dtufail/nuremberg-trials-corpus huggingface dataset:
MR. JUSTICE ROBERT H. JACKSON (Chief of Counsel for the United States): The Seizure of Power and Subjugation of Germany to a Police State. The Nazi Party seized control of the German State in 1933. "Seizure of power" is a characterization used by defendants and defense witnesses, and so apt that it has passed into both history and everyday speech. The Nazi junta in the early days lived in constant fear of overthrow. Goering, in 1934, pointed out that its enemies were legion and said: "Therefore, the concentration camps have been created, where we have first confined thousands of Communists and social democrat functionaries" (2344-PS). In 1933 Goering forecast the whole program of purposeful cruelty and oppression when he publicly announced: "Whoever in the future raises a hand against a representative of the National Socialist movement or of the State must know that he will lose his life in a very short while" (2494-PS). New political crimes were created to this end. It was made a treason, punishable with death, to organize or support a political party other than the Nazi Party (2548-PS). Circulating a false or exaggerated statement, or one which would harm the State or even the Party, was made a crime (1652-PS). Laws were enacted of such ambiguity that they could be used to punish almost any innocent act. It was, for example, made a crime to provoke "any act contrary to the public welfare" (1390-PS). The doctrine of punishment by analogy was introduced to enable conviction for acts which no statute forbade (1962-PS). Minister of Justice Gurtner explained that National Socialism considered every violation of the goals of life which the community set up for itself to be a wrong per se, and that the acts could be punished even though it was not contrary to existing "formal law" (2549-PS). The Gestapo and the SD were instrumentalities of an espionage system which penetrated public and private life (1680-PS). Goering controlled a personal wire-tapping unit. All privacy of communication was abolished (1390-PS). Party Blockleiter appointed over every 50 householders spied continuously on all within their ken (1893-PS).
MR. JUSTICE ROBERT H. JACKSON (Chief of Counsel for the United States): Upon the strength of this spying individuals were dragged off to "protective custody" and to concentration camps without legal proceedings of any kind (1956-PS) and without statement of any reason therefor (2533-PS). The partisan Political Police were exempted from effective legal responsibility for their acts (2347-PS). With all administrative offices in Nazi control and with the Reichstag reduced to impotence, the judiciary remained the last obstacle to this reign of terror (2469-PS). But its independence was soon overcome and it was reorganized to dispense a venal justice (784-PS). Judges were ousted for political or racial reasons and were spied upon and put under pressure to join the Nazi Party (2967-PS). After the Supreme Court had acquitted three of the four men whom the Nazis accused of setting the Reichstag fire, its jurisdiction over treason cases was transferred to a newly established "People's Court" consisting of two judges and five Party officials (2967-PS). The German film of this "People's Court" in operation, which. we showed in this chamber, revealed its presiding judge pouring partisan abuse on speechless defendants (3054-PS). Special courts were created to try political crimes, only Party members were appointed judges (2065-PS), and "judges' letters" instructed the puppet judges as to the "general lines" they must follow (~229). The result was the removal of all peaceable means either to resist or to change the Government. Having sneaked through the portals of power, the Nazis slammed the gate in the face of all others who might also aspire to enter. Since the law was what the Nazis said it was, every form of opposition was rooted out and every dissenting voice throttled. Germany was in the clutch of a police state, which used the fear of the concentration camp as a means to enforce nonresistance. The Party was the State, the State was the Party, and terror by day and death by night were the policy of both. 2. The Preparation and Waging of Wars of Aggression.
