Yesterday was the seventy-third anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp, and the solemn commemoration of International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The Holocaust is also known by its Hebrew name, the Shoah, or catastrophe; and it was indeed a catastrophe. Roughly five and a half million to six million Jews were slaughtered by the police, security, and military apparatus of the Nazi state. In his opening statement at Nuremberg, Associate Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson said, “We charge that all atrocities against Jews were the manifestation and culmination of the Nazi plan…”
The nine volumes of the trial proceedings are something that anyone that studies the Nazi period, or international law must read. In reading them one gets a feel for the process itself and the overall fairness of it.
Jackson’s opening and closing statements in the trial are considered to be among the most important and compelling addresses in legal history, as well as masterful rhetoric which connected with the audience and still do today. One legal analyst wrote:
The form components connected with all who participated as an audience at the time and kept the attentiveness of the audience, to change international criminal law forever. The settings broke, and notably continue to break, down the barriers for even those who still read the discourse today. Finally, the narrative’s connectivity is an absolute active function, as the memory and legacy of the tragedy that the Nazis inflicted upon humanity will forever evoke emotion for anyone exposed to this opening statement… With its emotional charge, legal rationale, and human viewpoint, it cannot be denied that this narrative not only held a strong rhetorical effectiveness for the judicial panel hearing the case, but also the world at the time it was given. Patrick Iyampillai, “A Grave Responsibility: A Rhetorical Critique of the Opening Statement at Nuremberg Using the Narrative Perspective”
This is one of the most important aspects of his opening statement because of its relevance today as anti-Semitism and violence against Jews grows more open and more common in Europe and the United States.
When you read them you get a sense of the moral authority that Jackson championed and the manner in which he tied these crimes in to the the crimes that he previously had dealt with in his speech before the tribunal.
I have read many authoritative histories of the Holocaust and the Nazi genocide committed against the Jews. I have also read the accounts of the Nazi perpetrators. These are vitality important, but what is often missing from them is Jackson’s skill as a prosecutor to hammer away at the guilt of those who committed these heinous actions. Sometimes a detached historian attempting to convey the facts, fails provide the moral rhetoric of a prosecutor to fully convey the extent of the evil that was committed by the Nazis Against the Jews. Thus, Jackson’s speech should be a jumping off point before one begins to study the Holocaust. It may not sound fair, but one has to understand the moral outrage of the Nazi crimes before one can appreciate the truth about the Nazi crimes.
Sadly, the crimes of the Nazis evoke little outrage today. When neo-Nazis demonstrated in Charlottesville in the summer of 2017, killing a counter-protestor and beating others, President Trump equivocated and said that there “were very good people on both sides.” Time after time we witness the spectacle of political leaders in the United States, Hungary, Poland, Germany, France, and Russia using blatant anti-Semitism, and racism to remind others that they are the superior race; and most of their supporters make no protest. The examples of their political words, and the crimes directly linked to racism and anti-Semitism are now far too numerous to even bother to list, and they are added to on what seems like a daily basis.
Do not get me wrong, history is important, facts matter, and anti-Semitism and racism are a poison that seems to infect the human race. Historian Christopher Browning wrote:
“I fear that we live in a world in which war and racism are ubiquitous, in which the powers of government mobilization and legitimization are powerful and increasing, in which a sense of personal responsibility is increasingly attenuated by specialization and bureaucratization, and in which the peer group exerts tremendous pressures on behavior and sets moral norms. In such a world, I fear, modern governments that wish to commit mass murder will seldom fail in their efforts for being unable to induce “ordinary men” to become their “willing executioners.”
The Nazis were guilty. Their crimes were horrific, and one cannot as a human being simply relegate them to the depths of history when before our eyes their apologists seek to again use race hatred to gain power; in some countries they are The stakes are far too high. As historian Timothy Snyder has so poignantly written:
“The European history of the twentieth century shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands. It would serve us well today to understand why.”
The fact is what happened in the Holocaust was not an aberration of human nature. Genocide is not confined to the Nazis. Rwanda, Cambodia, Armenia, the Balkans, Nanking, Stalin’s genocide of Ukrainians, Kazakhs, Belorussians, and other non-Russian citizens of the Soviet Union, and the American extermination of the indigenous Native American tribes are not ancient history. Historian Gerhard Weinberg wrote:
“It’s very, very important for people to get a sense of what the potentialities of people really are, what the dangers of ignorance can be. It is in this context, that a supposedly advanced society risks descending into the sewer, that the Holocaust is a warning to people who think of themselves as an advanced, modern society
With that, I give you Jackson’s dissection of the Nazi Crimes Against the Jews which he delivered on the afternoon of November 21st, 1945.
The most savage and numerous crimes committed by the Nazis were those against the Jews. Those in Germany, in 1933, numbered about 500,000. In the aggregate, they had made for themselves positions which excited envy, and had accumulated properties which excited the avarice of the Nazis. They were few enough to be helpless and numerous enough to be held up as a menace.
Let there be no misunderstanding about the charge of persecuting Jews. What we charge against these defendants is not those arrogances and pretensions which frequently accompany the intermingling of different peoples and which are likely, despite the honest efforts of Government, to produce regrettable crimes and convulsions. It is my purpose to show a plan and design to which all Nazis were fanatically committed to annihilate all Jewish people. These crimes were organised and promoted by the Party Leadership, executed and protected by the Nazi officials, as we shall convince you by written orders of the Secret State Police itself.
The persecution of the Jews was a continuous and deliberate policy. It was a policy directed against other nations as well as against the Jews themselves. Anti-Semitism was promoted to divide and embitter the democratic peoples and to soften their resistance to the Nazi aggression. As Robert Ley declared in Der Angriff on 14 May, 1944, “the second German secret weapon is Anti-Semitism because, if it is constantly pursued by Germany, it will become a universal problem which all nations will be forced to consider.”
Anti-Semitism also has been aptly credited with being a “spearhead of terror.” The ghetto was the laboratory for testing repressive measures. Jewish property was the first to be expropriated, but the custom grew and included similar measures against Anti-Nazi Germans, Poles, Czechs, Frenchmen, and Belgians. Extermination of the Jews enabled the Nazis to bring a practised hand to similar measures against Poles, Serbs, and Greeks. The plight of the Jew was a constant threat to opposition or discontent among other elements of Europe’s population -Pacifists, Conservatives, Communists, Catholics, Protestants, Socialists. It was in fact, a threat to every dissenting opinion and to every non-Nazi’s life.
The persecution policy against the Jews commenced with non-violent measures, such as disfranchisement and discriminations against their religion, and the placing of impediments in the way of success in economic life. It moved rapidly to organised mass violence against them, physical isolation in ghettos, deportation, forced labour, mass starvation, and extermination. The Government, the Party formations indicted before you as criminal organisations, the Secret State Police, the Army, private and semi-public associations, and “spontaneous” mobs that were carefully inspired from official sources, were all agencies that were concerned in this persecution. Nor was it directed against individual Jews for personal bad citizenship or unpopularity. The avowed purpose was the destruction of the Jewish people as a whole, as an end in itself, as a measure of preparation for war, and as a discipline for conquered peoples.
The conspiracy or common plan to exterminate the Jew was so methodically and thoroughly pursued, that despite the German defeat and Nazi prostration this Nazi aim largely has succeeded. Only remnants of the European Jewish population remain in Germany, in the countries which Germany occupied, and in those which were her satellites or collaborators. Of the 9,600,000Jews who lived in Nazi-dominated Europe, 6o per cent. are authoritatively estimated to have perished-5,700,000 Jews are missing from the countries in which they formerly lived, and over 4,500,000 cannot be accounted for by the normal death rate nor by immigration; nor are they included among displaced persons. History does not record a crime ever perpetrated against so many victims or one ever carried out with such calculated cruelty.
You will have difficulty, as I have, to look into the faces of these defendants and believe that in this Twentieth Century human beings could inflict such sufferings as will be proved here, on their own countrymen as well as upon their so-called “inferior” enemies. Particular crimes, and the responsibility defendants for them, are to be dealt with by the Soviet Government’s Counsel, when committed in the East, and by Counsel for the Republic of France committed in the West. I advert to them only to show their magnitude as evidence of a purpose and a knowledge common to all defendants, of an official plan rather than of a capricious policy of some individual commander, and to show such a continuity of Jewish persecution, from the rise of the Nazi conspiracy to its collapse, as forbids us to believe that any person could be identified with any part of Nazi action without approving this most conspicuous item in their programme.
The Indictment itself recites many evidences of the anti-Semitic persecutions. The defendant Streicher led the Nazis in anti-Semitic bitterness and extremism. In an article appearing in Der Sturmer on 19th March, he complained that Christian teachings have stood in the way of “racial solution of the Jewish question in Europe,” and quoted enthusiastically as the Twentieth Century solution the Fuehrer’s proclamation Of 24th February, 1943, that “the Jew will be exterminated.” And on 4th November, 1943, Streicher declared in Der Sturmer that the Jews “have disappeared from Europe and that the Jewish ‘Reservoir of the East’ from which the Jewish plague has for centuries beset the people of Europe, has ceased to exist.” Streicher now has the effrontery to tell us he is “only a Zionist”; he says he only wants to return the Jews to Palestine.
But on 7th May, 1942, his newspaper Der Sturmer had this to say: “It is also not only a European problem! The Jewish question is a world question! Not only is Germany not safe in the face of the Jews as long as one Jew lives in Europe, but also the Jewish question is hardly solved in Europe so long as Jews live in the rest of the world.”
Hans Frank Hitler’s Lawyer and Governor General of Occupied Poland
And the defendant Hans Frank, a lawyer by profession I say with shame, summarised in his diary in 1944 the Nazi policy thus:
“The Jews are a race which has to be eliminated; whenever we catch one, it is his end.” (Document No. 2233-PS, Vol. 1944, p. 26.)
And earlier, speaking of his function as Governor-General of Poland, he confided to his diary this sentiment:
“Of course I cannot eliminate all lice and Jews in only a year’s time.” (2233-PS, Vol. IV, 1940, p. 1159)
I could multiply endlessly this kind of Nazi ranting, but I will leave it to the evidence and turn to the fruit of this perverted thinking.
The most serious of the actions against Jews were outside of any law, but the law itself was employed to some extent. There were the infamous Nuremberg decrees of 15th September, 1935. (” Reichsgesetzblatt,” 1935, Part 1, p. 1146.) The Jews were segregated into ghettos and put into forced labour; they were expelled from their professions; their property was expropriated; all culturallife, the Press, the theatre, and schools were prohibited them; and the S.D. was made responsible for them. (212-PS, 069-PS.) This was an ominous guardianship as the following order for “The Handling of the Jewish Question” shows:
“The competency of the Chief of the Security Police and Security Service, who is charged with the mission of solving the European Jewish question, extends even to the occupied eastern provinces. . . .
