dtufail/nuremberg-trials-corpus huggingface dataset:
DR. LATERNSER: Accord-ing to the Bavarian State law at present valid, the legal possibility therefore exists of quashing individual criminal proceedings by means of an administrative act in the form of a pardon." And then he states that this right is vested in the Reich Governor of Bavaria, and goes on to suggest that "in view of this legal posi-tion the proposal of the State Minister of the Interior be submitted to the Council of Ministers." The next document, Page 10 of the English text, Document 12 of the German text, indicates that the Council of Ministers was not prepared to countenance the quashing. Page 10 of the English text, My Lord-and it states: "The proposal of the State Minister of the Interior that the inquiry pending at the public prosecution at the Provincial Court, Munich II, into. the death of the prisoners Handschuch, Franz, and Katz, who were in protective custody, be quashed was the subject of a debate during the meeting of the Council of Ministers of 5 December 1933. As a result, the State Minis-ter of Justice communicated the following to the undersigned official: "'The criminal proceedings regarding the happenings in the Dachau Concentration Camp are to be continued with all determination. The facts are to be cleared up with the utmost speed.'" Then there are various instructions with regard to the inquiries. The next step of this story is Document 12 of the German file, Page 11 of the English text: "Presented to the State Minister with the request that he take note. The note of the first public prosecutor, Dr. Stepp, regarding the carrying out of his instructions is attached with the request that note be taken.... "By order of Ministerial Counsellor Döbig, I communicated to the Reichsführer SS Himmler the decision taken yesterday by the Council of Ministers concerning the cases of Hand-schuch, et cetera. The Reichsführer SS told me that the mat-ter chiefly concerned the Chief of Staff of the SA, Reich Minister Röhm.
DR. LATERNSER: He (Himmler) had to discuss the matter with Röhm first." Then Röhm gives certain" instructions which this correspondent, Dr. Stepp, writes down from memory: "The Dachau Camp is a camp for prisoners who were appre-hended for political reasons and are kept in protective custody. The incidents concerned are of a political nature and must be decided under all circumstances first of all by the political authorities. To my mind they are not suited to be dealt with by the legal authorities. This is my opinion as Chief of Staff and also as a Reich Minister who is interested in the Reich not suffering politically because of the proceedings in question. "I shall get the Reichsführer SS to issue an order that no investigating authorities may enter the camp for the time being and that people in the camp may not be interrogated for the present." Then there is a note: "The Chief Prosecutor, Munich, was instructed by a directive from the Minister to refrain for the time being from making an application for the opening of preliminary investigations." Then follows the next document, Document 13, a letter to the public prosecution on the death of these men Franz and Katz: "With regard to the above-mentioned matter I have, as in-structed, on 12 July 1934 requested the Bavarian Political Police to clear up the matter further in conjunction with the commander's office of the Concentration Camp Dachau, and to endeavor to find out the persons who are suspected of having been the culprits. In this request I mentioned also that I have not yet received the legally confiscated instruments of suicide (belt and braces) of the dead men.
DR. LATERNSER: "The Political Police have apparently transmitted the files without any written direction to the political department of the Concentration Camp Dachau...." The first paragraph of this letter reads: "The latest application by the Public Prosecution, Munich II, for production of evidence shows what far-fetched means are employed in order to saddle the Concentration Camp Dachau with allegedly perpetrated crimes." In the second paragraph of the letter regret is expressed that the two dead men were able by their suicide to escape impending punishment for smuggling letters. The third paragraph refers to the confiscation' and reads: "After the two corpses had been dissected according to law and had been released, the commander's staff had no further interest in the preservation of the instruments with which the men had hanged themselves. The commander's staff do not belong to those, that loathsome type of cultured people, who preserve such articles as souvenirs, as was done in America in the Dillinger case." The letter is signed on behalf of the camp commandant by SS Obersturmbannführer Lippert. Then there is a request by the public prosecution for action. In the next letter there is a reference to this letter from the camp commandant of Dachau, which shows that the request of the Oberstaatsanwalt arose from the impartial observation of his official duty and then the file closes with this entry: "Munich, 27 Septem-ber 1934, Public Prosecution" It is a letter from -the Oberstaats-anwalt to the Generalstaatsanwalt at the Court of Appeals Munich: "Subject: Death of the prisoners in protective custody, Wil-helm Franz and Dr. Katz, in the Concentration Camp Dachau. "I have quashed the proceedings, as the investigations have not produced sufficient grounds for the assumption of outside guilt in the deaths of the two prisoners in protective custody." MAJOR JONES: Well now, Witness, I have taken some time to read that document.