MR. JUSTICE ROBERT H. JACKSON (Chief of Counsel for the United States): From the moment the Nazis seized power, they set about feverish but stealthy efforts, in defiance of the Versailles Treaty, to arm for war. In 1933 they found no air force. By 1939 they had 21 squadrons, consisting of 240 echelons or about 2,400 first-line planes, together with trainers and transports. In 1933 they found an army of 3 infantry and 3 cavalry divisions. By 1939 they had raised and equipped an army of 51 divisions, 4 of which were fully motorized and 4 of which were Panzer divisions. In 1933 they found a navy of 1 cruiser and 6 light cruisers. By 1939 they had built a navy of 4 battleships, 1 aircraft carrier, 6 cruisers, 22 destroyers, and 54 submarines. They had also built up in that period an armament industry as efficient as that of any country in the world (EC-28). These new weapons were put to use, commencing in September 1939, in a series of undeclared wars against nations with which Germany had arbitration and nonaggression treaties, and in violation of repeated assurances. On September 1, 1939, this rearmed Germany attacked Poland. The following April witnessed the invasion and occupation of Denmark and Norway, and May saw the overrunning of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. Another spring saw Yugoslavia and Greece under attack, and in June 1941 came the invasion of Soviet Russia. Then Japan, which Germany had embraced as a partner, struck without warning at Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and 4 days later Germany declared war on the United States. We need not trouble ourselves about the many abstract difficulties that can be conjured up about what constitutes aggression in doubtful cases. I shall show you, in discussing the conspiracy, that by any test ever put forward by any responsible authority, by all the canons of plain common sense, these were unlawful wars of aggression in breach of treaties and in violation of assurances. The third group of crimes was: Warfare in Disregard of International Law. It is unnecessary to labor this point on the facts.
MR. JUSTICE ROBERT H. JACKSON (Chief of Counsel for the United States): Goering asserts that the Rules of Land Warfare were obsolete, that no nation could fight a total war within their limits. He testified that the Nazis would have denounced the conventions to which Germany was a party, but that General Jodl wanted captured German soldiers to continue to benefit from their observance by the Allies. It was, however, against the Soviet people and Soviet prisoners that Teutonic fury knew no bounds, in spite of a warning by Admiral Canaris that the treatment was in violation of international law. We need not, therefore, for the purposes of the conspiracy Count, recite the revolting details of starving, beating, murdering, freezing, and mass extermination admittedly used against the Eastern soldiery. Also, we may take as established or admitted that the lawless conduct such as shooting British and American airmen, mistreatment of Western prisoners of war, forcing French prisoners of war into German war work, and other deliberate violations of the Hague and Geneva Conventions, did occur, and in obedience to highest levels of authority (R-110). The fourth group of crimes is: Enslavement and Plunder of Populations in Occupied Countries. The Defendant Sauckel, Plenipotentiary General for the Utilization of Labor (1666-PS), is authority for the statement that "out of 5,000,000 foreign workers who arrived in Germany, not even 200,000 came voluntarily" (R-124). It was officially reported to Defendant Rosenberg that in his territory "recruiting methods were used which probably have their origin in the blackest period of the slave trade" (294-PS). Sauckel himself reported that male and female agents went hunting for men, got them drunk, and "shanghaied" them to Germany (220-PS). These captives were shipped in trains without heat, food, or sanitary facilities. The dead were thrown out at stations, and the newborn were thrown out the windows of moving trains (054-PS).
MR. JUSTICE ROBERT H. JACKSON (Chief of Counsel for the United States): Sauckel ordered that "all the men must be fed, sheltered, and treated in such a way as to exploit them to the highest possible extent at the lowest conceivable degree of expenditure" (054-PS). About two million of these were employed directly in the manufacture of armaments and munitions (016-PS). The director of the Krupp locomotive factory in Essen complained to the company that Russian forced laborers were so underfed that they were too weakened to do their work (D-316), and the Krupp doctor confirmed their pitiable condition (D-288). Soviet workers were put in camps under Gestapo guards, who were allowed to punish disobedience by confinement in a concentration camp or by hanging on the spot (3040-PS). Populations of occupied countries were otherwise exploited and oppressed unmercifully. Terror was the order of the day. Civilians were arrested without charges, committed without counsel, executed without hearing. Villages were destroyed, the male inhabitants shot or sent to concentration camps, the women sent to forced labor, and the children scattered abroad (3012-PS). The extent of the slaughter in Poland alone was indicated by Frank, who reported, and I quote: "If I wanted to have a poster put up for every seven Poles who were shot, the forests of Poland would not suffice for producing the paper for such posters" (2032-PS). Those who will enslave men cannot be expected to refrain from plundering them. Boastful reports show how thoroughly and scientifically the resources of occupied lands were sucked into the German war economy, inflicting shortage, hunger, and inflation upon the inhabitants (EC-317). Besides this grand plan to aid the German war effort there were the sordid activities of the Rosenberg Einsatzstab, which pillaged art treasures for Goering and his fellow-bandits (014-PS). It is hard to say whether the spectacle of Germany's Number 2 leader urging his people to give up every comfort and strain every sinew on essential war work while he rushed around confiscating art by the trainload should be cast as tragedy or comedy.
