dtufail/nuremberg-trials-corpus huggingface dataset:
RALPH G. ALBRECHT (Associate Trial Counsel for the United States): The chart, furthermore, which we are offering has been certified on its face as correct by a high official of the Nazi Party, namely Franz Xaver Schwarz, its treasurer (Reichsschatzmeister der NSDAP) and its official in charge of Party administration; and his affidavit is being submitted with the chart, and I now wish to offer this chart in evidence. (Document Number 2903-PS, Exhibit USA-2.) We have been able to have this chart duplicated, and, with the permission of the Tribunal, we are making it available to all concerned. Before I offer some remarks of explanation concerning the organization of the National Socialist German Labor Party, which, we believe, will be found useful in connection with the Prosecution's 22 Nov.45 case, I would just like to call the attention of the Tribunal to the fact that the larger chart which now appears is a simplification of the duplicated chart which Your Honors have been furnished. For if it had been reproduced in the same detail, I am afraid many of the boxes would not have appeared intelligible from this point. I would like to call your attention first of all to an organization with which we will have to become very familiar: the Leadership Corps of the NSDAP, (the Reichsleiter), which has been named as a defendant organization and which comprises the sum of the officials and leaders of the Nazi Party. If Your Honors will be good enough to follow me down the center line of the chart, we come to the main horizontal line of division where the word "Reichsleiter" appears. That is the first category of the Leadership Corps, I should say, the main category, perhaps, of the Leadership Corps. The Fuehrer, of course, stands above it. As we follow the vertical line of division to the lower part of the chart, we reach five additional boxes, which may be referred to collectively as the Hoheitstrager, the bearers of the sovereignty of the Party, and those are the Gauleiter, the Kreisleiter, the Ortsgruppendeiter, the Zellenleiter, and the Blockleiter.
RALPH G. ALBRECHT (Associate Trial Counsel for the United States): The Fuehrer at the top of our chart is the supreme and the only leader in the Nazi hierarchy. His successor-designate was first the Defendant Hess and subsequently the Defendant Goering. The Reichsleiter, of whom 16 are shown on this chart, comprise collectively the Party Directorate (Reichsleitung). Through them, coordination of the Party and State machinery was achieved. A number of these Reichsleiter, each of whom, at some time, was in charge of at least one office within the Party Directorate, were also the heads of other Party formations and affiliated and supervised organizations of the Party and also of agencies of the State, and they even held ministerial positions. The Reichsleitung may be said to represent the horizontal organization of the Party according to functions, within which all threads controlling the varied life of the German people met. Each office within the Reichsleitung of the NSDAP executed definite tasks assigned to it by the Fuehrer, or by the leader of the Party Chancellery (Chef der Parteikanzlei), who on the chart before you appears directly under the Fuehrer. In 1945 the chief of the Party Chancellery was Martin Bormann, the defendant in this proceeding, and before him, and until his flight to England in 1941, the Defendant Rudolf Hess. It was the duty of the Reichsleitung to make certain that these tasks assigned to it by the Fuehrer were carried out with expedition and without interruption, in order that the will of the Fuehrer quickly and rapidly was communicated to the lowest Party echelon, the lowliest Zelle or Block. The individual offices of the Reichsleitung had the mission to remain in constant and closest contact with the life of the people through the agency of the subdivisions of the component Party organizations in the Gaue, within the Kreis, or the Ort or the lower group.
