purpose and the legal value of the treaty. If Germany was entitled to
have recourse to war in self-defense and if she was free to determine in
what circumstances she was permitted to exercise the right of
self-defense, can she ever be considered to have violated the solemn
obligation of the treaty? That question counsel of the defense sought to
answer in the negative. But that answer amounts to an assertion that
that solemn treaty subscribed to by more than sixty nations is a scrap
of paper devoid of any meaning at all, and it would result in this—that
every prohibition or limitation of the right of war would be a nullity
if it expressly provides for the right of self-defense, and I invite the
Tribunal emphatically to consign that parody of legal reasoning to where
it properly belongs.
Neither the Pact of Paris nor any other treaty was intended to—or
could—take away the right of self-defense. Nor did it deprive its
signatories of the right to determine, in the first instance, whether
there was danger in delay and whether immediate action to defend
themselves was imperative; and that only is the meaning of the express
proviso that each state judges whether action in self-defense is
necessary. But that does not mean that the state thus acting is the
ultimate judge of the propriety and of the legality of its conduct. It
acts at its peril. Just as the individual is answerable for the exercise
of his common law right of defense, so the state is answerable if it
abuses its discretion, if it transforms “self-defense” into an
instrument of conquest and lawlessness, if it twists the natural right
of self-defense into a weapon of predatory aggrandizement and lust. The
ultimate decision as to the lawfulness of action claimed to be taken in
self-defense does not lie with the state concerned, and for that reason,
the right of self-defense, whether expressly reserved or implied, does
not impair the capacity of a treaty to create legal obligations against
war.
Under the Covenant of the League of Nations, Japan was entitled to
decide in the first instance whether events in Manchuria justified
resort to force in self-defense. But it was left to an impartial body of
enquiry to find, as it did find, that there was in fact no justification
for action in self-defense and to mention a more recent example, Article
51 of the Charter of the United Nations lays down that nothing in the
Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective
self-defense in case of armed attack. But it expressly leaves to the
Security Council the power of ultimate action and determination. It is
to be hoped that the judgment of this Tribunal will discourage, and
discourage with appropriate finality, any further reliance on the
argument that, because a treaty reserved for the signatories the right
of action in self-defense, it becomes, for that reason, incapable of
imposing upon the signatories any effective legal obligation against
war.
I will now turn to the argument that the motion of criminal
responsibility is incompatible with the idea of national sovereignty. A
state may, and this Professor Jahrreiss conceded, commit an offense
against international law, but he contends that to make it criminally
responsible and punishable would be to deny the sovereignty of the
state.
It is strange to see the accused who in their capacity as the German
Government overran most of the states of Europe, who trampled brutally
upon their sovereign independence, and who with boastful and swaggering
cynicism made the sovereignty of the conquered states subservient to the
new conception of the “Grossraumordnung”—it is strange to see these
defendants appealing to the mystic virtues of the sanctity of state
sovereignty, and perhaps it is not less remarkable to find them invoking
orthodox international law to protect the defeated German State and its
rulers from just punishment at the hands of the victorious powers. But
there is no rule of international law which they can call in aid to this
regard.
In a sense these proceedings are not concerned with punishing the German
State. They are concerned with the punishment of individuals. But it
might seem strange if individuals were criminally responsible for the
acts of the state if such acts by the state were not themselves crimes.
There is, in our submission, no substance at all in the view that
international law rules out the criminal responsibility of states and
that since, because of their sovereignty, states cannot be coerced, all
their acts are legal. Legal purists may contend that nothing is law
which is not imposed from above by a sovereign power body having the
power to compel obedience. That idea of the analytical jurists has never
been applicable to international law. If it had, the undoubted
obligation of states in matters of contract and tort could not exist.
It may be true that in international relationships prior to the war,
there was no super-sovereign body which at the same time imposed
international laws and enforced them. But, at least in the international
field, the existence of law has never been dependent on the existence of
a correlated sanction external to the law itself. International law has
always been based on the element of common consent and where you have a
body of rules which, whether by common consent or treaty, are obligatory
upon the members of the international community, those rules are the
laws of that community although the consent has not been obtained by
force, and although there may be no direct or external sanction to
secure obedience. The fact is that absolute sovereignty in the old sense
is, very fortunately, a thing of the past. It is a conception which is
quite inconsistent with the binding force of any international treaty.
In the course of the work of the Permanent Court of International
Justice, it became a stock argument to rely on state sovereignty in
support of the opinion that, as states are sovereign, treaty obligations
entered into by them ought to be at least interpreted restrictively. The
court consistently discouraged that view. In its very first judgment—a
judgment given against Germany in the Wimbledon case—it rejected the
plea of sovereignty as a reason for the restrictive interpretation of
obligations in treaties. The court declined to see in a treaty, by which
a state undertook to observe a definite line of conduct, an abandonment
of its sovereignty and the court reminded Germany that the very right to
enter into international engagements is an attribute of state
sovereignty. As a philosophical proposition the right to contract and
the right to freedom of action too, I suppose, present an eternal
antithesis. But just as individuals secure their freedom by adherence to
their laws, so may sovereign states maintain their own individual
status; the view that since states are sovereign they cannot be coerced
has long since been abandoned. The Covenant of the League of Nations
made provision, in Article 16, for sanctions against sovereign
states—sanctions being only another name for coercion, probably
coercion of a punitive character. The Charter of the United Nations has
followed suit—much more decisively. It is true that, because of the
absence of a competent compulsory jurisdiction, there is no judicial
precedent for states being arraigned before a criminal tribunal. But
that is equally true of the undoubted civil responsibilities of states,
for apart from treaty there is no compulsory jurisdiction in any
international tribunal to adjudicate upon them.
The first man tried for murder may have complained that no court had
tried such a case before. The methods of procedure, the specific
punishments, the appropriate courts, can always be defined by subsequent
proclamation. The only innovation which this Charter has introduced is
to provide machinery, long overdue, to carry out the existing law, and
there is no substance in the complaint that the Charter is a piece of
_post factum_ legislation either in declaring wars of aggression to be
criminal, or in assuming that the state is not immune from criminal
responsibility.
But then it is argued, even if the state is liable, it is only the state
and not the individual who can be made responsible under international
law. That argument is put in several ways. States only, it is said, and
not individuals, are the subject of international law. But there is no
such principle of international law. One need only mention the case of
piracy or breach of blockade, or the case of spies, to see that there
are numerous examples of duties being imposed by international law
directly upon individuals. War crimes have always been recognized as
bringing individuals within the scope of international law. In England
and the United States our courts have invariably acted on the view that
the accepted customary rules of the law of nations are binding upon the
subject and the citizen, and the position is essentially the same in
most countries. In Germany itself, Article 4 of the Weimar Constitution
laid it down that generally recognized rules of international law must
be regarded as an integral part of German Federal Law and what can it
mean in effect, save that the rules of international law are binding
upon individuals? Shall we depart from that principle merely because we
are here concerned with the gravest offense of all—crimes against the
peace of nations and crimes against humanity? The law is a living,
growing thing. In no other sphere is it more necessary to affirm that
the rights and duties of states are the rights and duties of men and
that unless they bind individuals they bind no one. It is a startling
proposition that those who aid and abet, who counsel and procure the
commission of a crime are themselves immune from responsibility. The
international crime does not differ from the municipal offense in this
respect.
Then the argument is put in another way. Where the act concerned is an
act of state, those who carry it out as the instruments of the state are
not personally responsible and they are entitled, it is claimed, to
shelter themselves behind the sovereignty of the state. It is not
suggested, of course, that this argument has any application to war
crimes, and we submit each of these men is guilty of countless war
crimes. It might be enough to brush the matter aside as academic. But
that course perhaps would diminish the value which these proceedings
will have on the subsequent development of international law. Now it is
true that there is a series of decisions in which courts have affirmed
that one state has no authority over another sovereign state or over its
head or representative. Those decisions have been based on the precepts
of the comity of nations and of peaceful and smooth international
intercourse. They do not in truth depend upon any sacrosanctity of
foreign sovereignty, except insofar as the recognition of sovereignty in
itself promotes international relations. They really afford no authority
for the proposition that those who constitute the organs of incorporate
states, those who are behind the state, are entitled to rely on the
metaphysical entity which they create and control when, by their very
directions, that state sets out to destroy that very comity on which the
rules of international law depend. Suppose a state were to send a body
of persons into the territory of another state with instructions to
murder and to rob. Would those persons carrying out those orders be
immune because in the fulfillment of their criminal design they were
acting as the organs of another state? Suppose the individuals who had
ordered the predatory expedition were to fall into the hands of the
state attacked—could they plead immunity? In my submission clearly not.
Yet the case put is exactly the case which occurred here. The truth is
that this attempt to clothe crime with impunity because the motive was
political rather than personal invokes no principle of law but is based
on arbitrary political doctrines more appropriate to the sphere of power
politics than to that in which the rule of law prevails.
And finally it is said that these wretched men were powerless
instruments in Hitler’s hands, ordered to do that which reluctantly, so
they say, they did. The defense of superior orders is excluded by the
Charter although Article 8 provides that it may in appropriate cases be
considered in mitigation of punishment, if the Tribunal thinks that
justice so requires. But the Charter no more than declares the law.
There is no rule of international law which provides immunity for those
who obey orders which—whether legal or not in the country where they
are issued—are manifestly contrary to the very law of nature from which
international law has grown. If international law is to be applied at
all, it must be superior to municipal law in this respect, that it must
consider the legality of what is done by international and not by
municipal tests. By every test of international law, of common
conscience, of elementary humanity, these orders—if indeed it was in
obedience to orders that these men acted—were illegal. Are they then to
be excused?
The dictatorship behind which these men seek to shelter was of their own
creation. In the desire to secure power and position for themselves they
built up the system under which they received their orders. The
continuance of that system depended on their continued support. Even if
it were true that—as Jodl suggested—these men might have been
dismissed, perhaps imprisoned, had they disobeyed the orders which they
were given, would not any fate have been better than that they should
have lent themselves to these things? But it was not true. These were
the men in the inner councils, the men who planned as well as carried
out; of all people the ones who might have advised, restrained, halted
Hitler instead of encouraging him in his satanic courses. The principle
of collective responsibility of the members of a government is not an
artificial doctrine of constitutional law. It is an essential protection
of the rights of man and the community of nations; international law is
fully entitled to protect its own existence by giving effect to it.