An eventual act by the civilian population against the Jews is not to be prevented as long as this is compatible with the maintenance of order and security in the rear of the fighting troops. . . .
The first main goal of the German measures must be the strict segregation of Jewry from the rest of the population. In the execution of this, first of all, is the seizing of the Jewish populace by the introduction of a registration order and similar appropriate measures…
Then immediately, the wearing of the recognition sign, consisting of a yellow Jewish star, is to be brought about and all rights of freedom for Jews are to be withdrawn. They are to be placed in ghettos, and at the same time, are to be separated according to sex. The presence of many more or less closed Jewish settlements in White Ruthenia and in the Ukraine makes this mission easier. Moreover, places are to be chosen which make possible the full use of the Jewish manpower in case labour needs are present. The entire Jewish property is to be seized and confiscated, with the exception of that which is necessary for a bare existence. As far as the economical situation permits, the power of disposal of their property is to be taken from the Jews as soon as possible through orders and other measures given by the commissariat, so that the moving of property will quickly cease.”
“Any cultural activity will be completely forbidden to the Jew. This includes the outlawing of the Jewish Press, the Jewish theatres and schools.
“The slaughtering of animals according to Jewish rites is also to be prohibited.” (212-PS).
Obergrüppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich Architect of the Final Solution
The anti-Jewish campaign became furious following the assassination in Paris of the German Legation Councillor von Rath. Heydrich, Gestapo head, sent a telegram to all Gestapo and S.D. offices with directions for handling “spontaneous” uprisings anticipated for the nights of 9th and 10th November, 1938, so as to aid in destruction of Jewish-owned property and protect that of Germans. No more cynical document ever came into evidence. Then there is a report by an S.S. Brigade Leader, Dr. Stahlecher to Himmler, which recites that:
“Similarly, native anti-Semitic forces were induced to start pogroms against Jews after capture, though this inducement proved to be very difficult.
Following out orders, the Security Police was determined to solve the Jewish question with all possible means and most decisively. But it was desirable that the Security Police should not put in an immediate appearance, at least at the beginning, since the extraordinarily harsh measures were apt to stir even German circles. It had to be shown to the world that the native population itself took the first action by way of natural reaction against the suppression by Jews during several decades and against the terror exercised by the Communists during the preceding period.”
In view of the extension of the area of operations and the great number of duties which had to be performed by the Security Police, it was intended from the very beginning to obtain the co-operation of the reliable population for the fight against vermin – that is mainly the Jews and Communists. Beyond our directing of the first spontaneous actions of self-cleansing, which will be reported elsewhere, care had to be taken that reliable people should be put to the cleansing job, and that they were appointed auxiliary members of the Security Police.”
Kowno. To our surprise it was not easy at first to set in motion an extensive pogrom against Jews. Klimatis, the leader of the partisan unit, mentioned above, who was used for this purpose primarily, succeeded in starting a pogrom on the basis of advice given to him by a small advanced detachment acting in Kowno, and in such a way that no German order or German instigation was noticed from the outside. During the first pogrom in the night from 25 to 26.6 the Lithuanian partisans did away with more than 1,500 Jews, set fire to several Synagogues or destroyed them by other means and burned down a Jewish dwelling district consisting of about 60 houses. During the following nights about 2,300 Jews were made harmless in a similar way. In other parts of Lithuania similar actions followed the example of Kowno, though smaller and extending to the Communists who had been left behind.
These self-cleansing actions went smoothly because the Army authorities who had been informed showed understanding for this procedure. From the beginning it was obvious that only the first days after the occupation would offer the opportunity for carrying out pogroms. After the disarmament of the partisans the self-cleansing actions ceased necessarily.
It proved much more difficult to set in motion similar cleaning actions in Latvia.”
From the beginning it was to be expected that the Jewish problem in the East could not be solved by pogroms alone. In accordance with basic orders received, however, the cleansing activities of the Security Police had to aim at the complete annihilation of the Jews…
“The sum total of Jews liquidated in Lithuania amounts to 71,105. . . .” (L-180)
Of course, it is self-evident that these “uprisings” were managed by the government and the Nazi Party. If we were in doubt, we could resort to Streicher’s memorandum of 14th April, 1939, which says, “The anti-Jewish action of November, 1938, did not arise spontaneously from the people.. Part of the party formation has been charged with the execution of the anti-Jewish action.” (406-PS) Jews as a whole were fined a billion Reichsmarks. They were excluded from all businesses, and claims against insurance companies for their burned properties were confiscated, all by the decree of the defendant Goering. (Reichsgesetzblatt, 1938, Part 1, pp. 1579-1582.)
Synagogues were the objects of a special vengeance. On 10th November, 1938, the following order was given: “
“By order of the Group Commander, all Jewish Synagogues in the area of Brigade 50 have to be blown up or set afire. The operation will be carried out in civilian clothing…. Execution of the order will be reported….( 1721-PS.) Some 40 teletype messages, from police headquarters, which will be introduced to you, will tell the fury with which all Jews were pursued in Germany on those awful November nights. The S.S. troops were turned loose and the Gestapo supervised. Jewish-owned property was destroyed. The Gestapo ordered twenty to thirty thousand “well-to-do Jews” to be arrested. Concentration camps were to receive them and the order provided healthy Jews, fit for labour, were to be taken (3051-PS).
As the German frontiers were expanded by war, so the campaign against the Jews expanded. The Nazi plan never was limited to Germany; always it contemplated extinguishing the Jew in Europe and often in the world. In the West, the Jews were killed and their property, taken over. But the campaign achieved its zenith of savagery in the East. The Eastern Jew has suffered as no people ever suffered. Their sufferings were carefully reported to the Nazi authorities to show faithful adherence to the Nazi design. I shall refer only to enough of the evidence of these to show the extent of the Nazi design for killing Jews.
If I should recite these horrors in words of my own, you would think me intemperate and unreliable. Fortunately, we need not take the word of any witness but the Germans themselves. I invite you now to look at a few of the vast number of captured German orders and reports that will be offered in evidence, to see what a Nazi invasion meant. We will present such evidence as the report of “Einsatzgruppe (Action Group) A” of 15th October, 1941, which boasts that in overrunning the Baltic States, “Native Anti-Semitic forces were induced to start pogroms against the Jews during the first hours after occupation.” The report continues:
“From the beginning it was to be expected that the Jewish problem in the East could not be solved by pogroms alone. In accordance with the basic orders received, however, the cleansing activities of the Security Police had to aim at a complete annihilation of the Jews. Special detachments reinforced by selected units -in Lithuania partisan detachments, in Latvia units of the Latvian auxiliary police -therefore performed extensive executions both in the towns and in rural areas. The actions of the execution detachments were performed smoothly.”
“The sum total of the Jews liquidated in Lithuania, according to the report, amounts to 71,105. During the pogroms in Kowno 3,800 Jews were eliminated, in the smaller towns about 1,200 Jews.”
“In Latvia, up to now a total of 30,000 Jews was executed. Five hundred were eliminated by pogroms in Riga.” (L-180.)
This is a captured report from the Commissioner of Sluzk on 20th October, 1941, which describes the scene in more detail.
It says:-“… The first lieutenant explained that the police battalion had received the assignment to effect the liquidation of all Jews here in the town of Sluzk, within two days … Then I requested him to postpone the action one day. However, he rejected this with the remark that he had to carry out this action everywhere and in all towns and that only two days were allotted for Sluzk. Within these two days the town of Sluzk had to be cleared of Jews by all means … All Jews without exception were taken out of the factories and shops and deported in spite of our agreement. It is true that part of the Jews was moved by way of the ghetto, where many of them were processed and still segregated by me, but a large part was loaded directly on trucks and liquidated without further delay outside of the town.. For the rest, as regards the execution of the action, I must point out to my deepest regret that the latter bordered already on sadism. The town itself offered a picture of horror during the action. With indescribable brutality on the part of the German police officers and particularly the Lithuanian partisans, the Jewish people, but also among them White Ruthenians, were taken out of their dwellings and herded together. Everywhere in the town shots were to be heard and in different streets the corpses of shot Jews accumulated. The White Ruthenians were in greatest distress to free themselves from the encirclement. Regardless of the fact that the Jewish people, among whom were also tradesmen, were mistreated in a terribly barbarous way in the face of the White Ruthenian people, the White Ruthenians themselves were also worked over with rubber clubs and rifle butts. There was no question of an action against the Jews anymore. It rather looked like a revolution…”( 1104-PS.)
There are reports which merely tabulate the numbers slaughtered. Another example is an account of the work of Einsatzgruppen of Sipo and S.D. in the East which relates that “in Estonia, all Jews were arrested immediately upon the arrival of the Wehrmacht.”
Jewish men and women above the age of sixteen and capable of work were drafted for forced labour. Jews were subjected to all sorts of restrictions and all Jewish property was confiscated.
All Jewish males above the age of sixteen were executed, with the exception of doctors and elders. Only 500 of an original 4,500 Jews remained.
37,180 persons have been liquidated by the Sipo and S.D. in White Ruthenia during October.
In one town, 337 Jewish women were executed for demonstrating a “provocative attitude.” In another, 380 Jews were shot for spreading vicious propaganda.
And so the report continues, listing town after town, where hundreds upon hundreds of Jews were murdered.
In Vitebsk 3,000 Jews were liquidated because of the danger of epidemics.
In Kiev, 33,771 Jews were executed On 29th/ 30th September in retaliation for some fires which were set off there.
In Zhitomir, 3,145 Jews “had to be shot” because, judging from experience they had to be considered as the carriers of Bolshevik propaganda.
In Kherson, 410 Jews were executed in reprisal against acts of sabotage. In the territory east of the Djnepr, the Jewish problem was “solved” by the liquidation Of 4,891 Jews and by putting the remainder into labour battalions of up to 1,000 persons. (R-102.)
Other accounts tell not of the slaughterso much as of the depths of degradation to which the tormentors stooped. For example, we will show the report made to defendant Rosenberg about the Army and the S.S. in the area under Rosenberg’s jurisdiction, which recited the following:
“Details in the presence of S.S. man, a Jewish dentist has to break all gold teeth and fillings out of mouth of German and Russian Jews before they are executed.”
Men, women and children are locked into barns and burned alive.
Peasants, women and children, are shot on the pretext that they are suspected of belonging to bands. (R-135.)
We of the Western world heard of gas wagons in which Jews and political opponents were asphyxiated. We could not believe it. But here we have the report of 16th May, I942, from the German S.S. Officer Becker, to his supervisor in Berlin, which tells this story;
“Gas vans in C group can be driven to execution spot, which is generally stationed ten to fifteen kilometres from main road, only in dry weather. Since those to be executed become frantic if conducted to this place, such vans become immobilised in wet weather.