DR. LATERNSER: That is a characteristic Mustration of the fact that the SA and SS abominations in the camps were protected by the highest authorities of the Third Reich, is that not so? REINECKE: This document is from the year 1933, at a time when the Concentration Camp Dachau was not manned exclusively by SS men. The document indicates that the prosecution of the Provincial Court in Munich suspected, for given reasons, that some persons in protective custody had been murdered. MAJOR JONES: Are you suggesting that conditions improved after the SS men took complete charge of running the camps? REINECKE: I want to point out that this document contains in-dividual cases of the year 1933. But conclusions on the general con-ditions in concentration camps, particularly in the coming years, cannot be drawn from the document. MAJOR JONES: Did you know that the Waffen-SS was making quite a profitable business out of killing people in concentration camps? Did you know that? Did you know that? REINECKE: No. MAJOR JONES: I want you to look at the Document D-960, which will be Exhibit GB-569. It is a very short document, this one, it is from-it is headed: "Waffen-SS, Natzweiler Concentration Camp, Commander's office, 24 March 1943. "Bill to the Security Police and SD, Strasbourg. "For the 20 prisoners executed and cremated in this concentration camp, costs amounting to 127,05 Reichsmark arose. The Commander's office of the Natzweiler Concentration Camp requests the early payment of the above-mentioned sum." The tariff for killing was very low in Natzweiler, wasn't it- -- 6 marks 38 pfennigs for each dead man? Did you know that moneys were paid to the funds of SS for activities of that kind? REINECKE: No. And as I understand it, this document does not show that at all. The concentration camp command here uses the stamp "Waffen-SS," but in this connection I must refer to what I said yesterday, that the term "Waffen-SS" is misleading insofar as the concentration camp organization was an independent police institution.
DR. LATERNSER: This document seems to support my statement, since it shows that this horrible bill here was sent to the Security Police, that is, again to an executive organ. The Waffen-SS ... MAJOR JONES: Just a moment. Assuming that the Security Police paid this bill, where would the money have gone to? It would have gone back to Natzweiler. What would have happened to it? Would it have been credited to the funds of the Waffen-SS or not? REINECKE: The commands of the concentration camps, includ-ing Natzweiler, settled their accounts with the Reich, not with the Waffen-SS. I cannot say how this money was used and for what purposes it was spent, because ... MAJOR JONES: Do you know-you have no knowledge of the financial arrangements of these camps vis à vis the Waffen-SS, have you? If you have not that suffices for me for the moment. REINECKE: No, no. From my activity in the head office "SS Courts" I happen to know a little about the economic control of the concentration camps, and as to this point here, I know that the commands of concentration camps settled their accounts directly with the agencies of the German Reich and had no connection at all with other treasuries or agencies of the Waffen-SS as such. MAJOR JONES: If you please. Now you said in your testimony that the guards in concentration camps had not committed crimes, that whoever else was responsible, Pohl and one or two others, certainly it was not the SS guards. Were you serious when you said that, Witness? REINECKE: In order to avoid misunderstanding, I should like to make it clear here that when I spoke of guards, I meant only those persons who guarded a concentration camp from the outside in contrast to the personnel of the concentration camp who were employed in the command and on the command staff; that is to say, people who had the control within the camp. MAJOR JONES: But both those categories of guards were SS men, were they not? REINECKE: As I have already said, they belonged to the so--called nominal Waffen-SS without having anything to do with it organically.
