dtufail/nuremberg-trials-corpus huggingface dataset:
DR.DIX: After that time he, in contrast to the foreign countries, had a very clear idea of the danger, which fact, according to the evidence of Gisevius, is undeniable, and he personally risked his life and liberty to maintain peace by attempting to overthrow Hitler. The fact that all these Putsch actions before the war and after the outbreak of war were unsuccessful cannot, according to the evidence submitted, be considered his fault. The responsibility for the failure of this German resistance movement does not lie with the latter but elsewhere, within and without the German frontiers. I shall return to this later. There remains, therefore, the fact of rearmament as such. Here, too, I can refer essentially to the statements Schacht made in justifying himself during his cross-examination. This was exhaustive, and a repetition would be superfluous. It is therefore also completely superfluous to enter into an academic discussion as to whether Schacht's views were right; that is to say, whether it is correct that a certain amount of military force sufficient for defensive purposes is necessary for any country and was particularly necessary for Germany, and whether he was correct in his opinion that the nonfulfillment by the parties to the Versailles Treaty of the obligation to disarm justified the rearmament of Germany. The sole point in question is whether these opinions and motives of Schacht's were honest, or whether he pursued secret aggressive intentions under cover of this defensive armament. But these proceedings have established absolutely nothing to disprove the honesty of these opinions and motives. Of course, one can question the fact whether the quotation "si vis pacem, para bellum" has absolute validity; or whether objectively any pronounced rearmament does not carry an inherent danger of war, since good armies with competent officers naturally strive for a chance for real action. Of course, one can defend the thesis that moral strength is stronger than any armed strength.
DR.DIX: The cohesion of the British Empire and the world-wide influence of the Vatican's foreign policy could perhaps be cited as proof of this. All these questions carry a certain relativity in themselves; at any rate, one thing is certain: Even today in all large countries of the world the warning is constantly repeated that one must be militarily strong in order to preserve peace. Nations whose individualism and love of liberty rejected general conscription and a strong standing army now act to the contrary and honestly believe that they thereby serve peace. Let us take as an example a nation whose love of peace absolutely no one in the world, even the most mistrustful, can question, namely, Switzerland. Yet this peace-loving nation has always taken pride in maintaining the defense capacity of its people with the very intention of protecting its freedom and independence in a peaceful manner. One may academically call this idea of discouraging foreign aggression by the maintenance of a sufficiently strong defensive army imperialistic. It is, at any rate, honestly entertained by peaceful and liberty-loving nations and perhaps serves the cause of peace more effectively than many socalled antimilitaristic and pacifist doctrines. This sound point of view has really nothing to do with militarism. Whoever today recognizes this viewpoint as justified for great and small nations cannot contest the honesty of this view on the part of Schacht in the years 1935 to 1938. I have no more to say about this. I also need not give a wearisome enumeration of figures and make specialized technical statements to the effect that this part of rearmament which Schacht first financed with 9,000 million, and then reluctantly with a further 3,000 million Reichsmark, was by no means sufficient for a war of aggression, in fact, not even for an effective defense of the German frontiers.
DR.DIX: The answers that the witnesses Keitel, Bodenschatz, Milch, General Thomas, Kesselring, et cetera, have given to this in their depositions and affidavits are available and have been submitted to, or officially brought to the attention of, the Tribunal. In this respect they are unanimously agreed that even at the outbreak of war-that is, 18 months later-Germany was not sufficiently armed for an aggressive war; that therefore, when Hitler led this nation into a war of aggression in August 1939, it was not only a crime against humanity but also against his own people, the people with whose leadership he was entrusted. Therefore I also consider it superfluous to go into long discussions as to whether Blomberg's statement that Schacht was aware of the progress of rearmament is correct, or the statement of Schacht and Vocke that this was not so. I accept without further discussion the sincerity of Blomberg's statement. But since he had more to do with the technical side of rearmament than the Reichsbank had, general experience would seem to indicate that the memory of Schacht and Vocke is more reliable on this point than Blomberg's, to whom this report to the Reichsbank was a matter of secondary importance for his department. For the Reichsbank the desire to be informed about the technical progress of the armament as well as about the financial expenditure was a very important matter. One remembers such facts better than unimportant secondary matters. In any case it is established that until the budget year 1937-38 only 21,000 millions were spent on armament, of which 12,000 millions were financed by credits of the Reichsbank, and that, according to Generaloberst Jodl's statement of 5 June, on 1 April 1938 only 27 or 28 divisions were ready, whereas in 1939 there were already 73 or 75 divisions. It needs no expert to show that this volume of expenditure and armament on 1 April 1938 was entirely insufficient for a war of aggression.
