On 26 September 1944 the High Command of the Wehrmacht entrusted the German Armistice Commission -with the study of this affair. The said commission later requested High Command West for an inquiry on the incidents and an opinionon the facts submitted in the French note. "On 12 February 1945 the German Armistice Commission received from the Army Group B (from the President of the Military Tribunal of Army Group B) a note stating that the documents referring to this aff air had been since November 1944 with the Army Judge of Pz. AOK 6, and that Pz. AOX 6 and the Second SS Panzer Division 'Das Reich' had in the meantime been detached from Army Group B. "The manner in which this affair was inquired into causes the following remarks to be made: "The French, that is, the Delegation of the Vichy Government have in this memorandum brought on the German Wehrmacht the grave charge of having carried out numerous executions of French subjects, executions which are unjustified by law and therefore murders. It was in the interest of Germany to reply as promptly as possible to such charges. In the long period which has elapsed since the receipt of the French note it should have been possible, in spite of the development of the military situation and the movement of troops resulting there from, to single out at least part of these charges and to refute them by examination of the facts.
M. DUBOST: If merely one fraction of the charge had been refuted"-this sentence is important "it would have been possible to show the French that all their claims were based upon doubtful data. By the fact that nothing at all was done in this matter by the Germans, the enemy must have the impression that we are not in a position to answer these charges. "The study of this matter shows that there is often a considerable lack of understanding of the importance of counteracting all enemy propaganda and charges against the German Army by immediately refuting alleged German atrocities. "The German Armistice Commission is hereby entrusted to continue the study of this matter with all energy. We ask that every - assistance be given them for speeding up this work now, within their own field of duty. The fact that Pz. AOK. 6 is no longer under High Command West is no reason for impeding the making of the necessary investigations for clearing up and refuting the French charges."
THE PRESIDENT: M. Dubost, you stated, I think, that this document implicated Keitel.
M. DUBOST: It is signed by Keitel, Sir.
THE PRESIDENT: Signed by him, yes, but how does it implicate him in the affair of Oradour?
M. DUBOST: Mr. President, the French Commission, together with the de facto Vichy Government, frequently brought to the attention of the German authorities not only the atrocities of Oradour-sur-Glane, but numerous other atrocities. Orders were given by Keitel that these facts, which constitute absolute reality not merely in the eyes of the French but in the eyes of all those who have objectively and impartially inquired into the matter, should be examined for the purpose -of refuting part of these charges. This letter refers to the protest lodged earlier by the French, and we read part of it before you in the course of this examination of the question, particularly the facts noted in the letter of General Bridoux which mentions the murder of French people at Marsoulas in the department of Haute-Garonne, among them fourteen children.
THE PRESIDENT: I think you said that that was the last document you were going to refer to?
M. DUBOST: It is the last document.
THE PRESIDENT: Ten minutes past five. Shall we adjourn? M. Dubost, could you let us know what subject is to be gone into tomorrow?
M. DUBOST: Crimes against Humanity, by my colleague M. Faure. If you will allow me to present my conclusion this evening, it will not take long. Our work has been delayed somewhat this afternoon.
THE PRESIDENT: How long do you think you will take, M. Dubost, to make your concluding statement?
M. DUBOST: I think by five-thirty I shall be through.
THE PRESIDENT: I think perhaps, if it is as convenient to you, we had better hear you in the morning. Is it equally convenient to you?
M. DUBOST: I am at the orders of the Tribunal. [The Tribunal adjourned until 1 February 1946 at 1000 hours.]
MARSHAL: May it please the Court, I desire to announce that Defendants Kaltenbrunner and Seyss-Inquart will be absent from this morning's session on account of illness.
M. DUBOST: I have now completed my presentation of facts. This presentation has consisted of a dry enumeration of crimes, atrocities, extortions of all sorts, which I deliberately presented to you without any embellishments of oratory. The facts have a profound eloquence which suffices. These facts are, it seems to me, definitely established. I do not believe that the Defense, nor history-even German history-will be able to set aside their essential aspects. They will no doubt be exposed to criticism. Our evidence was hastily collected in a ruined country whose every means of communication had been destroyed by an enemy in flight, in a country where each individual was more concerned with preparation for the future than with looking back upon the past, even to exact vengeance, for the future is the life of our children, and the past is but death and destruction. For the whole of France, for each country in the West, the demands of daily life, the difficulty of preparing for a better future once again give full meaning to the words of the Scriptures, Sinite mortuos sepelire mortuos (Let the dead bury their dead.); and that is why in spite of all our efforts, all our endeavors, to prepare the work of justice which France and universal conscience demand, we were not able to be more thorough. That is why errors of detail may have slipped into our work, but the rectifications which time and the Defense will effect can be only accessory. They will not -eliminate the fact that millions of men have been deported, starved, exhausted through labor and privation before being put to death, like cattle without value; that innumerable innocent persons have been tortured before being turned over to the executioner. Rectifications may affect circumstances of time, sometimes of place; they will not change the essential facts even if a few details are modified.