Let me now pass to Counts Three and Four of the Indictment, the Counts
dealing with War Crimes and what we have described, as in fact they are,
as Crimes against Humanity.
And as to these, may I first make some comment on the legal position.
About the law as to war crimes, little indeed need be said, because the
law is clear enough and not in doubt. Here are crimes more terrible
indeed in their extent than anything which had hitherto been known, but
none the less well recognizable under the pre-existing rules of
international law and clearly within the legitimate jurisdiction either
of a national or of an international tribunal. There is no element of
retroactivity here, no question of _post factum_ law making, nor is
there any shadow of novelty in the decision of the Charter that those
who shared the ultimate responsibility for these frightful deeds should
bear individual responsibility. It is true that the lawyers and the
statesmen who, at The Hague and elsewhere in days gone by, built up the
code of rules and the established customs by which the world has sought
to mitigate the brutality of war and to protect from its most extreme
harshness those who were passive noncombatants, never dreamed of such
wholesale and widespread slaughter. But murder does not cease to be
murder merely because the victims are multiplied ten-million-fold.
Crimes do not cease to be criminal because they have a political motive.
These crimes were many and manifold. It is not useful to catalog them
here. They vary most considerably in the numbers of victims. There are
the 50 murdered prisoners of war who escaped from Stalag Luft III; the
hundreds of commandos and airmen who were exterminated; there are the
thousands of civilian hostages put to death; the tens of thousands of
sailors and passengers who perished in a piratical campaign of terror;
there are the hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war, especially
Russians, and of civilians who met their death because of the rigors and
cruelties to which they were exposed, if not by outright murder, and
there are the many millions murdered outright, or by the slower method
of deliberate starvation, 6 million of them for no better reason than
that they were of Jewish race or faith.
The mere number of victims is not the real criterion of the criminality
of an act. The majesty of death, the compassion for the innocent, the
horror and detestation of the ignominy inflicted upon man—man created
in the image of God—these are not the subjects of mathematical
calculation. Nonetheless, somehow, numbers are relevant. For we are not
dealing here with the occasional atrocities which are perhaps an
incident in any war. It may be that war develops the good things in man;
it certainly brings out the worst. It is not a game of cricket. In any
war, in this war no doubt there have been—and no doubt on both
sides—numbers of brutalities and atrocities. They must have seemed
terrible enough to those against whom they were committed. I do not
excuse or belittle them. But they were casual, unorganized, individual
acts. We are dealing here with something entirely different; with
systematic, wholesale, consistent action, taken as a matter of
deliberate calculation—calculation of the highest level. And so the
principal war crime in extent as in intensity with which these men are
charged is the violation of the most firmly established and least
controversial of all the rules of warfare, namely, that noncombatants
must not be made the direct object of hostile operations. What a mockery
the Germans sought to make of the Fourth Hague Convention on the laws
and customs of war—convention which merely formulated what was already
a fundamental rule: “Family honor and rights, the lives of persons and
private property, as well as religious convictions and practices, must
be respected.”
The murdering on the orders of the German Government, whose members are
here in the dock, in the territory occupied by its military forces,
whose leaders are here in the dock, of millions of civilians, whether it
was done in pursuance of a policy of racial extermination, as the result
of, or in connection with, the deportation of slave labor, in
consequence of the desire to do away with the intellectual and political
leaders of the countries which had been occupied or was part of the
general application of terror through collective reprisals upon the
innocent population and upon hostages—this murdering of millions of
noncombatants is a war crime. It may indeed be a crime against humanity
as well. Both imagination and intellect, shattered by the horror of
these things, recoil from putting the greatest crime in history into the
cold formula already described in the textbooks as a war crime. Yet it
is important to remember that that is what these crimes were.
Irrespective, in the main, of where they were committed or of the race
or nationality of the victims, these were offenses upon the civilian
population, contrary to the laws of war in general and to those of
belligerent occupation in particular. The truth is that murder,
wholesale, planned, and systematic, became part and parcel of a firmly
entrenched and apparently secure belligerent occupation. That that was a
war crime no one has sought to dispute.
But some attempt has been made to canvass the illegality of three other
classes of action with which also these men stand charged: Deportation
to Germany for forced labor; the crimes at sea in connection with
submarine warfare, and the shooting of commandos. And let me shortly
examine these matters.
The deportation of the civilian population for forced labor is, of
course, a crime both according to international custom and to
conventional international law as expressed in the Hague Convention.
Article 46 of Hague Convention Number IV enjoins the occupying powers to
respect “family honor and rights” and “the lives of persons.” Article 52
of the same convention lays down that:
“Services shall not be demanded from municipalities or
inhabitants except for the needs of the army of occupation”—and
that—“they shall be in proportion to the resources of the
country and of such a nature as not to involve the population in
the obligation of taking part in the operations of war against
that country.”
With these simple and categorical provisions we have to contrast the
staggering dimensions of the operation which the Defendant Sauckel
directed and in which the other defendants participated, the
ruthlessness with which peaceful citizens were torn from their families,
surroundings, and employment, the manner in which they were transported,
the treatment which they received on arrival, the conditions in which
they worked and died in thousands and tens of thousands, and the kind of
work which they were compelled to perform as direct helpers in the
production of arms, munitions, and other instruments of war against
their own country, and against their own people. How can all that be
reconciled with the law?
It seems to have been suggested that the prohibition of the Law of
Nations relating to deportation had in some way become obsolete in the
face of the modern development of totalitarian war requiring the vastest
possible use and exploitation of the material and labor resources of the
occupied territory. I confess I do not understand how the extent of the
activities a belligerent imposes on himself, the size of the effort he
needs to make in order to avoid defeat, can enlarge his rights against
peaceful noncombatants or enable him to brush aside the rules of war. We
cannot make these _post factum_ repeals of accepted international law in
favor of the lawbreakers.
Nor is there a shadow of a right to invoke any material change in
conditions as a justification for their crimes at sea—crimes which cost
the lives of 30,000 British seamen alone. We need not base our case here
solely on the mere violation of the customary rules of warfare as
embodied in the London Protocols of 1930 and 1936, fully subscribed to
as they were by Germany and prohibiting sinking without warning, or even
with warning if proper provision had not been made for the safety of
passengers and crew. We need not concern ourselves with the niceties of
argument whether the practice of arming merchantmen affects the
position.
Nor need we take time to examine the astonishing proposition that the
sinking of neutral shipping was legalized by the process of making a
paper order excluding such neutral ships not from some definite war zone
over which Germany exercised control but from vast areas of the seas.
For there is one matter at least about which nobody questions or puts
questions to the law.
If you are satisfied that orders were given that survivors should not be
rescued, that steps should be taken to prevent the shipwrecked from
surviving, for the use of such weapons that there could be no question
of survivors, you will have no doubt that what was done was contrary to
law. It is no answer that to allow noncombatants to survive entailed
greater risk to the attackers. The murderer is not excused because he
says that it was necessary to kill the victim he had violated lest he
should subsequently identify him.
So also in regard to the orders for the execution of commandos. New
methods of warfare, new forms of attack, do not in themselves repeat
existing established rules of law. The sanctity of the life of the
soldier in uniform, who surrenders after the accomplishment of his
mission and who committed no war crime prior to his capture, is, and I
ask you to say, must remain an absolute principle of international law.
Those who, for whatever motive, trample upon it in disregard of law, in
disregard of humanity, in disregard of chivalry, must pay the penalty
when at last the law is vindicated.
I shall not examine this matter further or detail the other types of war
crimes charged in the Indictment. For that these matters, various in
their kind or method, were crimes under established law is not in doubt.
The Tribunal will be concerned only to affirm the law and to decide upon
the measure of these prisoners’ involvement in its breach.
Let me, however, before I turn to questions of fact refer to the Fourth
Count of the Indictment, the Crimes against Humanity. It is convenient,
I think, to deal with these matters together for insofar as they were
committed during the war, to some extent they overlap and in any case
they are interconnected. The war crimes were in their very enormity
crimes against humanity. The crimes against humanity were not seldom war
crimes, larger still. Moreover, the crimes against humanity with which
this Tribunal has jurisdiction to deal are limited to this extent—they
must be crimes the commission of which was in some way connected with,
in anticipation of or in furtherance of the crimes against the peace or
the war crimes _stricto sensu_ with which the defendants are indicted.
That is the qualification which Article 6(c) of the Charter introduces.
The considerations which apply here are, however, different to those
affecting the other classes of offense, the crime against peace or the
ordinary war crime. You have to be satisfied not only that what was done
was a crime against humanity but also that it was not purely a domestic
matter but that directly or indirectly it was associated with crimes
against other nations or other nationals, in that, for instance, it was
undertaken in order to strengthen the Nazi Party in carrying out its
policy of domination by aggression, or to remove elements such as
political opponents, the aged, the Jews, the existence of which would
have hindered the carrying out of the total war policy.
Pursuing that for a moment, the racial policy against the Jews was, as I
have said, simply one facet of the Herrenvolk doctrine. In _Mein Kampf_
Hitler had said that the most decisive factor in the German collapse in
1918 was “the failure to recognize... the racial problem and the Jewish
menace.” The attack on the Jews was at once a secret weapon—an enduring
fifth column weapon—to split and weaken the democracies and a device
for unifying the German people for war. Himmler made it clear in his
speech on 4 October 1943, that the treatment meted out to German Jews
was closely connected with the war policy. He said:
“For we know how difficult we should have made it for ourselves
if ... we still had Jews today in every town as secret
saboteurs, agitators, and trouble mongers.”
So the crime against the Jews, insofar as it is a crime against humanity
and not a war crime as well, is one which we indict because of its close
association with the crime against the peace. That is, of course, a very
important qualification on the Indictment of the Crimes against Humanity
which is not always appreciated by those who have questioned the
exercise of this jurisdiction. But subject to that qualification we have
thought it right to deal with matters which the criminal law of all
countries would normally stigmatize as crimes—murder, extermination,
enslavement, persecution on political, racial, or economic grounds.