DR.DIX: Indeed Hitler was of the same opinion when in his memorandum of August 1936, which has been submitted to the Court, and which was handed to Speer in 1944, he pointed out, along with many derogatory remarks about Schacht's conduct of economic affairs, that 4 precious years had gone by, that we had had time enough in these 4 years to determine what we could not do, and that he hereby gave orders that the German Army must be ready for action in 4 years, that is, in the course of the year 1940. I should like to remind the Court that after Schacht's withdrawal as President of the Reichsbank, 31,500 millions were spent on armament during the two budget years 1938-39 and 1939-40. The issuing and expenditure of money on armament therefore continued without Schacht, and indeed to a considerably greater extent. Schacht had once written to Blomberg that he was not a money-making machine. He exercised constant pressure on Blomberg along this line. I refer only to his letter to Blomberg on 21 December 1935, which has been submitted to the Tribunal. He exercised a restraining influence by means of explanatory lectures to officers of the War Ministry and of the Armed Forces Academy. He refused the railway loan of 1936 requested by the Minister of Communications, which was indirectly in the interest of armament; and he stopped the credits of the Reichsbank as early as the beginning of 1937, concluding them by compromising on a final grant of 3,000 millions. He refused the credit which the Reich Minister of Finance requested from him in December 1938. He created an automatic brake for armament expenditure through the mefo bills, which from the technical and financial point of view was a somewhat bold measure, although legally tenable. These served at first too finance the armament expenditure but restricted further armament expenditure after their expiration on 1 April 1939 because the Reich was obligated to redeem them. Schacht's foresight proved true.
DR.DIX: The increase in employment brought such a rise in the state revenues that it would not have been difficult to liquidate the mefo bills at their expiration 5 years later. Keitel's statement has proved that during the budget year beginning 1 April 1938, 5,000 million marks more were spent for armament than during the preceding year, although as from 1 April 1938 the Reichsbank credits had completely ceased. Half of the 5,000 millions would have sufficed to redeem the mefo bills which matured during the budget year beginning 1 April 1939. The use of this money for further rearmament would have been avoided; but this was exactly what Schacht intended. From the beginning he had limited the validity of the mefo bills to 5 years; he stopped the credit assistance of the Reichsbank on 1 April 1939 in order to limit armament. It was impossible for Schacht to foresee that Hitler would simply break a strict credit obligation and not redeem the bills. These facts in themselves show that his attempts to resign could have had no other reason than opposition to any further armament, and the refusal to accept responsibility for it. In this sense the assertion of the Prosecution that he wanted to evade responsibility is completely correct. Nothing indicates that any other motives than those which are obvious from the facts just mentioned caused him to make this attempt to relinquish his duties. If the Prosecution maintains that the reason was his antagonism to Goering, this is also correct insofar as Schacht was an opponent of the Four Year Plan, of which Goering was the chief. That the reason was rivalry of power is a pure supposition, an interpretation of actual events which justifies the quotation: "Interpret to your heart's content; should you fail to explain, you will at least insinuate." The Reichsbank memorandum of November 1938, which led to the dismissal of Schacht and most of his collaborators including Vocke, is also unequivocally and forcibly opposed to armament.
DR.DIX: It naturally had to contain reasons for this which were derived from the departmental jurisdiction of the Reichsbank. Its aim was obvious. Hence Hitler's remark, "This is mutiny." The memorandum ends with the demand for control of the capital and loan market as well as the management of taxation by the Reichsbank. Compliance with this demand would have deprived Hitler of every possibility of raising money for further armament, and therefore this demand was unacceptable to him. Schacht and his colleagues knew this. Accordingly, they deliberately sought a break by this step. Schacht now bore no further responsibility. From now on he could devote himself exclusively to the plans for a coup d'etat by the conspiracy group to which he belonged. He became a traitor to Hitler. By remaining Minister without Portfolio, he hoped to learn more about what went on than if he resigned altogether;. this was vital for the aims of his conspiracy group. I shall return to this point later. The fact of armament, as such, therefore, proves absolutely nothing for the assertion of the Prosecution that Schacht deliberately contributed to the preparation of a war of aggression. Simultaneous economic armament, however, belongs of necessity to armament in the modern sense. On the German side this was already recognized for the first time at the beginning of the first World War by two very important German Jews, the founder of the Hamburg-America Line, Albert Ballin, and the great German industrialist, Rathenau. This is the same Rathenau who made the wonderful speech on peace during the Genoa Conference, which was received with wild applause by the delegates of those very powers which had opposed his country but 4 years previously as enemies, and who, as German Foreign Minister, was the victim of an anti-Semitic outrage in the early twenties. I probably can assume that the personality of Albert Ballin is known to the Court. Both men recognized, at the very outbreak of the first World War, the error of omitting economic mobilization.