Gas vans in D group were camouflaged as cabin trailers, but vehicles well known to authorities and civilian population which calls them ‘Death Vans.’
The writer of the letter, Becker, ordered all men to keep as far away as possible during gassing. Unloading van after the gassing has ‘atrocious spiritual and physical effect’ on men and they should be ordered not to participate in such work.” (501-PS.)
I shall not dwell on this subject longer than to quote one more sickening document which evidences the planned and systematic character of these Jewish persecutions. I hold a report written with Teutonic thoroughness as to detail, illustrated with photographs to authenticate its almost incredible text, and beautifully bound in leather with the loving care bestowed to a proud work. It is the original report of the S.S. Brigade General Stroop in charge of the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, and its title page carries the inscription, “The Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw no longer exists.” It is characteristic that one of the captions explains that the photograph concerned shows the driving out of Jewish “bandits”; those whom the photograph shows being driven out are almost entirely women and little children. It contains a day-by-day account of the killings mainly carried out by the S.S. Organisation, too long to relate, but let me quote General Stroop’s summary: “
“The resistance put up by the Jews and bandits could only be suppressed by energetic actions of our troops day and night. The Reichsfuehrer S.S. ordered therefore on 23rd April, 1943, the cleaning out of the ghetto with utter ruthlessness and merciless tenacity. I, therefore, decided to destroy and burn down the entire ghetto without regard to the armament factories. These factories were systematically dismantled and then burned. Jews usually left their hideouts, but frequently remained in the burning buildings and jumped out of the windows only when the heat became unbearable. They then tried to crawl with broken bones across the street into buildings which were not afire. Sometimes they changed their hideouts during the night into the ruins of burned buildings. Life in the sewers was not pleasant after the first week. Many times we could hear loud voices in them. S.S. men or policemen climbed bravely through the manholes to capture these Jews. Sometimes they stumbled over Jewish corpses; sometimes they were shot at. Tear gas bombs were thrown into the manholes and the Jews driven out of the sewers and captured. Countless numbers of Jews were liquidated in sewers and bunkers through blasting. The longer the resistance continued the tougher became the members of the Waffen S.S., Police and Wehrmacht, who always discharged their duties in an exemplary manner. Frequently Jews who tried to replenish. their food supplies during the night or to communicate with neighbouring groups were exterminated.” (1061-PS) “
“This action eliminated,” says the S.S. commander, “a proved total of 56,065. To that we have to add the number killed through blasting, fire, etc., which cannot be counted.”
We charge that all atrocities against Jews were the manifestation and culmination of the Nazi plan to which every defendant here was a party. I know very well that some of these men did take steps to spare some particular Jew for some personal reason from the horrors that awaited the unrescued Jew. Some protested that particular atrocities were excessive, and discredited the general policy. While a few defendants may show efforts to make specific exceptions to the policy of Jewish extermination, I have found no instance in which any defendant opposed the policy itself or sought to revoke or even modify it.
Determination to destroy the Jews was a binding force which at all times cemented the elements of this conspiracy. On many internal policies there were differences among the defendants. But there is not one of them who has not echoed the rallying cry of Naziism: DEUTSCIILAND ERWACHE-JUDA VERRECKE (Germany Awake-Jewry Perish!)
I come to the discussion of terrorism and to preparation for the war.
How a Government treats its own inhabitants generally is thought to be no concern of other Governments or of international society. Certainly few oppressions or cruelties would warrant the intervention of foreign powers. But the German mistreatment of Germans is now known to pass in magnitude and savagery any limits of what is tolerated by modern civilisation. Other nations, by silence, would take a consenting part in such crimes. These Nazi persecutions, moreover, take character as international crimes because of the purpose for which they were undertaken.
The purpose, as we have seen, of getting rid of the influence of free labour, the churches and the Jews was to clear their obstruction to the precipitation of aggressive war. If aggressive warfare in violation of treaty obligation is a matter of international cognisance, the preparations for it must also be of concern to the international community. Terrorism was the chief instrument for securing the cohesion of the German people in war purposes. Moreover, these cruelties in Germany served as atrocity practice to discipline the membership of the criminal organisation to follow the pattern later in occupied countries.
Through the police formations that are before you accused as criminal organisations, the Nazi Party leaders, aided at some point in their basic and notorious purpose by each of the individual defendants, instituted a reign of terror. These espionage and police organisations were utilised to hunt down every form of opposition and to penalise every nonconformity. These organisations early founded and administered concentration camps -Buchenwald in 1933, Dachau in 1934. But these notorious names were not alone. Concentration camps came to dot the German map and to number scores. At first they met with resistance from some Germans. We have a captured letter from Minister of Justice Gurtner to Hitler which is revealing. A Gestapo official had been prosecuted for crimes committed in a camp at Hohenstein, and the Nazi Governor of Saxony had promptly asked that the proceeding be quashed. The Minister of Justice in June of 1935 protested because, as he said, “In this camp unusually grave mistreatments of prisoners has occurred at least since Summer 1939. The prisoners not only were beaten with whips, without cause, similarly as in the Concentration Camp Bredow near Stettin until they lost consciousness, but they were also tortured in other manners, e.g., with the help of a dripping apparatus constructed exclusively for this purpose, under which prisoners had to stand until they were suffering from serious purulent wounds of the scalp.” (787-PS)
I shall not take time to detail the ghastly proceedings in these concentration camps. Beatings, starvings, tortures, and killings were routine -so routine that the tormentors became blase and careless. We have a report of discovery that in Plotzensee one night, 186 persons were executed while there were orders for only 150. Another report describes how the family of one victim received two urns of ashes by mistake. Inmates were compelled to execute each other. In 1942, they were paid five Reichsmarks per execution, but on 27th June, 1942, S.S. General Glucke ordered commandants of all concentration camps to reduce this honorarium to three cigarettes. In 1943, the Reichs leader of the S.S. and Chief of German Police ordered the corporal punishment on Russian women to be applied by Polish women and vice versa, but the price was not frozen. “As a reward, a few cigarettes” was authorised. Under the Nazis, human life had been progressively devalued, until it finally became worth less than a handful of tobacco -Ersatz tobacco. There were, however, some traces of the milk of human kindness. On 11th August, 1942, an order went from Himmler to the commandants of fourteen concentration camps that “only German prisoners are allowed to beat other German prisoners.” (2189-PS).
Mystery and suspense was added to cruelty in order to spread torture from the inmate to his family and friends. Men and women disappeared from their homes or business or from the streets, and no word came of them. The omission of notice was not due to overworked staff; it was due to policy. The Chief of the S.D. and Sipo reported that, in accordance with orders from the Fuehrer, anxiety should be created in the minds of the family of the arrested person. (668-PS.) Deportations and secret arrests were labelled, with a Nazi wit which seems a little ghoulish, “Nacht und Nebel” (Night and Fog). (L, 90, 833-PS.)
One of the many orders for these actions, gave this explanation:
“The decree carries a basic innovation. The Fuehrer and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces commands that crimes of the specified sort by civilians of the occupied territories are to be punished by the pertinent courts martial in the occupied territories only when (a) the sentence calls for the death penalty; and (b) the sentence is pronounced within eight days of arrest. Only when both conditions are met does the Fuehrer and Commander-in Chief of the Armed Forces hope for the desired deterrent effect from the conduct of punitive proceedings in the occupied territories. In other cases in the future, the accused are to be secretly brought to Germany, and the further conduct of the trial carried on here. The deterrent effect of these measures lies (a) in allowing the disappearance of the accused without a trace; (b) therein that no information whatsoever may be given about their whereabouts and their fate.” (833-PS.)
To clumsy cruelty, scientific skill was added. “Undesirables” were exterminated by injection of drugs into the bloodstream, by asphyxiation in gas chambers. They were shot with poison bullets, to study the effects (L-103); Then, to cruel experiments the Nazi added obscene ones. These were not the work of underling-degenerates, but of master-minds high in the Nazi conspiracy. On 20th May, 1942, General Field Marshal Milch authorised S.S. General Wolff to go ahead at Dachau Camp with so-called “cold experiments”; and four female gypsies were selected for the purpose. Himmler gave permission to carry on these “experiments” also in other camps (1617-PS). At Dachau, the reports of the “doctor” in charge show that victims were immersed in cold water until their body temperature was reduced to 26 degrees centigrade (8.24 degrees Fahrenheit) when they all died immediately. (1618-PS.) This was in August, 1942. But the “doctor’s” technique improved. By February, 1943, he was able to report that thirty persons were chilled to 27 to 29 degrees, their hands and feet frozen white, and their bodies “rewarmed” by a hot bath. But the Nazi scientific triumph was “rewarming with animal heat.” The victim, all but frozen to death, was surrounded with the bodies of living women until he revived and responded to his environment by having sexual intercourse. (1616-PS.) Here Nazi degeneracy reached its nadir.
I dislike to encumber the record with such morbid tales, but we are in the grim business of trying men as criminals, and these are the things that their own agents say happened. We will show you these concentration camps in motion pictures. just as the Allied armies found them when they arrived, and the measures General Eisenhower had to take to clean them up. Our proof will be disgusting and you will say I have robbed you of your sleep. But these are the things which have turned the stomach of the world and set every civilised hand against Nazi Germany.
Germany became one vast torture chamber. Cries of its victims were heard round the world and brought shudders to civilised people everywhere. I am one who received during this war most atrocity tales with suspicion and skepticism. But the proof here will be so overwhelming that I venture to predict not one word I have spoken will be denied. These defendants will only deny personal responsibility or knowledge.
Under the clutch of the most intricate web of espionage and intrigue that any modern State has endured, and persecution and torture of a kind that has not been visited upon the world in many centuries, the elements of the German population which were both decent and courageous were annihilated. Those which were decent but weak were intimidated. Open resistance, which had never been more than feeble and irresolute, disappeared. But resistance, I am happy to say, always remained, although it was manifest in only such events as the abortive effort to assassinate Hitler on 20th July, 1944. With resistance driven underground, the Nazi had the German State in his own hands.
But the Nazis not only silenced discordant voices. They created positive controls as effective as their negative case. Propaganda organs, on a scale never before known, stimulated the party and party formations with a permanent enthusiasm and abandon such as we, democratic people, can work up only for a few days before a general election. They inculcated and practised the Fuehrer-prinzip which centralised control of the Party and of the Party-controlled State over the lives and thought of the German people, who are accustomed to look upon the German State, by whomever controlled, with a mysticism that is incomprehensible to my people.