MR. JUSTICE ROBERT H. JACKSON (Chief of Counsel for the United States): In either case it was a crime. - International law at all times before and during this war spoke with precision and authority respecting the protection due civilians of an occupied country and the slave trade and plunder of occupied countries was at all times flagrantly unlawful. And the fifth group of crimes is: Persecution and Extermination of Jews and Christians. The Nazi movement will be of evil memory in history because of its persecution of the Jews, the most far-flung and terrible racial persecution of all time. Although the Nazi Party neither invented nor monopolized anti-Semitism, its leaders from the very beginning embraced it, incited it, and exploited it. They used it as "the psychological spark that ignites the mob." After the seizure of power, it became an official state policy. The persecution began in a series of discriminatory laws eliminating the Jews from the civil service, the professions, and economic life. As it became more intense it included segregation of Jews in ghettos, and exile. Riots were organized by Party leaders to loot Jewish business places and to burn synagogues. Jewish property was confiscated and a collective fine of a billion marks was imposed upon German Jewry. The program progressed in fury and irresponsibility to the 6'final solution." This consisted of sending all Jews who were fit to work to concentration camps as slave laborers, and all who were not fit, which included children under 12 and people over 50, as well as any others judged unfit by an SS doctor, to concentration camps for extermination (2605-PS). Adolf Eichmann, the sinister figure who had charge of the extermination program, has estimated that the anti-Jewish activities resulted in the killing of 6 million Jews. Of these, 4 minion were killed in extermination institutions, and 2 million were killed by Einsatzgruppen, mobile units of the Security Police and SD, which pursued Jews in the ghettos and in their homes and slaughtered them by gas wagons, by mass shooting in antitank ditches and by every device which Nazi ingenuity could conceive.
MR. JUSTICE ROBERT H. JACKSON (Chief of Counsel for the United States): So thorough and uncompromising was this program that the Jews of Europe as a race no longer exist, thus fulfilling the diabolic "prophecy" of Adolf Hitler at the beginning of the war (2738-PS). Of course, any such program must reckon with the opposition of the Christian Church. This was recognized from the very beginning. Defendant Bormann wrote all Gauleiters in 1941 that "National Socialism and Christian concepts are irreconcilable," and that the people must be separated from the churches and the influence of the churches totally removed (D-75). Defendant Rosenberg even wrote dreary treatises advocating a new and weird Nazi religion (2349-PS). The Gestapo appointed "Church specialists" who were instructed that the ultimate aim was "destruction of the confessional churches" (1815-PS). The record is full of specific instances of the persecution of clergymen (1164-PS, 1521-PS, 848-P,S, 849-PS), the confiscation of Church property (1481-PS), interference with religious publications (1498-PS), disruption of religious education (121-PS), and suppression of religious organizations (1481-PS, 1482-PS, R-145). The chief instrumentality for persecution and extermination was the concentration camp, sired by the Defendant Goering and nurtured under the over-all authority of Defendants Frick and Kaltenbrunner. The horrors of these iniquitous places have been vividly disclosed by documents (2309-PS, 3870-PS) and testified to by witnesses. The Tribunal must be satiated with ghastly verbal and pictorial portrayals. From your records it is clear that the concentration camps were the first and worst weapon of Nazi oppression used by the National Socialist State, and that they were the primary means utilized for the persecution of the Christian Church and the extermination of the Jewish race. This has been admitted to you by some of the defendants from the witness stand. In the words of Defendant Frank: "A thousand years will pass and this guilt of Germany will still not be erased." These, then, were the five great substantive crimes of the Nazi regime.