DR.DIX: Rathenau then organized the so-called War Raw Materials Department of the War Ministry. The first Plenipotentiary General for War Economy, for this is what he really was, was thus ideologically a pacifist; and certainly since that time there is probably no mobilization plan by any nation which does not provide for the purely military armament to be accompanied by a corresponding economic preparation for war. Therefore, the designation of a Plenipotentiary General for War Economy, even if he had taken up his duties, which as the evidence demonstrates most convincingly he never did but remained a dummy, does not show anything in the way of proof that the intention to wage a war of aggression existed. This post is equally necessary when arming for defense. The same applies to the institution of the Reich Defense Council, the Reich Defense Committee, et cetera. As such they are the same harmless, matter-of-course factors. They have no incriminating value. Only their misuse for the purpose of a war of aggression would be incriminating. However, Schacht's criminal intention in this respect has not been established, nor has anything else been found. I therefore refrain from going into details on this subject. In conclusion, the Prosecution sees something incriminating in the so-called maintenance of secrecy regarding certain mobilization measures and mobilization arrangements, as for example the second Reich Defense Law. Here, too, a natural and worldly-wise way of thinking deprives these findings of any incriminating character. All nations are accustomed to treat mobilization and armament measures as secret. Upon further consideration and after closer observation this practice can, of course, be recognized as a very superfluous routine matter. Only plans and technical details can be really kept secret. The fact of rearmament as such can never be kept secret. The same applies to the existence of a large body which is to serve the purpose of this rearmament.
DR.DIX: Either it becomes known because it starts to function, or, like the ominous Defense Council, it remains hidden and secret only because it does not function. In the memoirs of a Czarist officer regarding his experiences in the Russo-Japanese war I found the following humorous observation: "If I, as a member of the General Staff, wished an incident to become known, I had it classified as 'secret' and my wish was fulfilled. If I wished to keep something secret, which was almost an impossibility, I unobtrusively gave it free circulation and occasionally my wish was fulfilled." One should not quibble in a vacuum; but if one wishes to find the truth, one must take into account the teachings of experience based on hard facts. Thus, the fact of the military activation of Germany. after the seizure of power by Hitler and the subsequent rearmament was never a secret to the world. The main proceedings have produced a great deal of evidence to this effect. We know the report of Consul General Messersmith; we know his sworn testimony of 30 August 1945, submitted by the Prosecution under Number 2385-PS, according to which the armament program-he speaks of a giant armament program immediately following the seizure of power-and the rapid development of the air program had been apparent to everybody; it had been impossible to move in the streets of Berlin or in any other city of importance in Germany without seeing pilots or aviators in training. He expressly states, on Page 8 of his testimony, that this giant German rearmament program was never a secret and was quite publicly announced in the spring of 1935. I would like to remind you, amongst a great deal of other evidence, of the remark of Ambassador Dodd, who contends that he pointed out to Schacht that the German Government had bought high-grade airplanes from American airplane manufacturers for 1 million dollars and had paid for them in gold.
DR.DIX: Even if Ambassador Dodd perhaps made a mistake in this detail, yet all this still proves that German rearmament-the extent of which was surely even overestimated abroad at that time-must have been, at the very best, an open secret. Therefore it is not even necessary to refer to the mutual visits of the Chiefs of General Staffs, to which Milch and Bodenschatz testified, the visits of the Chief of the British Intelligence Service, Courtney, the permanent presence in Berlin of military attaches of nearly all countries, in order to recognize that the so-called secret rearmament was quite public and only safeguarded a few technical secrets, as did rearmament in every state. The outside world knew of the existence of this rearmament and, in any case, considered it to be compatible with world peace longer than Schacht himself did. It is not for me to criticize the attitude of the outside world, nor is it my intention to do so. Each part on the stage of life has its Odin rules of tact, including the part played by the defendant and his defense counsel. Their task is to establish a defense, and not to bring charges and make an attack. In connection therewith I expressly wish to guard against a possible misunderstanding to the effect that I want to appear as an accuser, a critic, or a know-it-all in any way. I present all this only from the aspect of my submission that the indirect circumstantial evidence submitted by the Prosecution is not conclusive. Furthermore, the Prosecution argues that Schacht was a member of the Reich Cabinet, at least as Minister without Portfolio from the time of his dismissal in January 1938, as Minister of Economics, until January 1943. The Prosecution makes the Reich Cabinet responsible-criminally responsible-for the belligerent invasions of Hitler. This argumentation has an attractively convincing power for somebody who starts with the normal concept of a Reich Cabinet. The effect disappears once it has been ascertained that the so-called Reich Cabinet was not a cabinet in the usual sense applying to a constitutional state.