All these controls, from their inception were exerted with unparalleled energy and single-mindedness to put Germany on a war footing. We will show from the Nazis’ own documents their secret training of military personnel, their secret creation of a military air force. Finally, a conscript army was brought into being. Financiers, economists, industrialists, joined in the plan and promoted elaborate alterations in industry and finance to support an unprecedented concentration of resources and energies upon preparations for war. Germany’s rearmament so outstripped the strength of her neighbours that in about a year she was able to crush the whole military force of Continental Europe, exclusive of that of Soviet Russia, and then to push the Russian armies back to the Volga. These preparations were of a magnitude which surpassed all need of defence, and every defendant, and every intelligent German, well understood them to be for aggressive purposes.
Before resorting to open aggressive warfare, the Nazis undertook some rather cautious experiments to test the spirit of resistance of those who lay across their path. They advanced, but only as others yielded, and kept in a position to draw back if they found a temperament that made persistence dangerous.
On 7th March, 1936, the Nazis reoccupied the Rhineland and then proceeded to fortify it in violation of the Treaty of Versailles and the Pact of Locarno. They encountered no substantial resistance and were emboldened to take the next step, which was the acquisition of Austria. Despite repeated assurances that Germany had no designs on Austria, invasion was perfected. Threat of attack forced Schuschnigg to resign as Chancellor of Austria and put the Nazi defendant Seyss-Inquart in his place. The latter immediately opened the frontier and invited Hitler to invade Austria “to preserve order”. On 12th March the invasion began. The next day, Hitler proclaimed himself Chief of the Austrian State, took command of its armed forces, and a law was enacted annexing Austria to Germany.
Threats of aggression had succeeded without arousing resistance. Fears nevertheless had been stirred. They were lulled by an assurance to the Czechoslovak Government that there would be no attack on that country. We will show that the Nazi Government already had detailed plans for the attack. We will lay before you the documents in which those conspirators planned to create an incident to justify their attack. They even gave consideration to assassinating their own Ambassador at Prague in order to create a sufficiently dramatic incident. They did precipitate a diplomatic crisis which endured throughout the summer. Hitler set 30th September as the day when troops should be ready for action. Under the threat of immediate war, the United Kingdom and France concluded a pact with Germany and Italy at Munich on 29th September, 1938, which required Czechoslovakia to acquiesce in the cession of the Sudetenland to Germany. It was consummated by German occupation on 1st October, 1938.
The Munich Pact pledged no further aggression against Czechoslovakia, but the Nazi pledge was lightly given and quickly broken. On 15th March, 1939, in defiance of the Treaty of Munich itself, the Nazis seized and occupied Bohemia and Moravia, which constituted the major part of Czechoslovakia not already ceded to Germany. Once again the West stood aghast, but it dreaded war, it saw no remedy except war, and it hoped against hope that the Nazi fever for expansion had run its course. But the Nazi world was intoxicated by these unresisted successes in open alliance with Mussolini and in covert alliance with Franco. Then, having made a deceitful, delaying peace with Russia, the conspirators entered upon the final phase of the plan to renew war.
I will not prolong this address by detailing the steps leading to the war of aggression which began with the invasion of Poland on 1st September, 1939. The further story will be unfolded to you by the British Delegation from documents including those of the German High Command itself. The plans had been laid long in advance. As early as 1935 Hitler appointed the defendant Schacht to the position of “General Deputy for the War Economy.” (2261-PS) We have the diary of General Jodl (1780-PS); the “Plan Otto,” Hitler’s own order for attack on Austria in case trickery failed (C-102); the “Plan Green” which was the blueprint for attack on Czechoslovakia (338-PS); the plan for the War in the West (376-PS, 375-PS); Funk’s letter to Hitler dated 25th August, 1939, detailing the long course of economic preparation for war (699-PS); Keitel’s top-secret mobilisation order for 1939-40 prescribing steps to be taken during a “period of tension,” as it was described, during which no “‘ state of war’ will be publicly declared even if open war measures against the enemy will be taken.” This latter order (1699-PS) is in our possession despite a secret order issued on 16th March, 1945, when Allied troops were advancing into the heart of Germany, to burn these plans. We have also Hitler’s directive, dated 18th December, 1940, for the “Barbarossa Contingency,” which was a code name, outlining the strategy of the attack on Russia. That plan, in the original, bears the initials of the defendants Keitel and Jodl. They were planning the attack and planning it long in advance of the declaration of war. We have detailed information concerning the “Case White,” the plan for attack on Poland (2327-PS). That attack began the war. The plan was issued by Keitel on 3rd April, 1939. The attack did not come until September. Steps in preparation for the attack were taken by subordinate commanders, one of whom issued an order on 14th June providing that:
“The Commander-in-Chief of the Armies has ordered the working out of a plan of deployment against Poland which takes in account the demands of political leadership for the opening of the war by surprise and for quick successes.. I declare it the duty of the Commanding Generals, the Divisional Commanders, and the Commandants to limit as much as possible the number of persons who will be informed, and to limit the extent of the information, and ask that all suitable measures be taken to prevent persons not concerned from getting information.
The operation, in order to forestall an orderly Polish mobilisation and concentration, is to be opened by surprise with forces which are for the most part armoured and motorised, placed on alert in the neighbourhood of the border. The initial superiority over the Polish frontier-guards and surprise that can be expected with certainty are to be maintained by quickly bringing up other parts of the army as well to counteract the marching up of the Polish Army.
If the development of the political situation should show that a surprise at the beginning of the war is out of question, because of well-advanced defence preparations on the part of the Polish Army, the Commander-in-Chief of the Army will order the opening of the hostilities only after the assembling of sufficient additional forces The basis of all preparations will be to surprise the enemy..”( 2327-PS)
We also have the order for the attack on England, initialled again by Keitel and Jodl. It is interesting that it commences with a recognition that although the British military position is “hopeless,” they show not the slightest sign of giving in. (442-PS)
Not the least incriminating are the minutes of Hitler’s meeting with his high advisers.
As early as 5th November, 1937, Hitler told defendants Goering, Raeder, and Neurath, among others, that German rearmament was practically accomplished and that he had decided to secure by force, starting with a lightening attack on Czechoslovakia and Austria, greater living space for Germans in Europe no later that 1943-5 and perhaps as early as 1938. (368-PS) On the 23rd May, 1939, the Fuehrer advised his staff that:
“It is a question of expanding our living space in the East and of securing our food supplies over and above the natural fertility, thoroughgoing German exploitation will enormously increase the surplus.
There is therefore no question of sparing Poland, and we are left with the decision:
To attack Poland at the first suitable opportunity.
We cannot expect a repetition of the Czech affair. There will be war.” (L-79)
On 22nd August, 1939, Hitler again addressed members of the High Command, telling them when the start of military operations would be ordered. He disclosed that for propaganda purposes, he would provocate a good reason. “It will make no difference,” he announced, “whether this reason will sound convincing or not. After all, the victor will not be asked whether he talked the truth or not. We have to proceed brutally. The stronger is always right.” (1014-PS) On 23rd November, 1939, after the Germans had invaded Poland, Hitler made this explanation: “For the first time in history we have to fight on only one front. The other front is at present free, but no one can know how long that will remain so. I have doubted for a long time whether I would strike in the East and then in the West. Basically, I did not organise the armed forces in order not to strike. The decision to strike was always in me. Earlier or later I wanted to solve the problem. Under pressure it was decided that the East was to be attacked first.” (789-PS)
We know the bloody sequel. Frontier incidents were staged. Demands were made for cession of territory. When Poland refused, the German forces invaded on 1st September, 1939. Warsaw was destroyed; Poland fell. The Nazis, in accordance with plans, moved swiftly to extend their aggression throughout Europe and to gain the advantage of surprise over their unprepared neighbours, Despite repeated and solemn assurances of peaceful intentions, they invaded Denmark and Norway on 9th April, 1940; Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg on 10th May, 1940, Yugoslavia and Greece on 6th April 1941.
As part of the Nazi preparation for aggression against Poland and her allies, Germany, on 23rd April, 1939 had entered into a non-aggression pact with Soviet Russia. It uses only a delaying treaty intended to be kept no longer than necessary to prepare for its violation. On 22nd June, 1941, pursuant to long matured plans, the Nazis hurled troops into Soviet territory without any declaration of war. The entire European world was aflame.
The Nazi plans of aggression called for use of Asiatic allies, and they found among the Japanese men of kindred mind and purpose. They were brothers, under the skin.
Himmler records a conversation that he had on 31st January, 1939, with General Oshima, Japanese Ambassador at Berlin. He wrote:
“Furthermore, he (Oshima) had succeeded up to now in sending 10 Russians with bombs across the Caucasian frontier. These Russians had the mission to kill Stalin. A number of additional Russians, whom he had also sent across, had been shot at the frontier.” (2195-PS.)
On 27th September, 1940, the Nazis concluded a German-Italian-Japanese ten-year military and economic alliance by which those powers agreed “to stand by and co-operate with one another in regard to their efforts in Greater East Asia and regions of Europe respectively, wherein it is their prime purpose to establish and maintain a new order of things.”
On 5th March, 1941, a top secret directive was issued by defendant Keitel. It stated that “The Fuehrer had ordered instigation of Japan’s active participation in the war” an directed that “Japan’s military power has to be strengthened by the disclosure of German war experiences and support of a military, economic and technical nature has to be given.” The aim was stated to be to crush England quickly, thereby keeping the United States out of the war. (C-75)
On 29th March, 1941, Ribbentrop told Matsuoka, the Japanese Foreign Minister, that the German Army was ready to strike against Russia. Matsuoka in turn reassured Ribbentrop about the Far East. Japan, he reported, was acting at the moment as though she had no interest whatever in Singapore, but “intends to strike when the right moment comes.” (1877-PS) On April, 1941, Ribbentrop urged Matsuoka that entry of Japan into the war would “hasten the victory” and would be more in the interest of Japan than of Germany, since it would Japan a unique chance to fulfil her national aims and to play a leading part in Eastern Asia. (1882-PS.)
The proofs in this case will also show that the leaders of Germany were planning war against the United States from its Atlantic as well as instigating it from its Pacific approaches. A captured memorandum from the Fuehrer’s headquarters, dated 29th October, 1940, asks certain information as to air bases and reports further that:
“The Fuehrer is at present occupied with the question of the occupation of the Atlantic islands with a view to the prosecution of war against America at a later date. Deliberations on this subject are being embarked upon here.” (376-PS.)
On 7th December, 1941, a day which the late President Roosevelt declared “will live in infamy,” victory for German aggression seemed certain. The Wehrmacht was at the gates of Moscow. Taking advantage of the situation, and while her plenipotentiaries were creating a diplomatic diversion in Washington, Japan without declaration o war treacherously attacked the United States at Pearl Harbour and the Philippines. Attacks followed swiftly on the British Commonwealth and The Netherlands in the South-west Pacific. These aggressions met in the only way that they could be met, with instant declarations of war and with armed resistance which mounted slowly through many long months of reverse until finally the Axis was crushed to earth and deliverance for its victims was won.