These things done against belligerent nationals, or for that matter,
done against German nationals in belligerent occupied territory would be
ordinary war crimes the prosecution of which would form no novelty. Done
against others they would be crimes against municipal law except insofar
as German law, departing from all the canons of civilized procedure, may
have authorized them to be done by the State or by persons acting on
behalf of the State. Although, so to do, does not in any way place those
defendants in greater jeopardy than they would otherwise be; the nations
adhering to the Charter of this Tribunal have felt it proper and
necessary in the interest of civilization to say that these things even
if done in accordance with the laws of the German State, as created and
ruled by these men and their ringleader, were, when committed with the
intention of affecting the international community—that is in
connection with the other crimes charged—not mere matters of domestic
concern but crimes against the law of nations. I do not minimize the
significance for the future of the political and jurisprudential
doctrine which is here implied. Normally international law concedes that
it is for the state to decide how it shall treat its own nationals; it
is a matter of domestic jurisdiction. And although the Social and
Economic Council of the United Nations Organization is seeking to
formulate a charter of the Rights of Man, the Covenant of the League of
Nations and the Charter of the United Nations Organization do recognize
that general position. Yet international law has in the past made some
claim that there is a limit to the omnipotence of the state and that the
individual human being, the ultimate unit of all law, is not disentitled
to the protection of mankind when the state tramples upon his rights in
a manner which outrages the conscience of mankind. Grotius, the founder
of international law, had some notion of that principle when—at a time
when the distinction between the just and the unjust war was more
clearly accepted than was the case in the nineteenth century—he
described as just a war undertaken for the purpose of defending the
subjects of a foreign state from injuries inflicted by their ruler. He
affirmed, with reference to atrocities committed by tyrants against
their subjects, that intervention is justified for “the right of social
connection is not cut off in such a case.” The same idea was expressed
by John Westlake, the most distinguished of British international
lawyers, when he said:
“It is idle to argue in such cases that the duty of neighboring
peoples is to look quietly on. Laws are made for men and not
creatures of the imagination and they must not create or
tolerate for them situations which are beyond endurance.”
The same view was acted upon by the European powers which in time past
intervened in order to protect the Christian subjects of Turkey against
cruel persecution. The fact is that the right of humanitarian
intervention by war is not a novelty in international law—can
intervention by judicial process then be illegal? The Charter of this
Tribunal embodies a beneficent principle—much more limited than some
would like it to be—and it gives warning for the future. I say, and
repeat again, gives warning for the future, to dictators and tyrants
masquerading as a state that if, in order to strengthen or further their
crimes against the community of nations, they debase the sanctity of man
in their own country they act at their peril, for they affront the
international law of mankind.
As for the criticism which is made of retroactive law, that it makes
that criminal which men did not know to be wrong when they committed
it—what application can that have here? You will not disregard it even
if these defendants time after time disregard it, the countless warnings
that were given by foreign states and foreign statesmen on the course
which was being pursued by Germany before the war. No doubt these men
counted on victory, their whole policy was based on the notion of
success; they little thought that they would be brought to account. But
can any one of them be heard to say that if he knew about these things
at all he did not know them to be wrongs crying out to High Heaven for
vengeance?
Let me deal with what they did to prisoners of war, for this alone, the
clearest crime of all, demands their conviction and will for all time
stain the record of German arms.
On the 8th of September 1941, final regulations for the treatment of
Soviet prisoners of war in all prisoner-of-war camps were issued, signed
by General Reinecke, the head of the prisoners of war department of the
High Command. They were the result of agreement with the SS and read as
follows (Document Number 1519-PS):
“The Bolshevist soldier has therefore lost all claim, to
treatment as an honorable soldier in accordance with the Geneva
Convention.... The order for ruthless and energetic action must
be given at the slightest indication of insubordination
especially in the case of Bolshevist trouble mongers.
Insubordination, active or passive resistance, must be broken
immediately by force of arms (bayonets, butts, and firearms)....
Anyone carrying out the order who does not use his weapons or
does so with insufficient energy is punishable.... Prisoners of
war attempting to escape are to be fired on without previous
challenge. No warning shot must ever be fired.... The use of
arms against prisoners of war is, as a rule, legal.... Camp
police must be formed of suitable Soviet prisoners of war in the
camp.... Within the wire fence the camp police may be armed with
sticks, whips, or other similar weapons to enable them to carry
out their duties effectively.”
The regulations go on to order the segregation of civilians and
politically undesirable prisoners of war taken during the Eastern
campaign. After prescribing the importance for the Armed Forces of
ridding themselves of all those elements among the prisoners of war
which could be considered as the driving forces of Bolshevism, emphasis
is placed on the need for special measures, free from bureaucratic
administrative influences, and accordingly their transfer to the
Security Police and the SD is given as the way to reach the “appointed
goal.”
That Keitel, who is directly responsible for this order, was issuing it
with full knowledge of its implications is made clear by the memorandum
of Admiral Canaris dated 15 September 1941, protesting against it, and
correctly stating the legal position, as follows (Document Number
EC-338):
“The Geneva Convention for the treatment of prisoners of war is
not binding in the relationship between Germany and the U.S.S.R.
Therefore only the principles of general international law on
the treatment of prisoners of war apply. Since the eighteenth
century these have gradually been established along the lines
that war captivity is neither revenge nor punishment but solely
protective custody the only purpose of which is to prevent the
prisoners of war from further participation in the war. This
principle was developed in accordance with the view held by all
armies that it is contrary to military tradition to kill or
injure helpless people.... The decrees for the treatment of
Soviet prisoners of war enclosed ... are based on a
fundamentally different viewpoint.”
Canaris went on to point out the shocking nature of the orders for use
of arms by guards and for equipping the camp police with clubs and
whips. On this memorandum, as you were reminded this morning, Keitel
noted:
“The objections arise from the military concept of chivalrous
warfare. This is the destruction of an ideology. Therefore, I
approve and back the measures. K.”
Any possible doubt that Keitel knew that the transfer to the Security
Police and SD was intended to mean liquidation can hardly survive study
of that document. Canaris writes of the screening, as it is called, of
the undesirables: “The decision over their fate is effected by the
action detachments of the Security Police and the SD,” on which Keitel,
underlining Security Police, comments “very efficient,” whilst on the
further criticism by Canaris that the principles of their decision are
unknown to the Wehrmacht authorities, Keitel comments “not at all.”
The parallel instruction to the Security Police and SD recites the
agreement with the High Command and after enjoining the closest
co-operation between the members of the police teams and the commandants
of the camp and listing those to be handed over, it reads (Document
502-PS):
“Executions must not be held in the camp.... If the camps in the
Government General are located in the immediate vicinity of the
border the prisoners are to be taken if at all possible to
former Soviet Russian territory for special treatment.”
It is not necessary to remind you of the volume of evidence with regard
to the numbers of Soviet and Polish prisoners in concentration camps.
Their treatment needs no further reminder than the report by the
commandant of Gross-Rosen Concentration Camp who on the 23d of October
1941 reports the shooting of 20 Russian prisoners between 5 and 6
o’clock that day and Müller’s circular from the same file, which states
(Document Number 1165-PS):
“The commanders of the concentration camps are complaining that
five to ten percent of the Soviet Russians destined for
execution are arriving in the camps dead or half dead. Therefore
the impression has arisen that the Stalags are getting rid of
such prisoners in this way.
“It was particularly noted that, when marching, for example from
the railroad station to the camp, a rather large number of
prisoners of war collapsed on the way from exhaustion, either
dead or half dead, and had to be picked up by a truck following
the convoy.
“It cannot be prevented that the German people take notice of
these occurrences.”
Did any of these defendants take notice of these occurrences that could
not be hidden from the German people?
I go on:
“Even if the transportation to the camps is generally taken care
of by the Wehrmacht, the population will still attribute this
situation to the SS.
“In order to prevent, if possible, similar occurrences in the
future, I therefore order that, effective from today on, Soviet
Russians declared definitely suspect and obviously marked by
death (for example with typhus) and who therefore would not be
able to withstand the exertions of even a short march on foot,
shall in the future, as a matter of basic principle, be excluded
from the transport into the concentration camp for execution.
“I request that the leaders of the Einsatzkommandos be
correspondingly informed of this decision without delay.”
On the 2d of March 1944, the Chief of the Sipo and SD forwarded to his
various branch offices a further order of the OKW for the treatment of
prisoners recaptured after attempted escape (Document Number L-158).
With the exception of British and Americans, who were to be returned to
the camps, the others were to be sent to Mauthausen and to be dealt with
under “Operation Kugel” which, as the Tribunal will remember, involved
immediate shooting. Inquiries by relatives, other prisoners, the
Protecting Power, and the International Red Cross were to be dealt with
in such a way that the fate of these men, soldiers whose only crime had
been to do their duty, should be forever hidden (Document 1650-PS).
It was shortly after the issue of the Kugel order that 80 British
officers of the R.A.F. made an attempt to escape from Stalag Luft III at
Sagan. The defendants directly connected with this matter have not
denied that the shooting of 50 of these officers was deliberate murder
and was the result of a decision at the highest level. There can be no
question that Göring, Keitel, and probably Ribbentrop, participated in
this decision and that Jodl and Kaltenbrunner and, if he did not
actually participate, Ribbentrop, were all aware of it at the time.
Göring’s participation is a matter of inevitable inference from the
following three facts:
First: The order was given by Hitler.
Second: Westhoff of the Prisoners of War Organization of the OKW says he
was informed by Keitel that Göring had blamed him for the escape at the
meeting at which the order was decided upon (Document Number UK-48).
Third: In Göring’s own Ministry which was responsible for the treatment
of R.A.F. prisoners of war, Walde heard of the order on the 28th of
March at the meeting of executives and told General Grosch. Grosch
informed Förster, who went straight to Milch, Göring’s Chief of Staff,
and returned to inform Grosch that Milch had been told, and had made the
necessary notes (Documents Number D-730, D-731).
You will say whether you do not consider the denials of Göring and Milch
to be mere perjury.
Keitel admits that Hitler ordered transfer to the SD and that he “was
afraid” they might be shot. He told his officers Graevenitz and
Westhoff: “We must set an example. They will be shot—probably some have
been shot already.” And when Graevenitz protested, he replied: “I do not
care a damn.”
On this evidence of his own officers, surely his complicity is clear in
this matter.
Jodl said that when Himmler was reporting the escape, he was in the next
room telephoning, he heard a very loud discussion and on going to the
curtain to hear what it was, he learned that there had been an escape
from Sagan. It is incredible in these circumstances that even if he did
not take part in the decision he did not at any rate know of it from
Keitel immediately after the meeting. And knowing of it, he carried on
playing his part in the conspiracy.
As to Kaltenbrunner’s guilt, the meeting at which Walde was informed of
the decision was with Müller and Nebe, Kaltenbrunner’s subordinates.