RALPH G. ALBRECHT (Associate Trial Counsel for the United States): These leaders had been taught that the right to organize human beings accrued through the appreciation of the fact that a people must be educated ideologically; "welttanschaulich", the Germans call it, that is to say, according to the philosophy of National Socialism. Among the Reichsleiter, on trial in this cause, may be included the following defendants: If Your Honors will follow me to this broad, horizontal line, we start at the extreme left at the box marked with the Defendant Frank's name. At one time, although not in March 1945, he was the head of the Legal Office of the Party. He was the Reichsleiter des Reichsrechtsamtes. In the third square appears the Defendant Rosenberg, the delegate of the Fuehrer for Ideological Training and Education of the Party. He was called "Der Beaufiragte des Fuehrers fuer die Überwachung der gesamten geistigen und weltanschaulichen Schulung der NSDAP." Next to him, to the right, is the Defendant Von Schirach, leader of youth education, (Leiter fur die Jugenderziehung). Next to him, appears the late Defendant Robert Ley, at one time head of the Party Organization (Reichsorganisationsleiter der NSDAP) and also the leader of the German Labor Front, the DAN (Letter der Deutschen Arbeitsfront). Then, if we cross the vertical line, and proceed to the right- in passing I might allude to the box marked with the name of Schwarz. He was the Party official and Reichsleiter, who certified to the chart before the Tribunal. As we proceed further to the right, next to the last box, we find the name of the Defendant Frick, who was the leader of the Reichstag fraction (Leiter der NS Reichstagsfraktion). The next categories to be considered are the Hoheitsträger, at the bottom of the vertical line, in the center of the chart. The National Socialists called them the bearers of sovereignty. To them was assigned the political sovereignty over specially designated subdivisions of the State, of which they were the appointed leaders. The Hoheitsträger may be said to represent the vertical organization of the Party.
RALPH G. ALBRECHT (Associate Trial Counsel for the United States): These leaders, these Hoheitsträger included all Gauleiter, of whom there were 42 within the Reich in 1945. A Gauleiter was a political leader of the largest subdivision of the State. He was charged by the Fuehrer with the political, cultural, and economic control over all forms and manifestations of the life of the people and the coordination of the same with National Socialist philosophy and ideology. A number of the defendants before the bar of this Tribunal were former Gauleiter of the NSDAP. I mention, in this connection, the Defendant Streicher, Gauleiter of Franconia, "Franken-Fuehrer" they called him, whose seat was in the city of Nuremberg. Von Schirach was Gauleiter of Vienna and the Defendant Sauckel was Gauleiter of Thuringia. The next lower category on the chart were the Kreisleiter, the political leaders of the largest subdivision within a Gaul Then follow the Ortsgruppenleiter, the political leaders of the largest subdivision within the Kreis. And a Kreis consisted perhaps of several towns or villages or, in the case of a larger city, anywhere from 1,500 to 3,000 households. The next Hoheitstrager were the Zellenleiter, the political leaders of a group from four to eight city blocks, or of a corresponding group within country districts, and then follow the Blockleiter, the political leaders of from 40 to 60 households. Now, each of these political leaders, of these Hoheitsträger, or bearers of sovereignty, was directly responsible to the next highest leader in the Nazi hierarchy. The Gauleiter was directly responsible to the Fuehrer himself; the Kreisleiter was directly responsible to the Gauleiter, the Ortsgruppenleiter to the Kreisleiter, and so on. The Fuehrer himself reserved to himself, in accordance with the philosophy that runs through the Party, the right to name all Fuehrer. It was he, personally, that named the Reichsleiter, all members of the Party Directorate.
RALPH G. ALBRECHT (Associate Trial Counsel for the United States): It was he that appointed all Gauleiter and Kreisleiter and all political leaders, down to the grade of Gauamtsleiter, which was a lower classification of political leader within the Party organization of the Gauleiter These Hoheitsträger, together with the Reichsleitung, constituted the all-powerful group of leaders by means of which the Nazi Party reached right down into the lives of the people, consolidated its control of them and compelled them to conform to the National Socialist pattern. For this purpose broad powers were given to them, including the right to call upon all Party formations to effectuate their plans. They could requisition the services of the SA and of the SS, as well as of the HJ and of the NSKK. If I may direct your attention, for the moment, to the Party organizations that appear at the extreme left of the chart, I would just like to say that structurally these organizations were organized regionally to accord with the offices and regions controlled by the Hoheitstrager. If I might be more explicit, let us take the SA. The subsidiary formations of the SA came down and corresponded, in its lower organizations, to the Gau, so that we have a Gauleitung in the SA, and further down, to the Kreis, so that we have a Kreisleitung in the SA, so that the Gauleiter and the Kreisleiter, to cite two examples, charged with a particular duty by the Fuehrer, could call on these organizations for assistance in carrying out their tasks. These sinister implications of the use of this power will become more apparent as the Prosecution's case develops, and as the wealth of evidentiary material is introduced into evidence to prove the criminality of the defendant organizations. The component Party-organizations, called "Gliederungen" within the Party, are shown at the extreme left of the chart, and are the organizations to which I directed the attention of Your Honors a moment ago. These organizations actually constitute the Party itself, and substantially the entire Party-membership is contained within these organizations.