DR. LATERNSER: MAJOR JONES: Well, I shall return to that point in a moment. First of all, I want you to look at Document D-924, which will give you a picture of the humanity and ethical attitude of SS guards. I am using a phrase which you used yourself vis à vis the SS. That is Exhibit GB-570, My Lord. It is a report this time from a Dutch source of the evacuation of the Rehmsdorff Camp to Theresienstadt. The first page is a statement by Peter Langhorst, who says: "I am an ex-political prisoner and I have been detained in various prisons and concentration camps, finally in the Rehms-dorff Camp. "At the approach of the Allied armies this camp was evac-uated and the prisoners, about 2,900 men, were put on transport from Rehmsdorff to Theresienstadt. "Mostly these prisoners were Czechs, Poles, Russians, and Hungarian Jews, while there were only a few Dutchmen among them. "Of these prisoners only some 500 men actually reached Theresienstadt; the others were simply killed off during the transport by the so-called 'shot in the neck.' "The corpses were thrown into mass graves which were filled up afterward." Then-I need not trouble you with the rest of the statement, but you see a further statement with regard to that matter by Baron Van Lainsweerde of Amsterdam, who was on this transport, who says that-at the end of the second paragraph: "Finally, on 12 November 1944, 1 was imprisoned in the Concentration Camp Rehmsdorff where I stayed until my escape on 20 April 1945.' At the approach of the Allied Forces, the camp at Rehmsdorff was evacuated in great haste and the political prisoners of this camp were transported to the Theresienstadt Camp. "At first the prisoners were transported by train and in goods vans. We arrived by train at Marienbad, where, for causes I do not know, we had a delay of about one week. The vans with the prisoners were kept standing at the station. In the course of that week Allied bombers attacked the Marienbad station and in the confusion some 1,000 prisoners escaped into the surrounding woods.
DR. LATERNSER: Naturally the entire local service (the SS, Volkssturm, and Hitlerjugend) was set to work to recapture the escaped prisoners, and practically all prisoners, who of course wore their camp clothes and could easily be recognized, were recaptured. These prisoners, about a thousand men, were led back in groups to Marienbad station and there they were killed by the SS guards by a shot in the neck. As both engines of the train had been wrecked during the air attack, the prisoners had to walk all the way from Marienbad to Theresienstadt, Many among them were unable to go so far, and fell down along the road, totally exhausted; without an exception these prisoners were murdered by the guards by a shot in the neck. That evening their bodies were removed by lorry and buried in mass graves in the woods." -- And he says he thinks that he could identify where it was. -- "I am fully prepared to assist in tracing them. When the transport started I heard the SS guards saying that the total number of prisoners amounted to 2,775. Only some 500 of these prisoners reached Theresien-stadt. The others were murdered during the transport. Near Lobositz, about 7 kilometers from Theresienstadt, I myself escaped. The leader of the transport was SS Ober-scharführer Schmidt, one of the hangmen of Buchenwald, who also there behaved in a most scandalous way toward the prisoners, and who was known to be a sadist." Do you still, say that the SS guards betrayed the characteristics of decency? REINECKE: I should like to emphasize that I did not say that the SS guards had the characteristics of SS members. I said that our investigations showed that the actual crimes in the concentration camps were committed by members of the commands and that we found no evidence that the guards had any part in them, and ... MAJOR JONES: Then let me show you-let me show you another document, the Document D-959-it will. be Exhibit GB-571-which is a report to the Ministry of the Interior of the Czechoslovak Republic.