Schellenberg’s evidence of the discussion between Nebe, Müller, and
Kaltenbrunner about this time on the subject of an International Red
Cross inquiry about 50 English or American prisoners of war is
conclusive. He heard Kaltenbrunner providing his subordinates with the
answer to be given to this inconvenient inquiry and one cannot doubt his
full knowledge of this matter. The reply sent to the Protecting Power
and the International Red Cross by Ribbentrop is now admitted on all
hands to have been a pack of lies. Is it to be believed that he also was
not a party to the decision?
That any of these men would have been prepared to take such a decision
themselves or to comply with it if taken by Hitler is, we submit, clear
from the correspondence providing for the lynching or shooting of what
were called terror-fliers. These documents show that neither Keitel nor
Jodl had any scruples in the matter while both Göring and Ribbentrop
agreed to the draft order (Documents Number D-777, D-783, D-784).
You will remember the meetings which preceded that correspondence—first
a meeting between Göring, Ribbentrop, and Himmler at which it was agreed
to modify “the original suggestion made by the Reich Foreign Minister
who wished to include every type of terror attack on the German civilian
population as justifying action” (Document Number 735-PS), and which
concluded that “lynch law would have to be the rule.”
At the subsequent meeting between Warlimont and Kaltenbrunner it was
agreed that “those aviators who escaped lynch law would in accordance
with a procedure to be devised ... be handed over to the SD for special
treatment.”
Finally Keitel’s note on the file: “I am against legal procedure. It
does not work out.”
Similar evidence is provided when we consider the attitude taken up in
February 1945, when Hitler wished to renounce the Geneva Convention.
Dönitz advised that: “It would be better to carry out measures
considered necessary without warning and at all costs to save face with
the outside world” (Document Number C-158), a decision with which Jodl
and Ribbentrop’s representative agreed. Their defense that this was
merely a technical measure and that they did not in fact intend any
concrete action is disposed of by Jodl’s memorandum on the whole
question (Document Number D-606):
“Just as it was wrong in 1914 that we ourselves solemnly
declared war on all the states which for a long time had wanted
to wage war against us and through this took the whole guilt of
the war on our shoulders before the outside world, and just as
it was wrong to admit that the necessary passage through Belgium
in 1914 was our own fault, so it would be wrong now to repudiate
openly the obligations of international law which we accepted
and thereby to stand again as the guilty party before the whole
world.”
After this remarkable statement he added that there was nothing to
prevent them in fact from sinking an English hospital ship as a reprisal
and then expressing regret that it was a mistake ...
THE PRESIDENT: Would it be convenient to you to sit at 9:45 in the
morning? The Tribunal anticipates in these circumstances we might be
able to finish at 1 o’clock or shortly afterward. In any event, we would
sit on in order to finish.
SIR HARTLEY SHAWCROSS: I think I would be very much obliged if the Court
would do that.
[_The Tribunal adjourned until 27 July 1946 at 0945 hours._]
ONE HUNDRED
AND EIGHTY-EIGHTH DAY
Saturday, 27 July 1946
_Morning Session_
SIR HARTLEY SHAWCROSS: May it please the Tribunal: Yesterday when we
recessed I had been dealing with the War Crimes in _stricto sensu_ and
in particular with the murder of the RAF officers from Stalag Luft III.
I want now very shortly to consider the question of the employment of
prisoners of war. Under Article 31 of the Geneva Convention it might
have been permissible to employ prisoners on certain work in connection
with the raw materials of the armament industry. But the statement made
by Milch at the Central Planning Board on the 16th of February 1943 in
the presence of Speer and Sauckel had no legal justification at all. He
said, if you will remember, and I quote:
“We have made the request that a certain percentage of men in
our ack-ack artillery must be Russians. 50,000 will be taken
altogether, 30,000 are already employed as gunners. This is an
amusing thing that Russians must work the guns” (Document Number
R-124).
That was quite obviously flagrantly illegal. Nobody could have had the
faintest doubt about it. The minutes record no protest whatever. It has
not been suggested that Göring or any of the others who must have read
the minutes and known what was going on, regarded this outrage by the
effective head of the German Air Force as being in any way unusual.
Himmler’s cynical words spoken at Posen on the 4th of October 1943 on
the subject of the Russian prisoners captured in the early days of the
campaign ought again to be put on record for history. I quote:
“At that time we did not value the mass of humanity as we value
it today as raw material, as labor. What, after all, thinking in
terms of generations, is not to be regretted but is now
deplorable by reason of the loss of labor, is that the prisoners
died in tens and hundreds of thousands of exhaustion and hunger”
(Document Number 1919-PS).
I turn now to the murder of the Commandos.
The evidence with regard to the Commando Order of the 18th of October
1942 (Document Number 498-PS) directly involves Keitel, Jodl, Dönitz,
Raeder, Göring, and Kaltenbrunner. By Article 30 of the Hague Rules, and
I quote: “A spy taken in the act shall not be punished without previous
trial.” And even the regulations printed in the book of every German
soldier provide, and I quote: “No enemy can be killed who gives up, not
even a partisan or a spy. These will be brought to punishment by the
courts.” These men were not spies; they were soldiers in uniform. It is
not suggesting that any man dealt with under the order was ever given a
trial before he was shot. Legally there can be no answer to the guilt of
any of those defendants who passed on or who applied this wicked order,
an order which Jodl admitted to be murder and in respect of which
Keitel, confessing his shame, admitted its illegality.
Raeder admitted that it was an improper order. Even Dönitz stated that
now he knew the true facts he no longer regarded it as correct. The only
defenses put forward have been that the individual in question did not
personally carry it out, that they regarded the statement in the first
paragraph of the order as justifying the action by way of reprisal, that
they did their best to minimize its effect and that it was not up to the
individual to question the directives of a superior. But no one has
seriously disputed that handing over to the SD—in the context
here—meant shooting without a trial.
The answer to these defenses, insofar as the defenses are not purely
dishonest, is that the security precautions provided in the order itself
were the plainest indication that the facts stated in the first
paragraph did not constitute any justification which would bear the
light of day. No higher degree of precaution accompanied the “Kugel
Order,” “Nacht und Nebel Order,” or any other of their brutal orders.
That the shackling incident at Dieppe had nothing to do with it appears
from Jodl’s staff memorandum of the 14th of October 1942 (Document
Number 1266-PS) which states in terms that the Führer’s aim was to
prevent the Commando method of waging war by dropping small detachments
who did great damage by demolitions, _et cetera_, and then surrendered.
The cancellation of the order in 1945 (Document Number D-649) is further
evidence that those responsible for it recognized their guilt, guilt
which was perhaps best summarized by the entry in the War Diary of the
Naval War Staff with regard to the shooting of the Commandos taken in
uniform at Bordeaux: “Something new in international law” (Document
Number D-658). Yet Raeder and his Chief of Staff were prepared to
initial, that entry. Kaltenbrunner’s knowledge is clearly shown by his
letter to the Armed Forces planning staff of the 23d of January 1945
(Document Number 535-PS) referring to it in detail and disputing its
application to particular categories.
Other men have already been sentenced to death for execution of this
order, men whose only defense was that they obeyed an order from their
superiors. I refer to the members of the SD who were executed for the
murder of the crew of Motor Torpedo Boat _345_ in Norway, and General
Dostler in Italy. Innumerable instances from their own records have been
proved against these defendants. Shall they escape? You will remember
the attitude of the Nazi People’s Court in 1944 to the plea of superior
orders (Document Number 3881-PS).
The Commando Order cannot compare in wickedness or brutality with the
Nacht und Nebel Order (Night and Fog Decree) of the 7th of December
1941. The Hitler directive signed by Keitel, after prescribing the death
penalty for offenses endangering the security or state of readiness of
the occupying powers, orders the removal to Germany of offenders, other
than those whose execution could be completed in a very short time,
under circumstances which would deny any information with regard to
their fate. And Keitel’s covering letter of the 12th of December gives
the reason:
“Efficient and enduring intimidation can only be achieved either
by capital punishment or by measures by which the relatives of
the criminals and the population do not know the fate of the
criminal. This aim is achieved when the criminal is transferred
to Germany” (Document Number L-90).
It is interesting to contrast that statement written when Keitel thought
that Germany was winning the war with his evidence before the Tribunal.
He said, you will remember: “Penal servitude would be considered
dishonorable by these patriots. By going to Germany they would suffer no
dishonor.”
This decree was still being enforced in February 1944 when the
commanders of some 18 concentration camps were being reminded of its
purpose and how to dispose of the bodies of the “Night and Fog”
prisoners without revealing the place of death (Document Number D-569).
The treatment of these prisoners was described by the Norwegian witness,
Cappelen, and members of the Tribunal will not have forgotten his
account of the transport of between 2,500 and 2,800 “Nacht und Nebel”
prisoners from one concentration camp to another in 1945 when 1,447 died
on the way. We who talk about the dignity of man, let us remember this,
and I quote it again (Cappelen speaking):
“... We could not walk fast enough and, seizing their rifles,
they smashed in the heads of five ... they said in German: ‘That
is what happens to those who cannot walk properly’... After
walking for 6 to 8 hours we came to a station, a railway
station. It was very cold and we had only striped prison clothes
on, and bad boots; but we said, ‘Oh, we are glad that we have
come to a railway station. It is better to stand in a cow truck
than to walk in the middle of winter.’ It was very cold, 10 to
12 degrees below zero (Centigrade). It was a long train with
open cars. In Norway we call them sand cars and we were kicked
on to those cars about 80 on each car.... In this car we sat for
about five days without food—cold—and without water. When it
was snowing we made like this [_indicating_] just to get some
water into the mouth and, after a long, long time—it seemed to
me years—we came to a place which I afterward learned was Dora.
That is in the neighborhood of Buchenwald.
“Well, we arrived there. They kicked us down from the cars, but
many were dead. The man who sat next to me was dead, but I had
no right to get away. I had to sit with a dead man for the last
day. I did not see the figures myself, naturally, but about a
third or half of us were dead, getting stiff. And they told us
that...—I heard the figure afterward in Dora—that the dead on
our train numbered 1,447.