M. DUBOST: But these facts, having been established in their general aspect, it remains for us to complete our task by giving them juridical significance, by analyzing them with reference to the law of which they constitute a violation, and by making clear the inculpations, in other words, by fixing the responsibilities of each defendant in respect to a law. What law shall we apply? Taken one by one and separated from the systematic policy which conceived, willed, and ordered them as a means of achieving domination through terror and beyond that as a means of extermination pure and simple; these facts constitute crimes against common law as much as violations of the laws and usages of war and of international law. All of them could therefore be defined separately as a violation of an international convention and of a penal provision of one or another of our established domestic laws. Or rather all could be qualified as a violation of a rule of common law which has emerged from each of our own domestic laws, as shown by M. De Menthon in his address; of that common law which, in the last analysis, was designated by him as being the foundation, as the root of international customs, which, beyond the Charter itself, is and remains the one and only guide of your decisions. But it is right to know that this common law springs from our established laws and, like them, punishes in principle actual misdeeds. Now, all of our defendants remained physically divorced from each of the criminal facts which in the ubiquity of their power they multiplied throughout the world. It was their will which commanded; but, as Mr. Justice Jackson recalled, they never reddened their own hands with the blood of their victims.
M. DUBOST: Therefore, if we refer exclusively to our established laws and especially to French domestic law, the defendants could not, in any case, be considered as principal authors but merely as accomplices "who have provoked the act through abuse of authority or of power." All of that is indeed a contradiction to the conception which each person in our countries holds of the guilt of the major war criminals. To solve the problem thus would be to narrow singularly the field of responsibility of each of the defendants. This responsibility would appear merely accessory, where, in fact, it is the principal responsibility; it would appear fragmentary, whereas to be truly fixed it must be presented as one single time, in the whole of their thoughts, intentions, and acts as chiefs of the Nazi government who conceived, willed, ordered, or tolerated the development of that systematic policy of terror and extermination, of which each fact taken separately is but a particular aspect, merely a constituent element. Thus a simple reference to common law does not bring us close enough to reality. If it does not omit, as such, any of the facts to which guilt attaches, it does leave aside the psychological factor and does not give us a complete conception of the guilt of the accused in a single formula embracing all the reality. That is because common law expresses a certain status of common morality which is accepted by civilized nations as law for the mutual relations of citizens. Profoundly imbued with the concept of individualism, this common law is not adequate to meet the exigencies of collective life which international morality must govern. Furthermore, this common law which is the foundation of our tradition has become static in a Cartesian sense, whereas our custom remains enriched by all the dynamism of international penal law. The Charter has not fixed the manner in which we are to qualify in a juridical sense the facts which I have presented before you.
M. DUBOST: In creating your Tribunal, the authors of the Charter limited themselves to establishing the limits of your jurisdiction: War Crimes, Crimes against Humanity, Crimes against Peace; and even then they did not give an exhaustive definition of each of these crimes. The Tribunal may refer on this point to Article 6 , paragraphs b and c of the Charter of the Tribunal. This article gives only an indicative enumeration. That is because the authors of the Charter bore in mind that international penal law is only still in the first phase of the birth of a custom in which law is developed by reaction to the deed and where the judge intervenes only to save the criminals from individual vengeance or where law is applied by the judge alone and the penalty pronounced according to his sole judgment. Thus, the authors of the Charter abstained from giving us a fixed method of qualification by reference to common law or on the contrary, to custom.
M. DUBOST: They did not say to you: "You will take one by one the criminal facts submitted to you, and each fact taken separately shall be isolated from the others to be defined by reference to a stipulation of any one domestic law or to a synthesis of domestic laws, yielding thus a common law." Nor did they say to you: "You will take these scattered criminal facts, you will group them together to make of them one single crime of which the definition, respecting in a general sense the rules of common law, will be essentially determined by the sole intention or purpose sought, without attempting to seek by analogy any precedents in the different domestic laws which apply only, moreover, to an entirely different subject." The authors of the Charter have left you free, entirely free, within the limits of custom; and consequently we, ourselves, within the same limitations are free to propose to you such qualification which appears to us most practical, which appears to us to come closest to the changing reality of facts in their relation to the general principles of law and the broad rules of morality which may seem to us to be such as to meet best the demands of human conscience expressed by international public opinion duly enlightened on Hitlerian atrocities, which will, in fact, remain within the limits of international penal custom. This custom is indeed still in a formulative stage; but although this Trial is without precedent, the problems that are being examined in this Court have arisen before; and the jurists who preceded us have already given them solutions. These solutions constitute precedents; and, as such, they constitute the first elements of your custom. In their memorandum to the Commission on the Responsibility of the Authors of the War and on Sanctions at the Peace Conference of 1919-1920 the French jurists, M. Larnaude and M.