DR.DIX: Judgments should not, however, be based on outward appearances and form-not on fiction, but only on actually established conditions. This makes it necessary to penetrate sociologically the nature of the Hitler regime and to examine whether a member of the Reich Cabinet, hence of the Reich Government as such, must in this capacity bear the same criminal responsibility as if he were in any other normal state set-up, be it a democratic republic or a democratic monarchy or a constitutional monarchy or a monarchy which, although absolute, was nevertheless founded on law, or some other constitutionally based set-up which bears the character of a somehow lawful state based on a constitution. We are thus obliged to investigate the actual sociological structure of the Hitler regime. We have heard an account on the Fuehrer Order (Fuehrerbefehl) in this connection by Professor Jahrreiss. Here, too, I want to avoid repetition and would only state the following in abbreviated form: I want to say first of all, in order to avoid once more the danger of a misunderstanding, that when I speak of the Hitler regime here I do so without referring in any way to the persons sitting in the dock; naturally with the exception of Schacht. For the latter, I do so in the negative sense, for he did not belong to the regime as such, in spite of the fact that he was a member of the Reich Government and President of the Reichsbank. I leave the question completely open as to whether any of the other defendants should be considered a member or supporter of the regime. That question is subject only to the judgment of the Tribunal and the evaluation of the defense counsel for each case.
DR.DIX: At the very beginning of my argument I indicated that, even for a person who lived in Germany during the Hitler regime, it is difficult to differentiate between the ostensible distribution of power and the actual underlying influence, since this requires a great deal of political intuition; it is bound to be impossible to judge for people who lived outside Germany and can only be arrived at through the findings resulting from the presentation of evidence before this Tribunal. We have established here that the Reich Cabinet, whom Hitler termed a club of defeatists, was convened for the last time in 1938 and that it met then only to receive a communication from Hitler. For actual deliberation and the passing of a resolution it had last been convened in 1937. We have also established that Hitler deliberately kept all news of political importance from the Reich Cabinet, as is proved quite unequivocally by the so-called Hossbach minutes of 10 November. During this meeting the Fuehrer called the attention of the chiefs of the branches of the Wehrmacht and the Reich Foreign Minister, who were present-Schacht, of course, was not present and did not learn about the Hossbach minutes until he came here-to the fact that the subject for deliberation was of such great importance that it would result in full Cabinet meetings in other countries but that, just because of its great significance, he had decided not to discuss the matter with the Reich Cabinet. Thus, at least after 1937, the members of the Reich Cabinet can no longer be considered the architects and supporters of the political aspirations of the Reich. The same holds true for the members of the Reich Defense Council, which as such was nothing but a bureaucratic and routine affair. Accordingly Hitler, in the spring of 1939, explicitly excluded the Reich Defense Council also from further war preparations, saying: "Preparations will be made on the basis of peace-time legislation." Despotism and tyranny showed themselves in unadulterated form as from 1938.
DR.DIX: It is a characteristic quality of the Fascist as well as the National Socialist regime, to have the political will concentrated in the head of the Party, who with the help of this Party subjugates and becomes master of the State and the nation. Justice Jackson also recognized this when he stated, on 28 February 1946, that the apex of power rested with a power group outside the State and the Constitution. To speak, in the case of such a regime, of a responsible Reich Government and of free citizens who, through some organizations or others, could exert influence on the formation of the political will, would be to proceed from entirely wrong hypotheses. Intangible elements devoid of all sense of responsibility usually gain influence on the head of the State and Party in such regimes. The formation of the political will can be recognized in its crystallized form only in the head of the State himself; all around him is shrouded in a haze. It is another characteristic of such a regime -and this again belongs to its inner untruthfulness-that beneath the surface of seemingly absolute harmony and union several power groups fight against each other. Hitler not only tolerated such opposing groups, he even encouraged them and made use of them as a basis for his power. One of the defendants spoke here of the unity of the German people during this war in contrast with the first World War, but I must stress in reply that hardly at any time during its history was the German nation so torn internally as it was during the Third Reich. The apparent unity was merely the quiet of a churchyard, enforced through terror. The conflicts between the individual high functionaries of the German people, which we have ascertained here, reflect the inner strife-torn condition of the German nation, carefully concealed through the terror wielded by the' Gestapo.