“Well, from Dora I do not remember so much because I was more or
less dead. I have always been a man of good humor and high
spirited, to help myself first and my friends; but I had nearly
given up.... I was fortunate because Bernadotte’s action came
and we were rescued and brought to Neuengamme, near Hamburg; and
when we arrived, there were some of my old friends, the student
from Norway who had been deported to Germany, other prisoners
who came from Sachsenhausen and other camps, and the few,
comparatively few, Norwegian ‘NN’ prisoners who were living, all
in very bad conditions. Many of my friends are still in the
hospital in Norway. Some died after coming home.”
In July 1944 a yet more drastic order followed the Night and Fog. On the
30th of that month Hitler issued the “Terror and Sabotage Decree”
(Document Number D-762) providing that all acts of violence by
non-German civilians in occupied territories should be combated as acts
of terrorism and sabotage. These not overcome on the spot were to be
handed over to the SD (Document Number D-763), women put to work, only
children spared. Within a month Keitel extended the order to cover
persons endangering security or war preparedness by any means other than
acts of terrorism or sabotage (Document Number D-764), the usual secrecy
requirements were laid down, restricting distribution in writing to a
minimum. He then ordered that the Terror and Sabotage Decree was to form
the subject of regular emphatic instruction to all personnel of the
Armed Forces, SS and Police. It was to be extended to crimes affecting
German interests, but not imperiling the security or war preparedness of
the occupying power. New regulations could be made by the agreement of
particular commanders and higher SS chiefs. In other words any offense
by any person in the occupied territories could be dealt with under this
decree.
On the 9th of September 1944, a meeting was solemnly held between
representatives of the High Command and the SS to discuss the
relationship of the Night and Fog Order to the Terror and Sabotage
Decree (Document Number D-767). It was considered that the Night and Fog
Order had become superfluous and the meeting went on to consider the
transfer of the 24,000 non-German civilians held under it by the SS to
the SD. The meeting discussed the problem of certain neutrals who had
been “turned into fog” by mistake. The German word “vernebelt” justifies
the statement of the witness Blaha that the special and technical
expressions used in concentration camps can only be said in German and
cannot really be translated into any other language. It is perhaps
superfluous to remind the Tribunal that when the Luftwaffe general in
Holland asked for authority to shoot striking railwaymen (Document
Number D-769), since the procedure of handing over to the SD under the
decree was too roundabout, Keitel, in a reply, copies of which were sent
both to the Admiralty and to the Air Ministry as well as to the
principal commanders in occupied territories, agreed at once that if
there was any difficulty in handing over to the SD, I quote: “... other
effective measures are to be taken ruthlessly and independently...”
(Document Number D-770).
In other words, General Christiansen could shoot the railwaymen if he
thought fit.
Let us not forget when we consider the problems of Europe in these days,
that it is not easy for anyone who has not had to live in territory
occupied by the Germans to realize the suffering and the state of terror
and constant apprehension in which the peoples of Europe lived through
those long years of subjection. It was Frank, who, writing on the 16th
of December 1941, said: “As a matter of principle we shall have pity
only for the German people and for no one else in the world” (Document
Number USSR-223).
Save that they had no pity even for their own people, how faithfully
these men carried out that principle.
I turn now to the attack on the partisans. If any doubt remained that
the German Armed Forces were directed not by honorable soldiers but by
callous murderers, it must be dissolved by the evidence as to the
appalling ruthlessness with which it was sought to put down the
partisans. The witness Ohlendorf said that the direction of antipartisan
warfare was the subject of a written agreement between the German War
Office, the High Command, and the SS. As a result of that agreement an
Einsatz group was attached to each Army Group Headquarters and directed
the work of the Einsatzkommandos allotted to the group in co-ordination
and agreement with the military authorities. If confirmation of the
Army’s support, knowledge and approval were needed, one has only got to
look at the report of the Einsatz Group A on its activities during the
first 3 months of the campaign against the Soviet Union.
I quote:
“Our task was to establish hurriedly personal contact with the
commanding generals of the armies and with the commanding
general of the army of the rear area. It must be stressed from
the beginning that co-operation with the Armed Forces was
generally good, in some cases ... it was very close, almost
cordial” (Document Number L-180).
And again, speaking of the difficulty of dealing with the partisans in a
particular area:
“After the failure of purely military activities such as the
placing of sentries and combing through the newly occupied
territories with whole divisions, even the Armed Forces had to
look out for new methods. The Einsatzgruppe made it its foremost
task to search for new methods. Soon therefore, the Armed Forces
adopted the experiences of the Security Police and their methods
of combating the partisans.”
One of these methods is described in the same report in these words:
“After a village had been surrounded, all the inhabitants were
forcibly shepherded into the main square. The persons suspected
on account of confidential information and the other villagers
were interrogated and thus it was possible in most cases to find
the people who helped the partisans. Those were either shot
offhand, or, if further interrogations promised useful
information, taken to headquarters. After the interrogation they
were shot.
“In order to get a deterring effect the houses of those who had
helped the partisans were burnt down on several occasions.”
And then, after stating that villagers were always threatened with the
burning of the whole village, the report adds: “The tactics to put
terror against terror succeeded marvelously” (Document Number D-735).
The Einsatzkommandos were, as Ohlendorf stated, under Kaltenbrunner’s
command, but the orders under which they were acting cannot have
exceeded in severity those which were issued by Keitel. The Führer order
issued by him on 16 December 1942 on the combating of partisans
states—I quote:
“If the fight against the partisans in the East as well as in
the Balkans is not waged with the most brutal means, we will
shortly reach the point when the available forces are
insufficient to master this scourge.
“It is therefore not only justifiable but it is the duty of the
troops to use all means without restriction—even against women
and children—so long as it insures success” (Document Number
UK-66).
Three days later he and Ribbentrop were informing their Italian opposite
numbers at breakfast that: “The Führer had declared that the Serbian
conspirators were to be eliminated and that no gentle methods must be
used in doing this.”
Keitel interjected, “Every village in which partisans might be found
must be burnt down” (Document Number D-735).
Two months later Ribbentrop was urging the Italian Ambassador in Berlin
to greater brutality in dealing with the partisans in Croatia. I quote:
“The gangs would have to be exterminated, including men, women, and
children, as their further existence imperiled the lives of German and
Italian men, women, and children” (Document Number D-741).
Göring appears to have assisted Himmler in recruiting the necessary
personnel for antipartisan work and he is recorded by a cabinet
councillor on the 24th of September 1942 as stating that he was looking
for daring fellows for employment in the Eastern special purpose units
and that he was considering convicts and poachers for the purpose. His
idea was:
“In the regions assigned for their operations these bands, whose
first task should be to destroy the commands of the partisan
groups, could murder, burn, and ravish. In Germany they would
once again come under strict supervision” (Document Number
638-PS).
A month later he gave the Duce a description of Germany’s methods in
combating the partisans in the following terms:
“To begin with, the entire livestock and all foodstuff is taken
away from the areas concerned so as to deny partisans all
sources of food. Men and women are taken away to labor camps,
children to children’s camps and the villages burnt down....
“Should attacks occur, then the entire male population of
villages would be lined up on one side and the women on the
other side. The women would be told that all men would be shot
unless they (the women) indicated which of the men did not
belong to the village. In order to save their men the women
always pointed out the stranger” (Document Number D-729).
These methods were not confined to the East. They were going on
throughout the length and breadth of every occupied territory. Wherever
the slightest resistance was offered the German answer was to attempt to
stamp it out with the utmost brutality. It would not be difficult to
rival the events of Lidice and Oradour-sur-Glane by a hundred other
instances.
One of the most brutal expedients, the taking of hostages, was the
subject of an order by the German High Command on 16 September 1941.
Keitel ordered—I quote:
“a. It should be inferred in every case of resistance to the
German occupying forces, no matter what the individual
circumstances, that it is of Communist origin.
“b. In order to nip these machinations in the bud the most
drastic measures should be taken immediately on the first
indication so that the authority of the occupying forces may be
maintained and further spreading prevented. In this connection
it should be remembered that a human life in the countries
involved frequently counts for nothing and a deterrent effect
can be attained only by unusual severity. The death penalty for
50 to 100 Communists should generally be regarded in those cases
as suitable atonement for one German soldier’s life. The way in
which sentence is carried out should still further increase the
deterrent effect” (Document Number C-148).
We may compare the wording of the Einsatzkommando report:
“In the knowledge that the Russian has been accustomed from old
to ruthless measures on the part of the authorities, the most
severe measures were applied” (Document Number L-180).
There is no difference in outlook between Keitel and Kaltenbrunner; the
German soldier was being ordered to emulate the SS.
A fortnight after issuing that order, Keitel, whose only defense was
that he had pressed for 5 to 10 hostages for one German in place of 50
to 100, had had a further idea, and on the 1st of October 1941 he
suggested that it is advisable that military commanders should always
have at their disposal a number of hostages of different political
tendencies, nationalist, democratic-bourgeois, or Communist, adding:
“It is important that among them shall be well-known leading
personalities or members of their families whose names are to be
made public. Depending on the membership of the culprit,
hostages of the corresponding group are to be shot in case of
attacks” (Document Number 1590-PS).
The original document bears the ominous note: “Complied with in France
and Belgium.”
The effect of these orders throughout the German Army is well seen from
three instances of the action taken by a local commander.
In Yugoslavia, a month after Keitel’s original order a station commander
reported that in revenge for the killing of 10 German soldiers and the
wounding of another 26, a total of 2,300 people had been shot, 100 for
each killed and 50 for each wounded German soldier (Document Number
USSR-74).
On the 11th of July 1944 the commander of the district of Covolo in
Italy was, in a public poster, threatening to kill 50 men for every
member of the German Armed Forces whether military or civilian, who was
wounded, and a hundred if a German was killed. In the event of more than
one soldier or civilian being killed or wounded, all the men of the
district would be shot, the houses set on fire, the women interned, and
the cattle confiscated immediately. In June of the same year 560
persons, including 250 men, were reported by Kesselring as having been
taken into custody under threat of shooting within 48 hours, some German
colonel having been captured by bandits (Document Number D-39).
The men directly implicated in these brutalities are Göring, Ribbentrop,
Keitel, Jodl, and Kaltenbrunner, but who can doubt that every man in
that dock knew of the orders and of the way in which the German Armed
Forces were being taught to murder men, women, and children, and were
doing so throughout the length and breadth of Europe? Raeder, who says
he disapproved of this sort of policy in Norway, states that he tried to
dissuade Hitler, yet he continued to hold his post and to lend his name
to the regime under which these things were being done.