DR. LATERNSER: I want to turn to Page 3 of the report: "Crimes committed by the members of the Allgemeine SS and the Waffen-SS. "The crimes committed by the members of the SS troops against the Czechoslovak and foreign citizens on the territory of the Czechoslovak Republic ... THE PRESIDENT: Mr. Elwyn Jones, isn't it rather late to put in documents of this sort, which are general reports by the govern-ments of Allied countries? The case has been already fully made by the Prosecution and to put in a new document of this sort, which is only a report of an Allied country, seems to the Tribunal to be .an unusual course to take. MAJOR-JONES: With great respect, My Lord, I submit that the Prosecution is entitled to put in documents of this kind in rebuttal of the sort of testimony that this witness is giving. The conception that a witness should solemnly say that SS guards com-mitted no atrocities was one which certainly did not occur even to the Prosecution, and in face of testimony of that kind I submit that the Prosecution is well entitled to put in documents which do mot deal with individual cases, which might possibly be objectionable to the Tribunal, but with the whole mass of testimony. I submit that until the very last moment the Prosecution is entitled to put in such documents, regrettable though it is, perhaps, that they, have not been put in before, but I do submit that the Prosecution is entitled to put them in. If Your Lordship pleases, if I might add a further comment to Your Lordship's inquiry: the Defense have, after all, produced over 100,000 affidavits and I do submit that in these circumstances, in view of that mountain of evidence, it is only right that there should rest upon the record the authority of state-ments submitted on behalf of the Prosecution. THE PRESIDENT: What is your submission, with reference to the construction of Article 21, with reference to this document?
DR. LATERNSER: MAJOR JONES: If Your Lordship pleases, I submit that the terms of Article 21 make it mandatory upon the Tribunal to accept reports of this kind by governments which are submitted by the Prosecution. THE PRESIDENT: Which are the special words to which you refer? MAJOR JONES: The second sentence: "The Tribunal... shall also take judicial notice of official governmental documents and reports of the United Nations, including the acts and documents of the committees set up in the various Allied countries for the investigation of war crimes, and the records and findings of military or other tribunals of any United Nations." Now this document, My Lord, is-it has a certificate from the Czechoslovak Minister of the Interior on the face of it, certifying that it is a, state document within the meaning of Article 21, and it bears the signature of the Minister of the Interior himself, so that I submit that quite clearly within the terms of Article 21 it is properly admissible and that in that respect the Tribunal should accept it. THE PRESIDENT: Was there any committee or commission which drew up this document? MAJOR JONES: It is a report of the Czechoslovak Ministry of the Interior itself; it is a report of the State Department. THE PRESIDENT: Report to whom? MAJOR JONES: Furthermore, My Lord, my learned friend, Mr. Griffith-Jones, draws my attention to Article 19 of the Charter: "The Tribunal shall not be bound by technical rules of evidence. It shall adopt and apply to the greatest possible extent expeditious and non-technical procedure, and shall admit any evidence that it deems to have probative value." I do submit that even if you were to find, and I find it hard to think that you would, that this is not a document within the meaning of Article 21, it is admissible under Article 19. THE PRESIDENT: Yes. Now, do you want to say anything, Dr. Pelckmann? BERR PELCKMANN: I believe, Your Lordship, the decision of the Tribunal on this document should be the same as that on the two documents which we attempted in vain to introduce yesterday.
DR. LATERNSER: Whether this document falls under Article 21, 1 cannot judge;' the Tribunal will decide that. But I refer to the other point of view which Your Lordship has already mentioned. It is very late to submit these documents now. Article 21 can only be interpreted to mean that such documents can be submitted during the presenta-tion of the case by the Prosecution. The Prosecution case is now closed, and documents can only be introduced by submitting them to a witness; but since there may be hundreds, perhaps thousands of these cases, the Defense must be given an opportunity to com-ment on them. It is not a question of testing the credibility of the witness, but it is actually a question of new evidence being presented by the Prosecution, and the Defense must have an opportunity of answering it. I do not believe that this is the intention of Article 21, otherwise the Trial would be extended indefinitely. THE PRESIDENT: The Tribunal will adjourn and we will sit again at 2 o'clock. [The Tribunal recessed until 1400 hours.] Afternoon Session THE PRESIDENT: Mr. Elwyn Jones, the Tribunal will take judicial notice of the document which you were submitting under Article 21, But they do not think that you need deal with it at great length. MAJOR JONES: If Your Lordship pleases. The Document D-959 will be Exhibit GB-571. [The witness Reinecke resumed the stand.] Witness, have you any knowledge of the part played by SS units in the arrest and ill-treatment of the students of Prague on 17 November 1939? REINECKE: No. About that subject I cannot testify, as the fact of their participation is now becoming known to me for the first time. MAJOR JONES: You had no knowledge of the participation of the 6th SS Totenkopf Standarte in that matter, did you? I am referring to ... REINECKE: No. MAJOR JONES: I am referring, My Lord, to an entry in the previous Czechoslovak report, USSR-60. [Turning to the witness.] You say you had no knowledge of that? This report ... REINECKE: No, I had no knowledge.