Your Honour, I am about to take up “Crimes in the Conduct of War,” which is quite a separate subject. We are within five minutes of the recessing time. It will be very convenient for me it if will be agreeable to you.
THE PRESIDENT: We will sit again in 15 minutes’ time, (A recess was taken.)
THE PRESIDENT: The Tribunal must request that if it adjourns for I5 minutes, that members of the bar and others are back in their seats after an interval of 15 minutes. Mr. Justice Jackson, I understand that you wish to continue to 5.15, when you may be able to conclude your speech?
MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: I think that would be the most orderly way.
THE PRESIDENT: Yes, the Tribunal will be glad to do so.
MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: May it please your Honour, I will now take up the subject of “Crimes in the Conduct of War.”
At this point I move to Justice Jackson’s closing statement.
Jackson’s closing occurred 178 days after his opening address, after nearly nine months of testimony and evidence was presented by the prosecutors and the defense. It was The Nazis own records provided massive amounts of damning evidence which the prosecution and to present in such a manner that it couldn’t be denied by defendants or history.
Jackson was masterful as he made his synopsis of the evidence and testimony presented over those nine months. To do so he had to come back after a poor performance against the former Nazi Reichs Marshal Hermann Goering. It was a day that shook his confidence, but after Jackson’s performance, British prosecutor Maxwell Fyfe destroyed Goering on cross. Many in the media believed that Jackson could not come back, in fact he wanted to resign as Chief Prosecutor. But he remained and delivered his second masterpiece of the trial.
His words should give us all pause when we think that we view the events of the past in a patronizing manner, thinking that we are too advanced to be capable of such such behaviors. We trust in technological advances and affluence but human nature remains unchanged and the crimes of the Twentieth Century which Jackson detailed in his summation could be eclipsed by worse today. There are plenty of world leaders all too willing to reprise the crimes of the Nazis. This is happening today at the hands of Vladimir Putin in Ukraine, where the Russian leader’s forces are committing Genocide.
So we begin where Jackson began on the Friday, July 27th 1946.
Mr. President and members of the Tribunal:
An advocate can be confronted with few more formidable tasks than to select his closing arguments where there is great disparity between his appropriate time and his available material. In eight months -a short time as State trials go -we have introduced evidence which embraces as vast and varied a panorama of events as has ever been compressed within the framework of a litigation. It is impossible in summation to do more than outline with bold strokes the vitals of this trial’s sad and melancholy record, which will live as the historical text of the twentieth century’s shame and depravity.
It is common to think of our own time as standing at the apex of civilisation, from which the deficiencies of preceding ages may patronisingly be viewed in the light of what is assumed to be “progress”. The reality is that in the long perspective of history the present century will not hold an admirable position, unless its second half is to redeem its first. These two-score years in this twentieth century will be recorded in the book of years as some of the most bloody in all annals. Two world wars have left a legacy of dead which number more than all the armies engaged in any war that made ancient or medieval history. No half-century ever witnessed slaughter on such a scale, such cruelties and inhumanities, such wholesale deportations of peoples into slavery, such annihilations of minorities. The terror of Torquemada pales before the Nazi Inquisition. These deeds are the overshadowing historical facts by which generations to come will remember this decade. If we cannot eliminate the causes and prevent the repetition of these barbaric events, it is not an irresponsible prophecy to say that this twentieth century may yet succeed in bringing the doom of civilisation.
Goaded by these facts, we were moved to redress the blight on the record of our era. The defendants complain that our pace is too fast. In drawing the Charter of this Tribunal, we thought we were recording an accomplished advance in International Law. But they say that we have outrun our times, that we have anticipated an advance that should be, but has not yet been made. The Agreement of London, whether it originates or merely records, at all events marks a transition in International Law which roughly corresponds to that in the evolution of local law when men ceased to punish crime by “hue and cry” and began to let reason and inquiry govern punishment. The society of nations has emerged from the primitive “hue and cry”, the law of “catch and kill”. It seeks to apply sanctions to enforce International Law, but to guide their application by evidence, law, and reason instead of outcry. The defendants denounce the law under which their accounting is asked. Their dislike for the law which condemns them is not original. It has been remarked before that:
“No thief e’er felt the halter draw with good opinion of the law.”
I shall not labour the law of this case. The position of the United States was explained in my opening statement. My distinguished colleague, the Attorney-General of Great Britain, will reply on behalf of all the Chief Prosecutors to the defendants’ legal attack. At this stage of the proceedings, I shall rest upon the law of these crimes as laid down in the Charter. The defendants, who except for the Charter would have no right to be heard at all, now ask that the legal basis of this trial be nullified. This Tribunal, of course, is given no power to set aside or modify the Agreement between the Four Powers, to which eighteen other nations have adhered. The terms of the Charter are conclusive upon every party to these proceedings.
In interpreting the Charter, however, we should not overlook the unique and emergent character of this body as an International Military Tribunal. It is no part of the constitutional mechanism of internal justice of any of the signatory nations. Germany has unconditionally surrendered, but no peace treaty has been signed or agreed upon. The Allies are still technically in a state of war with Germany, although the enemy’s political and military institutions have collapsed. As a Military Tribunal, this Tribunal is a continuation of the war effort of the Allied nations. As an International Tribunal, it is not bound by the procedural and substantive refinements of our respective judicial or constitutional systems, nor will its rulings introduce precedents into any country’s internal system of civil justice. As an International Military Tribunal, it rises above the provincial and transient, and seeks guidance not only from International Law but also from the basic principles of jurisprudence, which are assumptions of civilisation and which long have found embodiment in the codes of all nations.
Of one thing we may be sure. The future will never have to ask, with misgiving, what could the Nazis have said in their favour. History will know that whatever could be said, they were allowed to say. They have been given the kind of a trial which they, in the days of their pomp and power, never gave to any man.
But fairness is not weakness. The extraordinary fairness of these hearings is an attribute of our strength. The prosecution’s case, at its close, seemed inherently unassailable because it rested so heavily on German documents of unquestioned authenticity. But it was the weeks upon weeks of pecking at this case, by one after another of the defendants, that has demonstrated its true strength. The fact is that the testimony of the defendants has removed any doubt of guilt which, because of the extraordinary nature and magnitude of these crimes, may have existed before they spoke. They have helped to write their own judgement of condemnation.
But justice in this case has nothing to do with some of the arguments put forth by the defendants or their counsel. We have not previously and we need not now discuss the merits of all their obscure and tortuous philosophy. We are not trying them for the possession of obnoxious ideas. It is their right, if they choose, to renounce the Hebraic heritage in the civilisation of which Germany was once a part. Nor is it our affair that they repudiated the Hellenic influence as well. The intellectual bankruptcy and moral perversion of the Nazi regime might have been no concern of International Law had it not been utilised to goose-step the Herrenvolk across international frontiers. It is not their thoughts, it is their overt acts which we charge to be crimes. Their creed and teachings are important only as evidence of motive, purpose, knowledge and intent.
We charge unlawful aggression but we are not trying the motives, hopes, or frustrations which may have led Germany to resort to aggressive war as an instrument of policy. The law, unlike politics, does not concern itself with the good or evil in the status quo, nor with the merits of the grievances against it. It merely requires that the status quo be not attacked by violent means and that policies be not advanced by war. We may admit that overlapping ethnological and cultural groups, economic barriers, and conflicting national ambitions created in the 1930′ s, as they will continue to create, grave problems for Germany as well as for the other peoples of Europe. We may admit too that the world had failed to provide political or legal remedies which would be honourable and acceptable alternatives to war. We do not underwrite either the ethics or the wisdom of any country, including my own, in the face of these problems. But we do say that it is now, as it was for some time prior to 1939, illegal and criminal for Germany or any other nation to redress grievances or seek expansion by resort to aggressive war.
Let me emphasize one cardinal point. The United States has no interest which would be advanced by the conviction of any defendant if we have not proved him guilty on at least one of the counts charged against him in the Indictment. Any result that the calm and critical judgement of posterity would pronounce unjust would not be a victory for any of the countries associated in this prosecution. But in summation we now have before us the tested evidences of criminality and have heard the flimsy excuses and paltry evasions, of the defendants. The suspended judgement with which we opened this case is no longer appropriate. The time has come for final judgement, and if the case I present seems hard and uncompromising, it is because the evidence makes it so.
I perhaps can do no better service than to try to lift this case out of the morass of detail with which the record is full, and put before you only the bold outlines of a case that is impressive in its simplicity. True, its thousands of documents and more thousands of pages of testimony deal with an epoch and cover a continent, and touch almost every branch of human endeavour.
They illuminate specialities, such as diplomacy, naval development and warfare, land warfare, the genesis of air warfare, the politics of the Nazi rise to power, the finance and economics of totalitarian war, sociology, penology, mass psychology, and mass pathology. I must leave it to experts to comb the evidence and write volumes on their specialities, while I picture in broad strokes the offences whose acceptance as lawful would threaten the continuity of civilisation. I must, as Kipling put it, “splash at a ten-league canvas with brushes of camel’s hair”.
THE CRIMES OF THE NAZI REGIME
The strength of the case against these defendants under the conspiracy count, which it is the duty of the United States to argue, lies in its simplicity. It involves but three ultimate inquiries: First, have the acts defined by the Charter as crimes been committed; second, were they committed pursuant to a common plan or conspiracy; third, are these defendants among those who are criminally responsible? The charge requires examination of a criminal policy, not of a multitude of isolated, unplanned, or disputed crimes. The substantive crimes upon which we rely, either as goals of a common plan or as means for its accomplishment, are admitted. The pillars which uphold the conspiracy charge may be found in five groups of overt acts, whose character and magnitude are important considerations in appraising the proof of conspiracy.
1. THE SEIZURE OF POWER AND SUBJUGATION OF GERMANY TO A POLICE STATE The Nazi Party seized control of the German State in 1933. “Seizure of power” is a characterisation used by defendants and defence witnesses, and so apt that it has passed into both history and everyday speech. The Nazi junta in the early days lived in constant fear of overthrow. Goering, in 1934, pointed out that its enemies were legion, and said:
“Therefore, the concentration camps have been created, where we have first confined thousands of Communists and Social Democrat functionaries.”
In 1933 Goering forecast the whole programme of purposeful cruelty and oppression when he publicly announced:
“Whoever in the future raises a hand against a representative of the National Socialist movement or of the State must know that he will lose his life in a very short while.”