I pass on to matters for which he and Dönitz were more immediately
responsible. The conduct of the war at sea reveals exactly the same
pattern of utter disregard for law and for decency. There can seldom
have been an occasion when the minds of two naval commanders have been
so clearly read from their documents as those of the Defendants Raeder
and Dönitz that can be read in the present case.
As early as the 3d of September 1939 the German Navy, in a memorandum to
the Foreign Office, were seeking agreement to a policy of sinking
without warning both enemy and neutral merchant ships in disregard of
the London Submarine Rules, their own Prize Ordinance and of course the
international law. A series of documents during the following 6 weeks
reveals constant pressure on the Foreign Office by Raeder to consent to
this policy.
On the 16th of October 1939 Raeder produced a memorandum on the
intensification of naval warfare against England. In this document,
having proclaimed the “utmost ruthlessness” as necessary and the
intention to destroy Britain’s fighting spirit within the shortest
possible time, Raeder went on to say—I quote:
“The principal target of naval warfare is the merchant ship, not
only the enemy’s but in general every merchant ship which sails
the seas in order to supply the enemy’s war industry both for
imports and exports.”
It is that document which contains the infamous passage:
“It is desirable to base all military measures taken on existing
international law; however, measures which are considered
necessary from a military point of view, provided a decisive
success can be expected from them, will have to be carried out
even if they are not covered by existing international law. In
principle, therefore, any means of war which is effective in
breaking enemy resistance should be supported by a legal
conception, even if this entails the creation of a new code of
naval warfare.”
In another memorandum on the 30th of December he went on to urge further
intensification, particularly with regard to neutrals—I quote: “...
without binding ourselves to any conceptions such as the declaration of
barred zones...”—and he suggested that as they were going to invade,
neutral states it really did not matter if they went a little far at
sea: “... the intensified measures of the war at sea will, in their
political effect, only play a small part in the general intensification
of the war” (Document Number C-100).
You will have noted that these memoranda on the conduct of the war at
sea echo the High Command’s view on the future war which had been
written 18 months earlier:
“According to whether the application of normal rules of war
will create greater advantages or disadvantages for them, the
warring nations will consider themselves as being at war or not
being at war with the neutral states” (Document Number L-211).
Was that a mere coincidence? At all events, such was the pattern laid
down by Raeder and followed by Dönitz. From the very first the Naval War
Staff never had any intention of observing the laws of war at sea.
The defense that the sinking of Allied merchant ships without warning
was justified by Allied measures is as untenable as the suggestion that
the sinking at sight of neutral merchant ships was preceded by warning
which complied with the requirements of international law. You have seen
the very vague and general warnings given to the neutrals and the
memorandum of the Naval War Staff revealing that these were deliberately
given in the most general terms because Raeder knew that the action he
intended against neutrals was utterly illegal. I need not remind you of
the document which suggests that orders should be given by word of mouth
and a false entry made in the log book, the very practice followed in
the case of the _Athenia_, or of the entries in Raeder’s own war diary
revealing that carefully selected neutrals should be sunk wherever the
use of electric torpedoes might enable the Germans to maintain that the
ship had really struck a mine. You have confirmation in the bland
denials prepared by Raeder to answer the protests of the Norwegian and
Greek Governments on the sinking of the _Thomas Walton_ and the
_Garufalia_ and the reluctant admission in the case of the _Deptford_,
all three ships sunk in December 1939 by the same U-boat. Nothing
reveals more of the cynicism or opportunism with which Raeder and Dönitz
treated international law than the contrast between their attitude
toward the sinking of a Spanish ship in 1940 and that in September 1942.
In 1940 Spain did not matter to Germany; in 1942 she did.
Details with regard to the various successive measures taken in the
course of putting into effect the policy of sink at sight do not require
recapitulation but there are two features of the conduct of naval
warfare by these two defendants which I must emphasize. First, they
continued to put out to the world that they were obeying the London
Rules and their Prize Ordinance. The reason for that appears in Raeder’s
memorandum of the 30th of December 1939 where he says—I quote:
“... a public announcement of intensified measures for the war
at sea must be urgently advised against in order not to burden
the Navy again in the eyes of history with the odium of
unrestricted U-boat warfare” (Document Number C-100).
And that, you see, is the common plan—the common plan—the very
argument put forward by Jodl and Dönitz in February 1945, in favor of
simply breaking the regulations of the Geneva Convention rather than
announcing Germany’s renunciation of it to the world. And here, once
again, is the doctrine of military expediency; if it will pay Germany to
break a particular law she is entirely justified in breaking it,
provided always it can be done in such a way as to avoid detection and
the condemnation of world opinion.
It must not be thought that in initiating this policy of sink at sight
and in disregarding the rules of war at sea Raeder was any more drastic
than Dönitz. In his defense Dönitz made a great effort to explain away
his order of 17 September 1942. I ask the Tribunal to remember its
terms: “No attempt of any kind must be made at rescuing members of ships
sunk.... Rescue runs counter to the rudimentary demands of warfare aimed
at the destruction of enemy ship and crews” (Document Number D-630).
His diary entry of the same date, which confirms that order, starts—I
quote: “The attention of all commanding officers is again drawn to the
fact that all efforts to rescue run counter to the rudimentary demands
of warfare ...”
Well, the defendant denied that this means that crews were to be
destroyed or annihilated. But the previous history makes it abundantly
clear that this was an invitation to U-boat commanders to destroy the
crews of shipwrecked merchantmen, while preserving an argument for
Dönitz to make, should—as has indeed happened—occasion arise. That,
after all, was the pattern laid down by Hitler when on the 3d of January
1942, he told Oshima that—I quote: “... he must give the order that in
case foreign seamen could not be taken prisoner ... U-boats were to
surface after torpedoing and shoot up the lifeboats” (Document Number
D-423).
The evidence shows constant pressure by Hitler from then on for the
issue of this order. It is admitted that he demanded it at a meeting
with both Dönitz and Raeder on the 14th of May 1942 and that he raised
the question again on the 5th of September 1942. Dönitz himself referred
to pressure by Hitler during the Laconia incident. You have confirmation
that the order issued on the 17th of September was intended to bear the
construction put upon it by the Prosecution in the evidence of the
witness Heisig and in that of Möhle. Is it conceivable that a senior
officer would have been allowed to go on from the 17th of September 1942
until the end of the war briefing the hundreds of U-boats which set out
from Kiel that this was an order to annihilate unless that was what the
Naval War Staff intended? You have the evidence that Dönitz himself saw
every U-boat commander before and after his cruise, his own admissions
with regard to the comments made by his staff officers at the time he
drafted the order and his general attitude revealed by the order of
October 1939, which he admits was a nonrescue order—an utterly
indefensible order in itself in the submission of the Prosecution. There
is further the coincidence that the very argument which Hitler advanced
to Oshima, namely, the importance of preventing the Allies finding the
crews for the immense American construction program, was the argument
Dönitz himself admits putting forward on the 14th of May, was the
argument which Heisig reports hearing, and is the reason given for the
subsequent order to give priority in attacking convoys to sinking rescue
ships. You have the instances of the _Antonice_, the _Noreen Mary_, and
the _Peleus_ whilst the man who expressed horror at the idea that he
should issue such an order admittedly saw the log book of the U-boat
which sank the _Sheaf Mead_ with its brutal entry describing the
sufferings of those left in the water. Dönitz’ own statement was that—I
quote: “... to issue such a directive could only be justified if a
decisive military success could be achieved by it.”
Was it not because, as his own document shows, the percentage of ships
being sunk outside convoys in September 1942 was so high that a decisive
military success might have been gained that this order was issued,
whereas in April 1943, when almost all sinkings were in convoy, it was
not necessary to issue a further order in more explicit terms?
The Prosecution firmly and strongly submit that the Defendant Dönitz
intended by that order to encourage and to procure as many submarine
commanders as possible to destroy the crews of merchant ships but
deliberately couched the order in its present language so that he could
argue the contrary if circumstances required it. On the evidence of
Admiral Wagner that the Naval War Staff approved the order of 17
September 1942 with respect to survivors, Raeder cannot escape
responsibility and, indeed, since he was present at the meeting with
Hitler in May of that year and received the Führer order of the 5th of
September 1942 (Documents Dönitz-16 and 39) to issue instructions to
kill survivors, there can be little doubt that he was fully involved in
his subordinate’s policy.
Although within a few months Allied air power made it impossible for
U-boats in most areas to risk surfacing at all after they had discharged
their torpedo, and the question became one of less importance, it is
interesting to note that when the order against rescue ships was issued
on the 7th of October the following year the same phrase “destruction of
ships’ crews” (Document Number D-663) recurred.
Despite the denial of Kapitänleutnant Eck, (Document Number Dönitz-36)
there can really be no real doubt that, briefed by Möhle, he did what
his superior officers intended him to do. Why should it be supposed that
a man, who a month later received Hitler’s Commando Order without
protest, should shrink from ordering the destruction of seamen on rafts
or clinging to wreckage, when Hitler had explained its military
necessity. Eck, who obeyed the orders of Raeder and Dönitz, has paid the
supreme penalty. Are they to escape with less?
I turn now to yet another war crime—the use of slave labor. Its
importance for the German war machine had been appreciated by these
defendants long before the outbreak of war. Hitler had mentioned it in
_Mein Kampf_ and emphasized it at the meeting in May 1939. A few weeks
later in June the Reich Defense Council, Göring, Frick, Funk, and
Raeder, and representatives of every other ministry of state were
planning to employ 20,000 concentration camp inmates and hundreds of
thousands of workers from the Protectorate in the coming war.
Hitler’s plan for Poland, revealed to Schirach and Frank, was as
follows—I quote:
“The ideal picture is this: A Pole may possess only small
holdings in the Government General which will to a certain
extent provide him and his family with food. The money required
by him for clothes, ... _et cetera_, he must earn in Germany by
work. The Government General must become a center for supplying
unskilled labor, particularly agricultural labor. The
subsistence of these workmen will be fully guaranteed because
they can always be made use of as cheap labor” (Document Number
USSR-172).
That policy, of course, was a short-term policy, the real aim being the
elimination of the Eastern peoples. Sauckel was appointed
plenipotentiary with the task of replacing 2 million German workers who
had been called to service with the Wehrmacht, and he himself says that
after Hitler had emphasized that it was a war necessity he had no
scruples and within a month of his appointment he had sent his first
labor mobilization program to Rosenberg.