MR. JUSTICE ROBERT H. JACKSON (Chief of Counsel for the United States): Their commission, which cannot be denied, stands admitted. The Defendant Keitel, who is in a position to know the facts, has given the Tribunal what seems to be a fair summation of the case on the facts: "The defendant has declared that he admits the contents of the general Indictment to be proved from the objective and factual point of view (that is to say, not every individual case) and this in consideration of the law of procedure governing the Trial. It would be senseless, despite the possibility of refuting several documents or individual facts, to attempt to shake the Indictment as a whole." I pass now to the inquiry as to whether these groups of criminal acts were integrated in a Common Plan or Conspiracy. The Prosecution submits that these five categories of premeditated crimes were not separate and independent phenomena but that all were committed pursuant to a Common Plan or Conspiracy. The Defense admits that these classes of crimes were committed but denies that they are connected one with another as parts of a single program. The central crime in this pattern of crimes, the kingpin which holds them all together, is the plot for aggressive wars. The chief reason for international cognizance of these crimes lies in this fact. Have we established the Plan or Conspiracy to make aggressive war? Certain admitted or clearly proven facts help answer that question. First is the fact that such war of aggression did take place. Second, it is admitted that from the moment the Nazis came to power, every one of them and every one of the defendants worked like beavers to prepare for some war. The question therefore comes to this: Were they preparing for the war which did occur, or were they preparing for some war which never has happened? It is probably true that in their early days none of them had in mind what month of what year war would begin, the exact dispute which would precipitate it, or whether its first impact would be Austria, Czechoslovakia, or Poland.
MR. JUSTICE ROBERT H. JACKSON (Chief of Counsel for the United States): But I submit that the defendants either knew or were chargeable with knowledge that the war for which they were making ready would be a war of German aggression. This is partly because there was no real expectation that any power or combination of powers would attack Germany. But it is chiefly because the inherent nature of the German plans was such that they were certain sooner or later to meet resistance and that they could then be accomplished only by aggression. The plans of Adolf Hitler for aggression were just as secret as Mein Kampf, of which over six million copies were published in Germany. He not only openly advocated overthrowing the Treaty of Versailles, but made demands which went far beyond a mere rectification of its alleged injustices (GB-128). He avowed an intention to attack neighboring states and seize their lands, which he said would have to be won with "the power of a triumphant sword." Here, for every German to hearken to, were the "ancestral voices prophesying war." Goering has testified in this courtroom that at his first meeting with Hitler, long before the seizure of power, quoting: "I noted that Hitler had a definite view of the impotency of protest and, as a second point, that he was of the opinion that Germany should be freed of the peace of Versailles.
MR. JUSTICE ROBERT H. JACKSON (Chief of Counsel for the United States): We did not say we shall have to have a war and defeat our enemies; this was the aim, and the methods had to be adapted to the political situation." When asked if this goal were to be accomplished by war if necessary, Goering did not deny that eventuality but evaded a direct answer by saying, "We did not even debate about those things at that time." He went on to say that the aim to overthrow the Treaty of Versailles was open and notorious and that-I quote again-"every German in my opinion was for its modification, and there was no doubt that this was a strong inducement for joining the Party." Thus, there can be no possible excuse for any person who aided Hitler to get absolute power over the German people, or who took a part in his regime, to fail to know the nature of the demands he would make on Germany's neighbors. Immediately after the seizure of power the Nazis went to work to implement these aggressive intentions by preparing for war. They first enlisted German industrialists in a secret rearmament program. Twenty days after the seizure of power Schacht was host to Hitler, Goering, and some 20 leading industrialists. Among them were Krupp von Bohlen of the great Krupp armament works and representatives of I. G. Farben and other Ruhr heavy industries. Hitler and Goering explained their program to the industrialists, who became so enthusiastic that they set about to raise 3 million Reichsmark to strengthen and confirm the Nazi Party in power (EC-433). Two months later Krupp was working to bring a reorganized association of German industry into agreement with the political aims of the Nazi Government (D-157). Krupp later boasted of the success in keeping the German war industries secretly alive and in readiness despite the disarmament clauses of the Versailles Treaty, and recalled the industrialists' enthusiastic acceptance of "the great intentions of the Fuehrer in the rearmament period of 1933-39" (D-317).