RALPH G. ALBRECHT (Associate Trial Counsel for the United States): The four principal organizations are sometimes referred to as "para-military" organizations. They were uniformed organizations and they were armed. These organizations were the notorious SA and SS, which are named as party-defendants in this case, the HJ (Hitler Youth), and the NSKK -  the Motor Corps of the Party (Kraftfahrkorps). Then there were also the National Socialist Women's Organization, the National Socialist German Students' Bund (Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund), and the National Socialist University Teachers' Organization (Nationalsozialistischer Dozentenbund). There are additional organizations that were officially designated within the Party, as affiliated organizations, not Gliederungen or controlled organizations, but affiliated organizations (Angeschlossene Verbände der NSDAP). Among those organizations we have the German Labor Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront)-the DAF; we have an organization that controlled the civil service (Reichsbund der Deutschen Beamten). There were the physicians within the National Socialist Deutscher Arztebund; there were the teachers in the National Socialist Lehrerbund; there were the lawyers within the National Socialist Rechtswahrerbund, of which, at one time, the Defendant Frank was the head. There is another group of organizations which was officially known as supervised organizations (Betreute Organisationen der NSDAP), organizations that included certain specialized women's organizations (Deutsches Frauenwerk), certain student societies (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Studentenschaft), former university students (Altherrenbund der Deutschen Studenten). There was a group that had reference to the German communes (Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Gemeindetag), and there was a Reichsbund fur Leibesubungen that interested itself in controlling all those interested in physical exercise.
RALPH G. ALBRECHT (Associate Trial Counsel for the United States): According to the official Party designations applicable to the various organizations and associations that controlled German life there was a fourth category, which is the last organization that appears to the right on the chart before Your Honors, which is sometimes simply called "Weitere Nationalsozialistische Organisationen", and here, in some respects, we are in "No man's land", because the Party was not static, it was dynamic and our latest information is now to the effect that the organizations that ordinarily came within this category, well-known organizations like the RAD (Reich Labor Service) and the NSFK (the National Socialist Fliegerkorps) or Flying Corps may no longer be included there. At least that was the opinion of the Party treasurer, who certified to this chart. I think with these few remarks, I have given some general impression of the structure of the Party, with which we are dealing in this proceeding before Your Honors. Before leaving the chart, perhaps I would just like to point out several other instances where some of the defendants appear in this set-up. At the very top, to the left of the Fuehrer, as marked on the chart before Your Honors, are the successors-designate of the Fuehrer. First is the Defendant Hess, until 1941, and followed by the Defendant Goering. Under the Fuehrer appears the chief of the Party Chancellery, the Defendant Martin Bormann, and then, if we come to the level of the Reichsleiter, and go to the left, opposite Rosenberg's name, we find that somewhat below that his name is repeated as the head of an office on a lower level, namely, the Foreign Relations Office of the Party, which played such a sinister influence in the early work of the Party, as will later appear in the documentary evidence to be presented to Your Honors.