New political crimes were created to this end. It was made a treason, punishable with death, to organize or support a political party other than the Nazi Party. Circulating a false or exaggerated statement, or one which would harm the State or even the Party, was made a crime. Laws were enacted of such ambiguity that they could be used to punish almost any innocent act. It was, for example, made a crime to provoke “any act contrary to the public welfare”.
The doctrine of punishment by analogy was introduced to enable conviction for acts which no statute forbade. Minister of Justice Guertner explained that National Socialism considered every violation of the goals of life which the community set up for itself to be a wrong per se, and that the acts could be punished even though it was not contrary to existing “formal law”.
The Gestapo and the SD were instrumentalities of an espionage system which penetrated public and private life. Goering controlled a personal wiretapping unit. All privacy of communication was abolished. Party Blockleiter appointed over every 50 householders spied continuously on all within their ken.
Upon the strength of this spying individuals were dragged off to “protective custody” and to concentration camps without legal proceedings of any kind1and without statement of any reason therefore. The partisan political police were exempted from effective legal responsibility for their acts.
With all administrative offices in Nazi control and with the Reichstag reduced to impotence, the judiciary remained the last obstacle to this reign of terror. But its independence was soon overcome and it was reorganised to dispense a venal justice. Judges were ousted for political or racial reasons and were spied upon and put under pressure to join the Nazi Party. After the Supreme Court had acquitted three of the four men whom the Nazis accused of setting the Reichstag on fire, its jurisdiction over treason cases was transferred to a newly established “People’s Court” consisting of two judges and five Party officials. The German film of this “People’s Court” in operation, which the showed in this chamber, revealed its presiding judge pouring partisan abuse on speechless defendants. Special courts were created to try political crimes, only Party members were appointed judges, and “Judges’ letters” instructed the puppet judges as to the “general lines” they must follow.
The result was the removal of all peaceable means either to resist or to change the Government. Having sneaked through the portals of power, the Nazis slammed the gate in the face of all others who might also aspire to enter. Since the law was what the Nazis said it was, every form of opposition was rooted out and every dissenting voice throttled. Germany was in the clutch of a police State, which used the fear of the concentration camp as a means to enforce non-resistance. The Party was the State, the State was the Party, and terror by day and death by night were the policy of both.
2. THE PREPARATION AND WAGING OF WARS OF AGGRESSION From the moment the Nazis seized power, they set about with feverish but stealthy efforts, in defiance of the Versailles Treaty, to arm for war. In 1933 they found no air force. By 1939 they had 21 squadrons, consisting of 240 echelons or about 2,400 first-line planes, together with trainers and transports.
In 1933 they found an army of 3 infantry [sic] (actually 7) and 3 cavalry divisions. By 1939 they had raised and equipped an army of 51 divisions, 4 of which were fully motorized and 4 of which were panzer divisions. In 1933 they found a navy of one cruiser and six light cruisers. By 1939 they had built a navy of 4 battleships, 1 aircraft carrier, 6 cruisers, 22 destroyers, and 54 submarines. They had also built up in that period an armament industry as efficient as that of any country in the world.
These new weapons were put to use, commencing in September, 1939, in a series of undeclared wars against nations with which Germany had arbitration and non-aggression treaties, and in violation of repeated assurances.
On 1st September, 1939, this rearmed Germany attacked Poland. The following April witnessed the invasion and occupation of Denmark and Norway, and May saw the overrunning of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. Another spring saw Yugoslavia and Greece under attack, and in June, 1941, came the invasion of Soviet Russia. Then Japan, which Germany had embraced as a partner, struck without warning at Pearl Harbour in December, 1941, and four days later Germany declared war on the United States.
We need not trouble ourselves about the many abstract difficulties that can be conjured up about what constitutes aggression in doubtful cases. I shall show you, in discussing the conspiracy, that by any test ever put forward by any responsible authority, by all the canons of plain common sense, these were unlawful wars of aggression in breach of treaties and in violation of assurances.
3. WARFARE IN DISREGARD OF INTERNATIONAL LAW
It is unnecessary to labour this point on the facts. Goering asserts that the Rules of Land Warfare were obsolete, that no nation could fight a total war within their limits. He testified that the Nazis would have denounced the Conventions to which Germany was a party, but that General Jodl wanted captured German soldiers to continue to benefit from their observance by the Allies.
It was, however, against the Soviet people and Soviet prisoners that Teutonic fury knew no bounds, in spite of a warning by Admiral Canaris that the treatment was in violation of International Law. We need not, therefore, for the purposes of the conspiracy count, recite the revolting details of starving, beating, murdering, freezing, and mass extermination admittedly used against the Eastern soldiery. Also, we may take as established or admitted that the lawless conduct such as shooting British and American airmen, mistreatment of Western prisoners of war, forcing French prisoners of war into German war work, and other deliberate violations of the Hague and Geneva Conventions, did occur, and in obedience to highest levels of authority.
4. ENSLAVEMENT AND PLUNDER OF POPULATIONS IN OCCUPIED COUNTRIES
The defendant Sauckel, Plenipotentiary General for the Utilization of Labour, is authority for the statement that “out of five million foreign workers who arrived in Germany, not even 200,000 came voluntarily”. It was officially reported to defendant Rosenberg that in his territory “recruiting methods were used which probably have their origin in the blackest period of the slave trade”. Sauckel himself reported that male and female agents went hunting for men, got them drunk, and “shanghaied” them to Germany. These captives were shipped in trains without heat, food, or sanitary facilities. The dead were thrown out at stations, and the newborn were thrown out the windows of moving trains.
Sauckel ordered that “all the men must be fed, sheltered and treated in such a way as to exploit them to the highest possible extent at the lowest conceivable degree of expenditure”. About two million of these were employed directly in the manufacture of armaments and munitions. The director of the Krupp locomotive factory in Essen complained to the company that Russian forced labourers were so underfed that they were too weakened to do their work, and the Krupp doctor confirmed their pitiable condition. Soviet workers were put in camps under Gestapo guards, who were allowed to punish disobedience by confinement in a concentration camp or by hanging on the spot.
Populations of occupied countries were otherwise exploited and oppressed unmercifully. Terrorism was the order of the day. Civilians were arrested without charges, committed without counsel, executed without hearing. Villages were destroyed, the male inhabitants shot or sent to concentration camps, the women sent to forced labour, and the children scattered abroad. The extent of the slaughter in Poland alone was indicated by Frank, who reported:
” If I wanted to have a poster put up for every seven Poles who were shot, the forests of Poland would not suffice for producing the paper for such posters.”
Those who will enslave men cannot be expected to refrain from plundering them. Boastful reports show how thoroughly and scientifically the resources of occupied lands were sucked into the German war economy, inflicting shortage, hunger, and inflation upon the inhabitants. Besides this grand plan to aid the German war effort there were the sordid activities of the Rosenberg “Einsatzstab”, which pillaged art treasures for Goering and his fellow-bandits. It is hard to say whether the spectacle of Germany’s No. 2 leader urging his people to give up every comfort and strain every sinew on essential war work while he rushed around confiscating art by the trainload should be cast as tragedy or comedy. In either case it was a crime.
International Law at all times before and during this war spoke with precision and authority respecting the protection due to civilians of an occupied country, and the slave trade and plunder of occupied countries was at all times flagrantly unlawful.
5. PERSECUTION AND EXTERMINATION OF JEWS AND CHRISTIANS
The Nazi movement will be of evil memory in history because of its persecution of the Jews, the most far-flung and terrible racial persecution of all time. Although the Nazi Party neither invented nor monopolised anti-Semitism, its leaders from the very beginning embraced it, incited it, and exploited it. They used it as “the psychological spark that ignites the mob”. After seizure of power, it became an official State policy. The persecution began in a series of discriminatory laws eliminating the Jews from the civil service, the professions, and economic life. As it became more intense it included segregation of Jews in ghettoes, and exile. Riots were organized by Party leaders to loot Jewish business places and to burn synagogues. Jewish property was confiscated and a collective fine of a billion marks was imposed upon German Jewry. The programme progressed in fury and irresponsibility to the “final solution”. This consisted of sending all Jews who were fit to work to concentration camps as slave labourers, and all who were not fit, which included children under 12 and people over 50, as well as any others judged unfit by an SS doctor, to concentration camps for extermination.
Adolf Eichmann, the sinister figure who had charge of the extermination programme, has estimated that the anti-Jewish activities resulted in the killing of six million Jews. Of these, four million were killed in extermination institutions, and two million were killed by Einsatzgruppen, mobile units of the Security Police and SD which pursued Jews in the ghettoes and in their homes and slaughtered them in gas wagons, by mass shooting in anti-tank ditches and by every device which Nazi ingenuity could conceive.
So thorough and uncompromising was this programme that the Jews of Europe as a race no longer exist, thus fulfilling the diabolic “prophecy” of Adolf Hitler at the beginning of the war. Of course, any such programme must reckon with the opposition of the Christian Church. This was recognized from the very beginning. Defendant Bormann wrote all Gauleiters in 1941 that “National Socialism and Christian concepts are irreconcilable”, and that the people must be separated from the Churches, and the influence of the Churches totally removed. Defendant Rosenberg even wrote dreary treatises advocating a new and weird. Nazi religion.
The Gestapo appointed “Church specialists” who were instructed that the ultimate aim was “destruction of the confessional Churches”. The record is full of specific instances of the persecution of clergymen, the confiscation of Church property, interference with religious publications, disruption, of religious education, and suppression of religious organizations.
The chief instrument for persecution and extermination was the concentration camp, sired by the defendant Goering and nurtured under the overall authority of defendants Frick and Kaltenbrunner.
The horrors of these iniquitous places have been vividly disclosed by documents and testified to by witnesses. The Tribunal must be satiated with ghastly verbal and pictorial portrayals. From your records it is clear that the concentration camps were the first and worst weapon of Nazi oppression used by the National Socialist State, and that they were the primary means utilised for the persecution of the Christian Church and the extermination of the Jewish race. This has been admitted to you by some of the defendants from the witness stand. In the words of defendant Frank:
“A thousand years will pass and this guilt of Germany will still not be erased.”
These, then, were the five great substantive crimes of the Nazi regime. Their commission, which cannot be denied, stands admitted. The defendant Keitel, who is in a position to know the facts, has given the Tribunal what seems to be a fair summation of the case on the facts:
“The defendant has declared that ‘he admits the contents of the general Indictment to be proved from the objective and factual point of view’ (that is to say, not every individual case) ‘and this in consideration of the law of procedure governing the trial. It would be senseless, despite the possibility of refuting several documents or individual facts, to attempt to shake the Indictment as a whole.’” I pass now to the inquiry as to whether these groups of criminal acts were integrated in a common plan or conspiracy.
THE COMMON PLAN FOR CONSPIRACY
The prosecution submits that these five categories of premeditated crimes were not separate and independent phenomena but that all were committed pursuant to a common plan or conspiracy.