MR. JUSTICE ROBERT H. JACKSON (Chief of Counsel for the United States): Some 2 months after Schacht had sponsored his first meeting to gain the support of the industrialists, the Nazis moved to harness industrial labor to their aggressive plans. In April 1933 Hitler ordered Dr. Ley "to take over the trade unions," numbering some six million members. By Party directive Ley seized the unions, their property and their funds. Union leaders, taken into "protective custody" by the SS and SA, were put into concentration camps (2283-PS, 2271-PS, 2335-PS, 2334-PS, 2928-PS, 2277-PS, 2332-PS, 2333-PS). The free labor unions were then replaced by a Nazi organization known as the German Labor Front, with Dr. Ley at its head. It was expanded until it controlled over 23 million members (2275-PS). Collective bargaining was eliminated, the voice of labor could no longer be heard as to working conditions, and the labor contract was prescribed by "trustees of labor" appointed by Hitler (405-PS). The war purpose of this labor program was clearly acknowledged by Robert Ley 5 days after war broke out, when he declared in a speech that: "We National Socialists have monopolized all resources and all our energies during the past 7 years so as to be able to be equipped for the supreme effort of battle" (1939-PS). The Nazis also proceeded at once to adapt the Government to the needs of war. In April 1933 the Cabinet formed a Defense Council, the working committee of which met frequently thereafter. In the meeting of 23 May 1933 at which Defendant Keitel presided, the members were instructed that: "No document must be lost since otherwise the enemy propaganda would make use of it. Matters communicated orally cannot be proven; they can be denied by us in Geneva" ' (EC-177). In January 1934-and, Your Honors, dates in this connection are important-with Defendant Jodl present, the Council planned a mobilization calendar and mobilization order for some 240,00Q industrial plants. Again it was agreed that nothing should be in writing so that "the military purpose may not be traceable" (EC-404).
MR. JUSTICE ROBERT H. JACKSON (Chief of Counsel for the United States): On 21 May 1935, the top secret Reich Defense Law was enacted. Defendant Schacht was appointed Plenipotentiary for War Economy with the task of secretly preparing all economic forces for war and, in the event of mobilization, of financing the war (2261-PS). Schacht's secret efforts were supplemented in October 1936 by the appointment of Defendant Goering as commissioner of the Four Year Plan, with the duty of putting the entire economy in a state of readiness for war within 4 years (EC-408). A secret program for the accumulation of the raw materials and foreign credits necessary for rearmament was also set on foot immediately upon seizure of power. In September of 1934, the Minister of Economics was already complaining that: "The task of stockpiling is being hampered by the lack of foreign currency; the need for secrecy and camouflage also is a retarding influence" (EC-128). Foreign currency controls were at once established. Financing was delegated to the wizard Schacht, who conjured up the mefo bill to serve the dual objectives of tapping the short-term money market for rearmament purposes while concealing the amount of these expenditures (EC-436). The spirit of the whole Nazi administration was summed up by Goering at a meeting of the Council of Ministers, which included Schacht, on 27 May 1936, when he said, "All measures are to be considered from the standpoint of an assured waging of war" (1301-PS). The General Staff, of course, also had to be enlisted in the war plan. Most of the generals, attracted by the prospect of rebuilding their armies, became willing accomplices. The hold-over Minister of War Von Blomberg and the Chief of Staff General Von Fritsch, however, were not cordial to the increasingly belligerent policy of the Hitler regime, and by vicious and obscene plotting they were discredited and removed in January- 1938.