“Should we not succeed in obtaining the necessary labor on a
voluntary basis we must immediately institute conscription of
forced labor ... a gigantic number of new foreign workers ...
men and women ... an indisputable necessity” (Document Number
016-PS).
This program he was to carry out “with every possible energy and a
ruthless commitment of all our resources ...”(Document Number 017-PS).
It is unnecessary to refer to the voluminous evidence of the execution
of this policy for the recruitment of workers. It is sufficient to quote
Sauckel again addressing the Central Planning Board in March of 1944:
“... to train male and female agents ... who shanghaied ... men
for labor in Germany.... Out of 5 million foreign workers who
arrived in Germany not even 200,000 came voluntarily” (Document
Number R-124).
The methods employed in their forced deportations are hideous in their
brutality and must have been known to every one of these defendants. In
April of 1941 Himmler was addressing the officers of the SS
Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler. I quote:
“Very frequently a member of the Waffen-SS thinks about the
deportation of this people here. These thoughts come to me today
watching the very difficult work performed by the Security
Police and supported by your men who help them a great deal.
Exactly the same thing happened in Poland in weather 40 degrees
below zero where we had to haul away thousands, tens of
thousands, hundreds of thousands ...” (Document Number 1918-PS).
And again:
“Whether 10,000 Russian females fall down from exhaustion while
digging an antitank ditch interests me only insofar as the
antitank ditch for Germany is finished ... When somebody comes
to me and says, ‘I cannot dig the antitank ditch with women and
children, it is inhuman, for it would kill them’, then I have to
say: ‘You are a murderer of your own blood because if the
antitank ditch is not dug, German soldiers will die and they are
the sons of German mothers.’ We must realize that we have 6-7
million foreigners in Germany ... Perhaps it is even 8 million
now. We have prisoners in Germany. They are none of them
dangerous so long as we take severe measures at the merest
trifle” (Document Number 1919-PS).
By August 1943 the need for workers was even greater. Himmler ordered:
“... that all young female prisoners capable of work are to be
sent to Germany for work through the agency of Reich
Commissioner Sauckel. Children, old women and old men are to be
collected and employed in women’s and children’s camps ...”
(Document Number 744-PS).
The orders issued to group leaders of the SD, active in the Ukraine,
showed the same urgency. I quote:
“The activity of the Labor Office ... is to be supported to the
greatest extent possible. It will not be possible always to
refrain from using force.... When searching villages, or when it
has become necessary to burn down a village, the whole
population will be put at the disposal of the commissioner by
force. As a rule, no more children will be shot.... If we limit
our harsh Security Police measures through the above orders for
the time being, it is only done for the following reason. The
most important thing is the recruitment of workers” (Document
Number 3012-PS).
Speer admitted—how could he deny it—the knowledge and approval of the
way the workers were enrolled and brought to Germany against their will;
there was Kaltenbrunner’s letter to his friend Blaschke:
“For ... special reasons I have in the meantime given orders to
ship several evacuation transports to Vienna; at present four
shipments with approximately 12,000 Jews are pending.... They
should reach Vienna within the next few days.... Women unable to
work and children of those Jews who are all kept in readiness
for special action and therefore one day will be removed again,
have to stay in the guarded camp also during the day” (Document
Number 3803-PS).
That sinister phrase again—the meaning of which they all knew so
well—“special treatment,” “special action.” Murder remains murder by
whatever euphemism murderers may seek to describe it.
The need for labor became so urgent that not only were even Jews spared
the gas chambers so long as they were fit for employment but children
were seized and put to work.
So much for their deportation to Germany. What was to be their lot on
their arrival? As early as March 1941 instructions had been issued to
the Kreis Farmers Association on the treatment Polish farm workers were
to receive (Document Number EC-68). They were to have no rights to
complain. They were forbidden—this religious people—to visit churches;
all forms of entertainment, public transport were barred. Their
employers were given the right to inflict corporal punishment and were
“not to be held accountable in any case by any official agency.” And
lastly, it was ordered:
“Farm workers of Polish nationality should if possible be
removed from the community of the home; they can be quartered in
stables, _et cetera_. No remorse whatever should restrict such
action.”
The treatment of those employed in industry was even worse. You will
remember the affidavit of the Polish doctor in Essen who did his best to
attend to the Russian prisoners of war.
“... men were thrown together in such a catastrophic manner that
no medical treatment was possible ... it seemed to me ...
unworthy of human beings that people should find themselves in
such a position.... Every day at least 10 men were brought to me
whose bodies were covered with bruises because of the continual
beatings with rubber tubes, steel switches, or sticks. The
people were often writhing with agony and it was impossible for
me to give them even a little medical aid.... It was difficult
for me to watch how such suffering people could be directed to
do heavy work ... Dead people often lay for 2 or 3 days on the
palliasses until their bodies stank so badly that fellow
prisoners took them outside and buried them somewhere ... I was
a witness during a conversation with some Russian women, who
told me personally that they were employed in Krupp’s factory
and that they were beaten daily in a bestial manner.... Beating
was the order of the day” (Document Number D-313).
By the end of 1943 more than 5 million men, women, and children were
working in the Reich and if we include prisoners of war the total of
those working in Germany was at this date just under 7 million (Document
Number D-524). To these must be added the hundreds of thousands brought
in during 1944—millions of men and women taken from their homes by the
most brutal methods, transported in all weather in cattle-trucks from
every quarter of Europe, employed on farms and in factories throughout
the Reich, frequently under abominable conditions; children taken from
their parents, many to remain for their lives orphans, not knowing their
identity or true names, taken away before they were old enough to
remember the place from which they came. What is the measure of this
crime? No man in that dock can dispute his knowledge or his complicity.
The minutes of the Central Planning Board must have been read in every
department of the State. You have seen the mass of evidence connecting
the military leaders and every other branch of the Government with this
colossal program of slavery. None of these men can be acquitted of this
crime. None of them can have been ignorant of the scale and brutality
with which it was perpetrated.
I pass now to a connected matter, but one even more terrible—the
general manner in which the defendants conducted the belligerent
occupation of the territories which they had overrun.
The evidence that these territories were the scene of murder, slavery,
terrorism, and spoliation on a scale without precedent in history, in
breach of the most elementary rules as to belligerent occupation, has
not really been seriously challenged. These crimes were in no sense
sporadic or isolated depending on the sadism of a Koch here or cruelty
by a Frank there. They were part and parcel of a deliberate and
systematic plan of which their action in regard to slave labor was just
a symptom. In order to establish the “1,000-year Reich,” they set out to
accomplish the extermination or permanent weakening of the racial and
national groups of Europe or of those sections, such as the
intelligentsia, on which the survival of those groups must largely
depend.
The origin of this terrible attempt upon the existence of free and
ancient nations goes back to the whole Nazi doctrine of total war which
rejected war as being merely against states and their armies, as
international law provides. Nazi total war was also a war against
civilian populations, against whole peoples. Hitler told Keitel at the
end of the Polish campaign: “Prudence and severity must be the maxims in
this racial struggle in order to spare us from going to battle on
account of Poland again” (Document Number 864-PS).
The aims of genocide were formulated by Hitler in the following words in
his conversation with Hermann Rauschning:
“The French complained after the war that there were 20 million
Germans too many. We accept the criticism. We favor the planned
control of population movements. But our friends will have to
excuse us if we subtract the 20 millions elsewhere. After all
these centuries of whining about the protection of the poor and
lowly, it is about time for the decision to protect the strong
against the inferior. It will be one of the chief tasks of
German statesmanship for all time to prevent, by every means in
our power, the increase of the Slav races. Natural instincts bid
all living beings not merely to conquer their enemies, but also
destroy them. In former days, it was the victor’s prerogative to
destroy entire tribes, entire peoples. By doing this gradually
and without bloodshed, we demonstrate our humanity” (Document
Number USSR-378).
Himmler’s vision was similar. I quote:
“For us the end of this war will mean the open road to the East,
the creation of the Germanic Reich in this way or that ... the
fetching home of 30 million human beings of our blood, so that
still during our lifetime we shall be a people of 120 million
Germanic souls. That means that we shall then be able to tackle
the peace, during which we shall be willing for the first 20
years to rebuild and spread out our villages and towns, and that
we shall push the borders of our German race 500 kilometers
farther out to the East” (Document Number L-70).
Their aims went beyond mere Germanization, the imposition of the German
cultural pattern upon other peoples. Hitler was resolved to expel
non-Germans from the soil he required but that they owned, and colonize
it by Germans. This is plainly stated in _Mein Kampf_. I quote:
“The Polish policy in the sense of a Germanization of the East,
demanded by so many, was rooted unfortunately almost always in
the same wrong conclusion. Here too it was believed that one
could bring about a Germanization of the Polish element by a
purely linguisitic integration into the German nationality. Here
too the result would have been an unfortunate one; people of an
alien race, expressing their alien thought in the German
language, compromising the height and dignity of our own
nationality by their own inferiority” (Document Number USA-256,
Pages 429-430).
Himmler put it even more clearly:
“It is not our task to germanize the East in the old sense, that
is to teach the people there the German language and the German
law, but to see to it that only people of purely Germanic blood
live in the East” (Document Number 2915-PS).
The defendants were careful to conceal their true aims from their
victims. In January 1940 a captured report reads:
“In order to relieve the living space of Poles in the Government
General as well as in the liberated East, one should remove
cheap labor temporarily by hundreds of thousands, employ them
for a few years in the old Reich, and thereby hamper their
native biological propagation at the same time,”
and it concludes:
“Strictest care is to be taken that secret circulars, memoranda,
and official correspondence which contain instructions
detrimental to the Poles are kept rigidly under lock and key so
that they will not some day fill the White Books printed in
Paris or the U.S.A.” (Document Number 661-PS).
Again, the day before the appointment of Rosenberg as Minister for the
East, Hitler told him in the presence of Keitel, Göring, and Bormann, I
quote:
“We ought to act here in exactly the same way as we did in the
case of Norway, Denmark, Holland, and Belgium. In these cases,
too, we did not publish our aims and it is only sensible to
continue in the same way. Therefore we shall emphasize again
that we were forced to occupy, administer, or secure a certain
area. It was in the interests of the inhabitants that we
provided order, food, communications, _et cetera_. Hence our
measures. Nobody shall be able to recognize that it initiates a
final settlement. This should not prevent our taking all
necessity measures—shooting, deportation, _et cetera_, and we
shall take them” (Document Number L-221).