RALPH G. ALBRECHT (Associate Trial Counsel for the United States): We then come to the late Defendant Ley's name, on the main horizontal division, and follow the dotted line to a lower level, and we will find he was the chief of the German Labor Front, and if we come closer to the vertical line, to a lower level; below the Reichsleitung, we find the Defendant Sheer in the Hauptamt fuer Technik (the Office of Technical Affairs), and below that as the chief of the Bund Deutscher Technik (German Technological League). With the permission of the Tribunal, the Prosecution will now pass to the consideration of the governmental machinery of the German Estate, which, like the organization of the Nazi Party, requires some brief observations before the Prosecution proceeds with the submission of proof on the Common Plan of Conspiracy, with which the defendants have been charged. If the Tribunal will allow, the Prosecution will offer as its second exhibit, another chart, delineating substantially the governmental structure of the Reich Government as it existed in March 1945, and also the chief Leadership Corps of the Reich Government and the Reich Administration during those years. (Document Number 2905-PS, Exhibit USA-3) This chart has been prepared by the Prosecution on the basis of information contained in two official publications, Das Taschenbuch fuer Verwaltungsbeamte, (the Manual for Administrative Officers) and the National Sozialistisches Jahrbuch , to which I have already alluded, edited by the Defendant Ley. This chart has been examined, corrected, and certified by the Defendant Wilhelm Frick, whose affidavit is submitted with the chart. In fact, it is reproduced directly on the copies of the charts before Your Honors. It seems plain that the Defendant Frick, a former Minister of Interior of the Reich from January 1933 to August 1943, was well qualified, by reason of his position and long service in public office during the National Socialist regime, to certify to the substantial accuracy of the facts disclosed in this chart.
RALPH G. ALBRECHT (Associate Trial Counsel for the United States): Now, with the permission of the Tribunal, I would like to make some brief comments on this chart. First of all, we refer to the Reichsregierung, which is the big box in the center of the chart on the vertical line, directly below Hitler. The Reichsregierung is a word that may not be translated literally as "government of the Reich." The word "Reichsregierung" is a word of art and is applied collectively to the ministers who composed the German Cabinet. The Reichsregierung has been named as a defendant in this proceeding, and as used in the Indictment the expression "Reichsregierung" identifies a group which, we will urge, should be declared to have been a criminal organization. This group includes all the men named in that center box, who were members of the Cabinet after 30 January 1933, that is, Reich ministers with and without portfolio, and all other officials entitled to participate in the deliberations of the Cabinet. Secondly, it includes members of the Counsel of Ministers for the Defense of the Reich. It is called "Ministerrat fuer die Reichsverteidigung", which is the large box to the right of the vertical line. Then, it includes the members of the Secret Cabinet Council, which is the small box to the left of the vertical line, the Geheimer Kabinettsrat, of which the Defendant Von Neurath was the President. Unlike the Cabinets and Ministerial Councils in countries that were not within the orbit of the Axis, the Reichsregierung, after 30 January, 1933 when Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of the German Reich, did not remain merely the executive branch of the Government. In short order it also came to be possessed, and it exercised legislative, and other functions as well, in the governmental system into which the German Government developed while under the domination of the National Socialist Party. It is proper to observe here that unlike such Party organizations as the SA and SS, the Reichsregierung, before 1933, certainly, was not a body created exclusively or even predominantly for the purpose of committing illegal acts.