The defence admits that these classes of crimes were committed, but denies that they are connected one with another as parts of a single programme. The central crime in this pattern of crimes, the king-pin which holds them all together, is the plot for aggressive wars. The chief reason for international cognizance of these crimes lies in this fact. Have we established the plan or conspiracy to make aggressive war?
Certain admitted or clearly proven facts help to answer that question. First is the fact that such war of aggression did take place. Second, it is admitted that from the moment the Nazis came to power, every one of them and every one of the defendants worked like beavers to prepare for some war. The question therefore comes to this: Were they preparing for the war which did occur, or were they preparing for some war which never happened?
It is probably true that in their early days none of them had in mind what month of what year war would begin, the exact dispute which would precipitate it, or whether its first impact would be Austria, Czechoslovakia, or Poland. But I submit that the defendants either knew or were chargeable with knowledge that the war for which they were making ready would be a war of German aggression. This is partly because there was no real expectation that any power or combination of powers would attack Germany. But it is chiefly because the inherent nature of the German plans was such that they were certain sooner or later to meet resistance and that they could then be accomplished only by aggression.
The plans of Adolf Hitler for aggression were just as secret as Mein Kampf, of which over six million copies were published in Germany. He not only openly advocated overthrowing the Treaty of Versailles, but made demands which went far beyond a mere rectification of its alleged injustices. He avowed an intention to attack neighbouring States and seize their lands, which he said would have to be won with “the power of a triumphant sword”. Here, for every German to hearken to, were the “ancestral voices prophesying war”.
Goering has testified in this courtroom that at his first meeting with Hitler, long before the seizure of power:
“I noted that Hitler had a definite view of the impotency of protest and, as a second point, that he was of the opinion that Germany should be freed of the Peace of Versailles. ‘We did not say we shall have to have a war and defeat our enemies’; this was the aim and the methods had to be adapted to the political situation.”
When asked if this goal were to be accomplished by war if necessary, Goering did not deny that eventuality but evaded a direct answer by saying, “We did not debate about that at all at that time.” He went on to say that the aim to overthrow the Treaty of Versailles was open and notorious and that, I quote again, “Every German in my opinion was for its modification, and there was no doubt that this was a strong inducement for joining the party.”
Thus, there can be no possible excuse for any person who aided Hitler to get absolute power over the German people, or who took a part in his regime, to fail to know the nature of the demands he would make on Germany’s neighbours.
Immediately after the seizure of power the Nazis went to work to implement these aggressive intentions by preparing for war. They first enlisted German industrialists in a secret rearmament programme. Twenty days after the seizure of power Schacht was host to Hitler, Goering and some twenty leading industrialists. Among them were Krupp von Bohlen of the great Krupp armament works and representatives of I. G. Farben and other Ruhr heavy industries. Hitler and Goering explained their programme to the industrialists, who became so enthusiastic that they set about to raise three million Reichsmarks to strengthen and confirm the Nazi Party in power. Two months later Krupp was working to bring a reorganised association of German industry into agreement with the political aims of the Nazi Government. Krupp later boasted of the success in keeping the German war industries secretly alive and in readiness despite the disarmament clauses of the Versailles Treaty, and recalled the industrialists’ enthusiastic acceptance of “the great intentions of the Fuehrer in the rearmament period of 1933-1939”.
Some two months after Schacht had sponsored his first meeting to gain the support of the industrialists, the Nazis moved to harness industrial labour to their aggressive plans. In April, 1933, Hitler ordered Dr. Ley “to take over the trade unions”, numbering some 6 million members. By Party directive Ley seized the unions, their property and their funds. Union leaders, taken into “protective custody” by the SS and SA, were put into concentration camps. The free labour unions were then replaced by a Nazi organization known as the German Labour Front, with Dr. Ley at its head. It was expanded until it controlled over 23 million members. Collective bargaining was eliminated, the voice of labour could no longer be heard as to working conditions, and the labour contract was prescribed by “trustees of labour” appointed by Hitler. The war purpose of this labour programme was clearly acknowledged by Robert Ley five days after war broke out, when he declared in a speech that:
“We National Socialists have monopolised all resources and all our energies during the past seven years so as to be able to be equipped for the supreme effort of battle.”
The Nazis also proceeded at once to adapt the Government to the needs of war. In April, 1933, the Cabinet formed a Defence Council, the working committee of which met frequently thereafter. In the meeting of 22nd May, 1933, at which defendant Keitel presided, the members were instructed that:
“No document must be lost since otherwise the enemy propaganda would make use of it. Matters communicated orally cannot be proven; they can be denied by us in Geneva.”
In February, 1934 -and, your Honours, dates in this connection are important -with defendant Jodl present, the Council planned a mobilization calendar and mobilization order for some 240,000 industrial plants. Again it was agreed that nothing should be in writing so that “the military purpose may not be traceable”.
On 21st May, 1935, the top secret Reich Defence Law was enacted. Defendant Schacht was appointed Plenipotentiary General for War Economy with the task of secretly preparing all economic forces for war and, in the event of mobilization, of financing the war.
Schacht’s secret efforts were supplemented in October, 1936, by the appointment of defendant Goering as Commissioner of the Four-Year Plan, with the duty of putting the entire economy in a state of readiness for war within four years.
A secret programme for the accumulation of the raw materials and foreign credits necessary for extensive rearmament was also set on foot immediately upon seizure of power. In September of 1934, the Minister of Economics was already complaining that:
“The task of stock-piling is being hampered by the lack of foreign currency; the need for secrecy and camouflage also is a retarding influence.”
Foreign currency controls were at once established. Financing was delegated to the wizard Schacht, who conjured up the MEFO bill to serve the dual objectives of tapping the short-term money market for rearmament purposes while concealing the amount of these expenditures.
The spirit of the whole Nazi administration was summed up by Goering at a meeting of the Council of Ministers, which included Schacht, on 27th May, 1936, when he said: “All measures are to be considered from the standpoint of an assured waging of war.” The General Staff, of course, also had to be enlisted in the war plan. Most of the generals, attracted by the prospect of rebuilding their armies, became willing accomplices. The Minister of War von Blomberg and the Chief of Staff General von Fritsch, however, were not cordial to the increasingly belligerent policy of the Hitler regime, and by vicious and obscene plotting they were discredited and removed in January, 1938. Thereupon, Hitler assumed for himself supreme command of the armed forces and the positions of von Blomberg and of von Fritsch were filled by others who became, as Blomberg said of Keitel, “a willing tool in Hitler’s hands for every one of his decisions”. The generals did not confine their participation to merely military matters. They participated in all major diplomatic and political manoeuvres, such as the Obersalzberg meeting where Hitler, flanked by Keitel and other top generals, issued his virtual ultimatum to Schuschnigg.
As early as 5th November, 1937, the plan to attack had begun to take definiteness as to time and victim. In a meeting which included the defendants Raeder, Goering and von Neurath, Hitler stated the cynical objective:
“The question for Germany is where the greatest possible conquest could be made at the lowest possible cost.”
He discussed various plans for the invasion of Austria and Czechoslovakia, indicating clearly that he was thinking of these territories not as ends in themselves, but as means for further conquest. He pointed out that considerable military and political assistance could be afforded by possession of these lands, and discussed the possibility of constituting from them new armies up to a strength of about 12 divisions. The aim he stated boldly and baldly as the acquisition of additional living-space in Europe, and recognized that “The German question can be solved only by way of force.” Six months later, emboldened by the bloodless Austrian conquest, Hitler, in a secret directive to Keitel, stated his “unalterable decision to smash Czechoslovakia by military action in the near future”.
On the same day, Jodl noted in his diary that the Fuehrer had stated his final decision to destroy Czechoslovakia soon and had initiated military preparations all along the line. By April the plan had been perfected to attack Czechoslovakia “with lightning swift action as the result of an ‘incident’”.
All along the line preparations became more definite for a war of expansion, on the assumption that it would result in a world-wide conflict. In September, 1938, Admiral Carls officially commented on a “Draft Study of Naval Warfare against England”:
“There is full agreement with the main theme of the study.
1. If, according to the Fuehrer’s decision, Germany is to acquire a position as a world power, she needs not only sufficient colonial possessions but also secure naval communications and secure access to the ocean.
2. Both requirements can only be fulfilled in opposition to Anglo-French interests and will limit their positions as world powers. It is unlikely that they can be achieved by peaceful means. The decision to make Germany a world power therefore forces upon us the necessity of making the corresponding preparations for war.
3. War against England means at the same time war against the Empire, against France, probably against Russia as well, and a large number of countries overseas; in fact, against one-third to one-half of the whole world.
It can only be justified and have a chance of success if it is prepared economically as well as politically and militarily and waged with the aim of conquering for Germany an outlet to the ocean.”
This Tribunal knows what categorical assurances were given to an alarmed world after the Anschluss, after Munich, after the occupation of Bohemia and Moravia, that German ambitions were realised and that Hitler had “no further territorial demands to make in Europe.” The record of this trial shows that those promises were calculated deceptions and that those high in the bloody brotherhood of Nazidom knew it.
As early as 15th April, 1938, Goering pointed out to Mussolini and Ciano that the possession of those territories would make possible an attack on Poland. Ribbentrop’s Ministry wrote on 26th August, 1938:
“After the liquidation of the Czechoslovakian question, it will be generally assumed that Poland will be next in turn.”
Hitler, after the Polish invasion, boasted that it was the Austrian and Czechoslovakian triumphs by which “the basis for the action against Poland was laid”. Goering suited the act to the purpose and gave immediate instructions to exploit, for the further strengthening of the German war potential, first the Sudetenland, and then the whole Protectorate.
By May of 1939 the Nazi preparations had ripened to the point that Hitler confided to the defendants Goering, Raeder, Keitel, and others, his readiness “to attack Poland at the first suitable opportunity”, even though he recognized that “further successes cannot be attained without the shedding of blood”. The larcenous motives behind this decision he made plain in words that echoed the covetous theme of Mein Kampf:
“Circumstances must be adapted to aims. This is impossible without invasion of foreign States or attacks upon foreign property. Living-space in proportion to the magnitude of the State is the basis of all power -further successes cannot be attained without expanding our living-space in the East ….”