Having given these words of caution to his confederates, you will
remember how Hitler went on to elaborate his plans for the destruction
of the Soviet peoples. The Crimea, he said, must be evacuated of all
foreigners and settled by Germans only.
“We now have to face the task of cutting up the giant cake
according to our needs in order to be able: First, to dominate
it, secondly, to administer it, thirdly, to exploit it.”
The pattern was exemplified in the infamous plan of Neurath and Frank
for Bohemia and Moravia—the same Neurath whose counsel the day before
yesterday asked you to respect the holiness of the individual” (Document
Number 3859-PS).
The pattern, I say, was exemplified in their plan for Bohemia and
Moravia. No more terrible document has been put in evidence in this
Trial nor one which more completely exposes the falsity of the slogan
“Lebensraum,” which constituted the excuse for the rape of
Czechoslovakia. That plan required the elimination of the
intelligentsia, the bearers of Czechoslovakian history and tradition,
and, since the long-term solution of evacuating all Czechs completely
from the country and replacing them by Germans could not be effected
immediately because of shortage of Germans, a short term solution of
germanizing the remainder of the population. This was to be done by
rendering their language a dialect, by abolition of higher education, by
instituting a stringent marriage policy after various racial
examinations. You will remember Frank’s summary. I quote:
“Apart from the continuance of the propaganda for Germanization
and the granting of advantages as an inducement, severest police
methods with exile and special treatment for all saboteurs.
Principle: ‘Pastry and Whip’” (Document Number 3859-PS).
You will remember too the plan for Poland discussed in Hitler’s train on
the 12th of September 1939 by Ribbentrop, Keitel, and Jodl, as described
in the evidence of the witness Lahousen, and the discussion between
Hitler, Schirach, and Frank 3 weeks later after dinner in the Führer’s
apartment.
“... there should be one master only for the Poles—the German;
two masters side by side cannot and must not exist and therefore
all representatives of Polish intelligentsia are to be
exterminated. This sounds cruel but such is the law of life”
(Document Number USSR-172).
Such were the plans for the Soviet Union, for Poland and for
Czechoslovakia. Genocide was not restricted to extermination of the
Jewish people or of the gypsies. It was applied in different forms to
Yugoslavia, to the non-German inhabitants of Alsace-Lorraine, to the
people of the Low Countries and of Norway. The technique varied from
nation to nation, from people to people. The long-term aim was the same
in all cases.
The methods followed a similar pattern: First a deliberate program of
murder, of outright annihilation. This was the method applied to the
Polish intelligentsia, to gypsies, and to Jews. The killing of millions,
even by the gas chambers and the mass shootings employed, was no easy
matter. The defendants and their confederates also used methods of
protracted annihilation, the favorite being to work their victims to
death, hence Himmler’s bond with the Minister of Justice in September
1942 under which antisocial elements were handed over to the SS “to be
worked to death” (Document Number 654-PS). On the 14th of the same month
Goebbels was recommending this method in terms:
“With regard to the destruction of asocial life Dr. Goebbels has
the opinion that the following groups should be exterminated:
Jews and gypsies unconditionally, Poles who have to serve about
3 or 4 years of penal servitude, and Czechs and Germans who are
sentenced to death or penal servitude for life or to security
custody. The idea of exterminating them by labor is the best”
(Document Number 682-PS).
Another favorite technique of extermination was by starvation.
Rosenberg, the great architect of this policy of national murder, told
his collaborators in June 1941:
“The object of feeding the German people stands this year
without a doubt at the top of the list of Germany’s claims on
the East, and there the southern territories and the northern
Caucasus will have to serve as a balance for the feeding of the
German people. We see absolutely no reason for any obligation on
our part to feed also the Russian people with the products of
that surplus territory. We know that this is a harsh necessity
bare of any feelings. A very extensive evacuation will be
necessary without any doubt and it is sure that the future will
hold very hard years in store for the Russians” (Document Number
1058-PS).
The method applied in Alsace was deportation. A captured report reads:
“The first expulsion action was carried out in Alsace in the
period from July to December 1940 in the course of which 105,000
persons were either expelled or prevented from returning. They
were in the main Jews, gypsies and other foreign racial
elements, criminals, antisocial, and incurably insane persons,
and in addition Frenchmen, and Francophiles. The patois-speaking
population was combed out by these series of deportations in the
same way as the other Alsatians” (Document Number R-114).
The report goes on to state that new deportations are being prepared and
after reciting the categories affected, sums up the measures being
taken:
“... the problem of race has been given first consideration and
this in such a manner that persons of racial value are to be
deported to Germany proper and racially inferior persons to
France.”
The Nazis also used various biological devices, as they have been
called, to achieve genocide. They deliberately decreased the birthrate
in the occupied countries by sterilization, castration, and abortion, by
separating husband from wife and men from women and obstructing
marriage. I quote:
“We are obliged to depopulate”—said Hitler to Rauschning—“as
part of our mission of preserving the German population. We
shall have to develop a technique of depopulation. If you ask me
what I mean by depopulation, I mean the removal of entire racial
units. And that is what I intend to carry out—that, roughly, is
my task. Nature is cruel, therefore, we, too, must be cruel. If
I can send the flower of the German nation into the hell of war
without the smallest pity for the spilling of precious German
blood, then surely I have the right to remove millions of an
inferior race that breeds like vermin” (Document Number
USSR-378).
You have seen Neurath’s use of this biological device in his plan for
Czechoslovakia. Listen to Bormann’s directives for the Eastern territory
summarized by one of Rosenberg’s subordinates. I quote:
“The Slavs are to work for us. Insofar as we do not need them,
they may die. Therefore, compulsory vaccination and German
health services are superfluous. The fertility of the Slavs is
undesirable. They may use contraceptives or practice abortion;
the more the better. Education is dangerous. It is enough if
they can count up to a hundred. At best an education which
produces useful stooges for us is admissible” (Document Number
R-36).
Himmler speaks with the same voice:
“We must be honest, decent, loyal, and comradely to members of
our own blood, to nobody else. What happens to the Russians, the
Czechs, does not interest me in the slightest. What the nations
can offer in the way of good blood of our type we will take, if
necessary by kidnapping their children and raising them here
with us. Whether nations live in prosperity or starve to death
interests me only insofar as we need them as slaves for our
Kultur; otherwise it is of no interest to me” (Document Number
1919-PS).
The converse to methods designed to decrease the birthrate in occupied
territories was the artificial increase in the birthrate of Germans. In
February 1941 the Defendant Seyss-Inquart organized a system of giving
away Dutch girls to German soldiers. In violation of Article 43 of the
Hague Convention, he ordered changes in the law of the Netherlands so
that he could assume parental and guardianship rights over girls,
substituting himself for their parents if the parents refused their
daughters permission to marry German soldiers.
This policy of Seyss-Inquart’s was later confirmed by the supreme
authorities of the German Reich, Hitler, Keitel, and Lammers, on July
28th, 1942. A decree was issued granting subsidies and employment
privileges for Dutch and Norwegian women bearing children to members of
the German Armed Forces. And they have the impudence to talk now about
the holiness of the individual. This was simply a plan to transfer, as
if it were some mercantile commodity, the biological resources of
Holland and Norway to the use of the German people. Himmler was one of
the advocates of stealing children; as he said on the 14th of October
1943:
“Obviously in such a mixture of peoples there will always be
some racially very good types. In these cases I think that it is
our duty to take their children with us to remove them from
their environment, if necessary by robbing or stealing them....
Either we win over any good blood that we can use for ourselves
and give it a place in our people or ... we destroy this blood”
(Document Number L-70).
In the case of Russia, Keitel, who had learned the phrase “shrewdness
and severity” as the maxim for the exploitation of Poland, paved the way
by his orders of the 13th of May and 23d of July 1941 (Documents Number
C-50 and C-52). I quote from the latter, drafted on his own admission by
Jodl:
“In view of the vast size of the occupied areas in the East the
forces available for establishing security in these areas will
be sufficient only if all resistance is punished not by legal
prosecution of the guilty but by the spreading of such terror by
the occupying power as is appropriate to eradicate every
inclination to resist among the population. The competent
commanders must find the means of keeping order ... not by
demanding more security forces but by applying suitable Draconic
methods ...” (Document Number C-52).
The immediate needs of the war machine no doubt saved the western
territories from similar destruction, but the Tribunal have an ample
evidence of the plunder of France, the Low Countries, and the other
territories which these men exploited to the utmost possible extent. In
view of the nature of their murderous policy, it is not surprising that
the men charged by the defendants to carry it out were brutes. In
Rosenberg’s domain, for instance, there was Koch, who was recommended by
Rosenberg for the post of Commissar in Moscow because of the very fact
of his “absolute ruthlessness.” It was Koch who caused the slaughter of
several hundred innocent human beings in the Zuman wood area so that he
could have a private hunting reserve. Another of Rosenberg’s agents was
Kube, who wrote:
“... we have liquidated in the last 10 weeks about 55,000 Jews
in White Ruthenia. In the territory Minsk-Land Jewry has been
eliminated without endangering the manpower demands. In the
pre-eminently Polish territory Lida, 16,000 Jews, in Slonim
8,000 Jews and so forth have been liquidated” (Document Number
3428-PS).
As in Poland the orders given to Frank were as follows:
“Ruthless exploitation ... reduction of entire Polish economy to
absolute minimum necessary for bare existence ... The Poles
shall be the slaves of the greater German world empire”
(Document Number EC-344).
And we know how he carried it out. In January 1940 he records:
“Cheap labor must be removed from the Government General by
hundreds of thousands. This will hamper the native biological
propagation ...” (Document Number 2233-PS).
In May he speaks of:
“... taking advantage of the focusing of world interest on the
Western Front by liquidations of thousands of the Poles, first
the leading representatives of the Polish intelligentsia.”
And in December:
“Poles must feel they have only one duty; to work and to behave.
We must carry out all measures ruthlessly; rely on me ...”
We who try to understand the problems of eastern Europe must try to
understand this; the details of the martyrdom of Poland simply cannot be
described; a third of the people murdered; millions left impoverished,
sick, maimed, and helpless; liberation was just in time to save this
ancient people from the terrible fulfillment of the program which these
men had plotted.
Would that be a convenient moment to ...
THE PRESIDENT: Certainly.
[_A recess was taken._]