DR. LATERNSER: MAJOR JONES: This report refers further to reprisal measures against civilians suspected of contact with the partisans, in which the SS took part. Do you have any knowledge of SS troops taking part in reprisal measures against civilians? REINECKE: I can testify to that insofar as it is known to me in which manner the Waffen-SS was being employed. I know that the Waffen-SS-and in this case it can only be the Waffen-SS which is meant-was fighting at the front. MAJOR JONES: I just want you to look at the last paragraph but one in Paragraph 2, Page 4 of Document D-959, Page 4, the paragraph-it is the fourth paragraph down in the English text. "On 5 May 1945, after having plundered the village of Javorisko in the district of Litovel, the SS burned it down. During this execution the SS troops shot in the nape of the neck or killed in the burning houses all the male inhabitants of the village from the age of 15 to 70 years. Women with children, after having been ill-treated, were driven away. The execution, at which 38 men lost their lives, took place because the inhabitants of the village were suspected of hiding partisans." Have you any knowledge of that action or of actions of that kind that the SS took part in? REINECKE: No. Such actions never became known to me. Obviously, we are here concerned with the last fight for Prague. MAJOR JONES: I want you to turn to some further evidence about the ill-treatment by SS guards of transports of prisoners from concentration camps. The fifth paragraph on Page 5 of the report refers to 312 persons being beaten to death or shot, and their bodies buried in a coal pit. And you see it stated there that the beatings and killings were done by SS guards. It is very much like the Dutch report, is it not? And then there follows in the last section, crimes committed during the Prague revolution in May 1945, further accounts of SS atrocities.
DR. LATERNSER: Now, Witness, I want you to look at a new Document, D-878, which will be GB-572, which is a r1eport from the Statistical-the Scientific Statistical Institute of the Reichsführer SS on the com-position of the SS. I want you to look, if you will, at the third page of the account, that is a page marked "Page L" That sets out the-I am sorry, My Lord, I have not a translation of this, but I think the entries will speak for themselves. They are' quite clear. That is headed "Total strength of the SS as on 30 June 1944." You will see it shows "Allgemeine SS" excluding-and the translation, I think, is, excluding those members who, at the moment, are serving as reserves of the Waffen-SS, "Nicht einberufen." Total called up 66,614. THE PRESIDENT: 64,000. MAJOR JONES: 64,000. Called up in the Wehrmacht, 115,908. Called up to the labor front, 722. In miscellaneous duties, 19,254, a total of 200,498 of the Allgemeine SS. Now, can you tell the Tribunal whether those "not called up" among the 64,000 odd were performing police duties, or were some of those performing police duties? REINECKE: In my view the figures which are contained in the document refer to members of the General SS who were neither called up nor were carrying out any other type of activity -- in other words, who were following their civilian occupations at home, that is to say, who were used in economic life. MAJOR JONES: The last category of 19,254 "on miscellaneous duties," were those people who were forming the personnel of the Einsatzkommandos? REINECKE: That is absolutely out of the question, because the personnel of the Einsatzkommandos only consisted of a few hundred men. The conception of the "sonstiger Einsatz" (on miscellaneous duties) must refer to some other function which I cannot define at the moment. MAJOR JONES: Well, now, you see that that page shows the total in the Waffen-SS of 594,443. Now I want you to turn to Page 24 of this report. THE PRESIDENT: Mr. Elwyn Jones, what is the final total described as? MAJOR JONES: The total SS total 794,941.