RALPH G. ALBRECHT (Associate Trial Counsel for the United States): The Reichsregierung was an instrument of government provided for by the Weimar constitution. Under the Nazi regime, however, the Reichsregierung gradually became a primary agent of the Party, with functions formulated in accordance with the objectives and methods of the Party itself. The Party to all intents and purposes, was intended to be a Fuehrerorden, an order of Fuehrer, a pool of political leaders. And while the Party was, in the words of a German law, "the bearer of the concept of the German State," it was not identical with the State. Thus, in order to realize its ideological and political objectives and to reach the German people, the Party had to avail itself of official state channels. The Reichsregierung, and such agencies and offices established by it, were the chosen instruments, by means of which the Party policies were converted into legislative and administrative acts, binding upon the German people as a whole. In order to accomplish this result, the Reichsregierung was thoroughly remodelled by the Party. Some of the steps may be here recorded, by which the coordination of Party and State machinery was assured in order to impose the will of the Fuehrer on the German people. On January 30, 1933, the date that the Fuehrer became Reich Chancellor, there were few National Socialists that were Cabinet members. But, as the power of the Party in the Reich grew, the Cabinet came to include an ever increasing number of Nazis, until by January 1937 no non-Party member remained in the Reichsregierung. New cabinet-posts were created and Nazis appointed to them. Many of these cabinet members were also in the Reichsleitung of the Party. To give but a few examples: The Defendant Rosenberg, whose name Your Honors will find in that central box on the vertical line, the delegate of the Fuehrer for Ideological Training and Education of the Party, was a member of the Reichsregierung in his capacity as Minister for the Occupied Eastern Areas, the Reichsminister fuer die besetzten Ostgebiete.
RALPH G. ALBRECHT (Associate Trial Counsel for the United States): And if Your Honors will follow me on the vertical line to the main horizontal line and proceed to the very end, you will find a box marked "Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories", of which the head was the Defendant Rosenberg. The Defendant Frick, the leader of the National Socialist fraction in the Reichstag, was also Minister of the Interior. If Your Honors will follow me down to the main horizontal line and two boxes over you will find the Ministry presided over by the Defendant Frick. Goebbels, the Reichsleiter fur Propaganda, also sat in the Cabinet as Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda (Reichsminister fur Volksaufklarung und Propaganda). He is in the next box to the right from the Ministry of the Interior. After the 25th of July 1934 Party participation in the work of the Cabinet was at all times achieved through the person of the Defendant Rudolf Hess, the deputy of the Fuehrer. By a decree of Hitler the Defendant Hess was invested with the power to take part in the editing of legislative bills with all the departments of the Reich. Later this power of the Fuehrer's deputy was expanded to include all executive decisions and orders that were published in the Reichsgesetzblatt, the official volume in which are contained the decrees of the State. After Hess's flight to England in 1941, the Defendant Martin Bormann, as his successor, took over the same functions, and in addition he was given the authority of a Reichsminister so that he could sit in the Cabinet. Now, another item of importance: On the 30th of January 1937, four years after Hitler became Chancellor, the Fuehrer executed the acceptances into the Party of those last few Cabinet members who still remained out of the Party. Only one Cabinet member had the strength of character to reject membership in the Party. That was the Minister of Transportation and Minister of Posts, Mr. Eltz-Ruebenach. His example was not followed by the Defendant Von Neurath. His example was not followed by the Defendant Raeder.
RALPH G. ALBRECHT (Associate Trial Counsel for the United States): And if the Defendant Schacht was not yet at that time a member of the Party, I might say that his example was not followed by the Defendant Schacht. The chart shows many other instances where Party members on the highest, as well as subordinate levels, occupied corresponding or other positions in the organization of the State. Take Hitler. The Fuehrer of the NSDAP was also the Chancellor of the Reich, with which office, furthermore, the office of President of the Reich was Joined and merged after the death of President Von Hindenburg in 1934. Take the Defendant Goering, the successor-designate of Hitler. As Fuehrer of the SA, he sat in the Cabinet as Air Minister Luftfahrtminister and he also held many other important positions, including that of Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe (the German Air Force) and that of Delegate for the Four Year Plan. Himmler, the notorious head of the SS, the Reichsfuehrer SS, was also the chief of the German Police, reporting to the Defendant Frick. He himself later became Minister of the Interior after the attempted assassination of Hitler on June 20, 1944, which event also catapulted him into the position of Commander-in-Chief of the German Reserve Army. Now, at the extreme upper left of the chart is a small box that is labeled "Reichstag" (the former German parliament).
THE PRESIDENT: The Tribunal will adjourn for 10 minutes, and 10 minutes only. [A recess was taken]