M. DUBOST: De Lapradelle wrote: "Criminal law could not foresee that through a singular defiance of the essential laws of humanity, of civilization, of honor, an army, by virtue of the instructions of its sovereign, could systematically lend itself to perform deeds through the perpetration of acts such as the enemy has not shrunk from performing in order to achieve success and victory.' Therefore, domestic criminal law has never before been able to make provisions which would permit the repression of such acts. And still one must, in the interpretation of every law, cling to the intention of the law maker... If, in certain cases considered particularly propitious, one might succeed in apprehending individuals bearing responsibility of whom the Emperor could be considered an accomplice one would only succeed, and not without difficulty, in narrowing the field of his responsibility by limiting it to a few precise cases.... It is a very restricted approach to the problem of William II to diminish it and reduce it to the proportions of a criminal or a court-martial case.... The high justice which an anxious world awaits would not be satisfied if the German Emperor were judged only as an accomplice or even as the co-author of a common-law crime. His actions as Chief of State must be considered in conformity with their true juridical character ...... But except for minor details all of this is indeed implicitly contained in the last paragraph of Article 6 of the Charter of your Tribunal: "Leaders, organizers, instigators, and accomplices participating in the formulation or execution of a Common Plan or Conspiracy to commit any of the foregoing crimes"-Crimes against Peace, War Crimes, Crimes against Humanity-"are responsible for all acts performed by any persons in execution of such plan." Fundamentally, all this is within strict conformity with the primordial German concept of Fuehrertum, which places all responsibility on the leader and those who are with the leader from the very start.
M. DUBOST: Thus we can, by con-ling as close as possible to reality, by applying the Charter of 8 August and Article 6 of the Charter of your Tribunal, by respecting the rules of common law defined by the chief of our delegation, M. De Menthon, and by following custom, which is sketched in the field of international penal law, require of your Tribunal to declare all the defendants guilty of having, in their role as the chief Hitlerian leaders of the German people, conceived, willed, ordained, or merely tolerated by their silence that assassinations or other inhuman acts be systematically committed, that violent treatment be systematically imposed on prisoners of war or civilians, that devastations without justification be systematically committed as a deliberate instrument for the accomplishment of their purpose of dominating Europe and the world through terrorism and the extermination of entire populations in order to enlarge the living space of the German people. More specifically, we ask you to declare Goering, Keitel, and Jodl guilty of having taken part in the execution of this plan by ordering the seizure and the execution of hostages in violation of Article 50 of the Hague Convention which prohibits collective sanctions and reprisals. We ask you to find Keitel, Jodl, Kaltenbrunner, Seyss-Inquart, Bormann, and Ribbentrop guilty of having taken part in the execution of this plan:, 1. by ordering the terrorist murders of innocent civilians; 2. by ordering the execution without trial and torture to death of members of the resistance; 3.
M. DUBOST: by ordering devastations without justification: To declare Goering, Keitel, Jodl, Speer, and Sauckel guilty of having taken part in the execution of this plan by jeopardizing the health and the lives of prisoners of war, notably by submitting them to privations and hard treatments, by exposing them, or by attempting to expose them to bombings or other risks of war: To declare Goering, Keitel, Jodl, Kaltenbrunner, and Bormann guilty of having taken part in the execution of this plan, by personally ordering or by provoking the formulation of orders leading to terrorist murder or to the lynching by the population of certain combatants, more specifically, of airmen and members of commando groups as well as the terrorist murder or slow extermination of certain categories of prisoners of war: To declare Keitel guilty of having taken part in the execution of this plan by prescribing the deportation of innocent civilians and by applying to some of them the NN ( Nacht und Nebel ) regime which marked them for extermination: To declare Jodl guilty of having taken part in the execution of this plan by ordering the arrest, with a view to deportation, of the Jews of Denmark: To declare Frank, Rosenberg, Streicher, Von Schirach, Sauckel, Frick, and Hess guilty of having taken part in the execution of this plan, by justifying the extermination of Jews or by working out a statute with a view to their extermination: To declare Goering guilty of having taken part in the execution of this plan: 1. by creating concentration camps and by placing them under the control of the State Police for the purpose of ridding National Socialism of any opposition; 2. by tolerating and then by approving fatal physiological experiments on the effect of cold, and of increasing or decreasing pressure, which experiments were carried out-with material provided by the Luftwaffe and controlled by Dr.
M. DUBOST: Rascher, medical officer of the Luftwaffe detailed to the concentration camp of Dachau for that purpose-on healthy deportees who were involuntary subjects for the said experiments with which he Goering as chief, associated himself; 3. by utilizing in large numbers internees for exhausting labor under inhuman conditions in the armament factories of the Luftwaffe: To find Speer guilty of having taken part in the execution of this plan by employing in large numbers the internees for exhausting labor under inhumane conditions in the armament factories (Document Number 1584-PS): To find Bormann guilty of having taken part in the execution of this plan by participating in the extermination of internees in concentration camps (Document Number 654-PS). With regard to Doenitz, Raeder, Von Papen, Von Neurath, Fritzsche, Funk, and Schacht, we associate ourselves with the conclusion of our British and American colleagues.