While a credulous world slumbered, snugly blanketed with perfidious assurances of peaceful intentions, the Nazis prepared not as before for a war but now for the war. The defendants Goering, Keitel, Raeder, Frick and Funk, with others, met as the Reich Defence Council in June of 1939. The minutes, authenticated by Goering, are revealing evidence of the way in which each step of Nazi planning dovetailed with every other. These five key defendants, three months before the first panzer unit had knifed into Poland, were laying plans for “employment of the population in wartime”, and had gone so far as to classify industry for priority in labour supply after “five million servicemen had been called up”. They decided upon measures to avoid “confusion when mobilization takes place”, and declared a purpose “to gain and maintain the lead in the decisive initial weeks of war”. They then planned to use in production prisoners of war, criminal prisoners, and concentration camp inmates. They then decided on “compulsory work for women in war time”. They had already passed on applications from 1,172,000 specialist workmen for classification as indispensable, and had approved 727,000 of them. They boasted that orders to workers to report for duty “are ready and tied up in bundles at the labour offices”. And they resolved to increase the industrial manpower supply by bringing into Germany “hundreds of thousands of workers” from the Protectorate to be “housed together in hutments”.
It is the minutes of this significant conclave of many key defendants which disclose how the plan to start the war was coupled with the plan to wage the war through the use of illegal sources of labour to maintain production. Hitler, in announcing his plan to attack Poland, had already foreshadowed the slave labour programme as one of its corollaries when he cryptically pointed out to the defendants Goering, Raeder, Keitel, and others that the Polish population “will be available as a source of labour”. This was part of the plan made good by Frank, who as Governor-General notified Goering, that he would supply “at least one million male and female agricultural and industrial workers to the Reich”, and by Sauckel, whose impressments throughout occupied territory aggregated numbers equal to the total population of some of the smaller nations of Europe.
Here also comes to the surface the link between war labour and concentration camps, a manpower source that was increasingly used and with increasing cruelty. An agreement between Himmler and the Minister of Justice, Thierack, in 1942 provided for “the delivery of anti-social elements from the execution of their sentence to the Reichsfuehrer SS to be worked to death”. An SS directive provided that bedridden prisoners be drafted for work to be performed in bed. The Gestapo ordered 46,000 Jews arrested to increase the “recruitment of manpower into the concentration camps”. One hundred thousand Jews were brought from Hungary to augment the camps’ manpower. On the initiative of the defendant Donitz concentration camp labour was used in the construction of submarines. Concentration camps were thus geared into war production on the one hand, and into the administration of justice and the political aims of the Nazis on the other. The use of prisoner-of-war labour, as then planned in that meeting, also grew with German needs. At a time when every German soldier was needed at the front and forces were not available at home, Russian prisoners of war were forced to man anti-aircraft guns against Allied planes. Field-Marshal Milch reflected the Nazi merriment at this flagrant violation of International Law, saying: “… This is an amusing thing, that the Russians must work the guns.”
The orders for the treatment of Soviet prisoners of war were so ruthless that Admiral Canaris, pointing out that they would “result in arbitrary mistreatments and killing”, protested to the OKW against them as breaches of International Law. The reply of Keitel was unambiguous. He said:
“The objections arise from the military conception of chivalrous warfare! This is the destruction of an ideology! Therefore I approve and back the measures”.
The Geneva Convention would have been thrown overboard openly, except that Jodl objected because he wanted the benefits of Allied observance of it while it was not being allowed to hamper the Germans in any way.
Other crimes in the conduct of warfare were planned with equal thoroughness as a means of ensuring victory of German arms: In October, 1938, almost a year before the start of the war, the large-scale violation of the established rules of warfare was contemplated as a policy, and the Supreme Command circulated a most secret list of devious explanations to be given by the Propaganda Minister in such cases. Even before this time commanders of the armed forces were instructed to employ any methods of warfare so long as they facilitated victory. During the progress of the war the orders increased in savagery. A typical Keitel order, demanding the use of the “most brutal means”, provided that .
“… It is the duty of the troops to use all means without restriction, even against women and children, so long as they ensure success.”
The German naval forces were no more immune from the infection than the land forces. Raeder ordered violations of the accepted rules of warfare wherever necessary to gain strategic successes. Donitz urged his submarine crews not to rescue survivors of torpedoed enemy ships, in order to cripple merchant shipping of the Allied Nations by decimating their crews.
Thus, the WAR CRIMES against Allied forces and the CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY committed in occupied territories are incontestably part of the programme for making the war because, in the German calculations, they were indispensable to its hope of success.
Similarly, the whole group of pre-war crimes, including the persecutions within Germany, fall into place around the plan for aggressive war like stones in a finely wrought mosaic. Nowhere is the whole catalogue of crimes of Nazi oppression and terrorism within Germany so well integrated with the crime of war as in that strange mixture of wind and wisdom which makes up the testimony of Hermann Goering. In describing the aims of the Nazi programme before the seizure of power, Goering stated that the first question was to achieve and establish a different political structure for Germany, which would enable Germany to object against the Dictate (of Versailles), and to make not only a protest, but an objection of such a nature that it would actually be considered.
With these purposes, Goering, admitted that the plan was made to overthrow the Weimar Republic, to seize power, and to carry out the Nazi programme by whatever means were necessary, whether legal or illegal.
From Goering’s cross-examination we learn how necessarily the whole programme of crime followed. Because they considered a strong State necessary to get rid of the Versailles Treaty, they adopted the Fuehrerprinzip. Having seized power, the Nazis thought it necessary to protect it by abolishing parliamentary government, and suppressing all organized opposition from political parties. This was reflected in the philosophy of Goering that the opera was more important than the Reichstag. Even the “opposition of each individual was not tolerated unless it was a matter of unimportance”. To insure the suppression of opposition a secret police force was necessary. In order to eliminate incorrigible opponents, it was necessary to establish concentration camps and to resort to the device of protective custody. Protective custody, Goering, testified, meant that:
“People were arrested arid taken into protective custody who had not yet committed any crime but who could be expected to do so if they remained free.”
The same war purpose was dominant in the persecution of the Jews. In the beginning, fanaticism and political opportunism played a principal part, for anti-Semitism and its allied scapegoat, mythology, were the vehicle on which the Nazis rode to power. It was for this reason that the filthy Streicher and the blasphemous Rosenberg were welcomed at Party rallies and made leaders and officials of the State or Party. But the Nazis soon regarded the Jews as foremost amongst the opposition to the police State with which they schemed to put forward their plans of military aggression. Fear of their pacifism and their opposition to strident nationalism was given as the reason that the Jews had to be driven from the political and economic life of Germany. Accordingly, they were transported like cattle to the concentration camps, where they were utilised as a source of forced labour for war purposes.
At a meeting held on 12th November, 1938, two days after the violent anti-Jewish pogroms instigated by Goebbels and carried out by the Party Leadership Corps and the SA, the programme for the elimination of Jews from the German economy was mapped out by Goering, Funk, Heydrich, Goebbels, and the other top Nazis. The measures adopted included confinement of the Jews in ghettoes, cutting off their food supply, “aryanizing” their shops, and restricting their freedom of movement. Here another purpose behind the Jewish persecutions crept in, for it was the wholesale confiscation of their property which helped to finance German rearmament. Although Schacht’s plan to use foreign money to ransom the entire race within Germany was not adopted, the Jews were stripped to the point where Goering was able to advise the Reich Defence Council that the critical situation of the Reich exchequer, due to rearmament, had been relieved “through the billion Reichsmark fine imposed on Jewry, and through profits accrued to the Reich in the aryanization of Jewish enterprises”.
A glance over the dock will show that, despite quarrels among themselves, each defendant played a part which fitted in with every other, and that all advanced the Common Plan. It contradicts experience that men of such diverse backgrounds and talents should so forward each other’s aims by coincidence. The large and varied role of Goering was half militarist and half gangster. He stuck his pudgy finger in every pie. He used his SA bullies to help bring the gang into power. In order to entrench that power he contrived to have the Reichstag burned, established the Gestapo, and created the concentration camps. He was equally adept at massacring opponents and at framing scandals to get rid of stubborn generals. He built up the Luftwaffe and hurled it at his defenceless neighbours. He was among the foremost in harrying Jews out of the land. By mobilising the total economic resources of Germany he made possible the waging of the war which he had taken a large part in planning. He was, next to Hitler, the man who tied the activities of all the defendants together in a common effort.
The parts played by the other, defendants, although less comprehensive and less spectacular than that of the Reichsmarschall, were nevertheless integral and necessary contributions to the joint undertaking, without any one of which the success of the common enterprise would have been in jeopardy. There are many specific deeds of which these men have been proven guilty. No purpose would be served -nor indeed is time available -to review all the crimes which the evidence has charged against their names. Nevertheless, in viewing the conspiracy as a whole and as an operating mechanism, it may be well to recall briefly the outstanding services which each of the men in the dock rendered to the common cause.
Record of Proceedings: July 26, 1946, continued:
Rudolf Hess
The zealot Hess, before succumbing to wanderlust, was the engineer tending the Party machinery, passing orders and propaganda down to the Leadership Corps, supervising every aspect of Party activities, and maintaining the organization as a loyal and ready instrument of power.
Joachim von Ribbentrop
When apprehensions abroad threatened the success of the Nazi regime for conquest, it was the double-dealing Ribbentrop, the salesman of deception, who was detailed to pour wine on the troubled waters of suspicion by preaching the gospel of limited and peaceful intentions.
Wilhelm Keitel
Keitel, the weak and willing tool, delivered the armed forces, the instrument of aggression, over to the Party and directed them in executing its felonious designs.
Ernst Kaltenbrunner
Kaltenbrunner, the grand inquisitor, assumed the bloody mantle of Heydrich to stifle opposition and terrorise into compliance, and buttressed the power of National Socialism on a foundation of guiltless corpses.
Alfred Rosenberg
It was Rosenberg, the intellectual high priest of the “master race”, who provided the doctrine of hatred which gave the impetus for the annihilation of Jewry, and who put his infidel theories into practice against the Eastern occupied territories. His woolly philosophy also added boredom to the long list of Nazi atrocities.
Hans Frank
The fanatical Frank, who solidified Nazi control by establishing the new order of authority without law, so that the will of the Party was the only test of legality, proceeded to export his lawlessness to Poland, which he governed with the lash of Caesar and whose population he reduced to sorrowing remnants.
Wilhelm Frick
Frick, the ruthless organiser, helped the Party to seize power, supervised the police agencies to ensure that it stayed in power, and chained the economy of Bohemia and Moravia to the German war machine.
Julius Streicher
Streicher, the venomous vulgarian, manufactured and distributed obscene racial libels which incited the populace to accept and assist the progressively savage operations of “race purification”.
Walter Funk
As Minister of Economics Funk accelerated the pace of rearmament, and as Reichsbank president banked for the SS the gold teeth-fillings of concentration camp victims -probably the most ghoulish collateral in banking history.
Hjalmar Schacht
It was Schacht, the facade of starched respectability, who in the early days provided the window-dressing, the bait for the hesitant, and whose wizardry later made it possible for Hitler to finance the colossal rearmament programme, and to do it secretly.
Karl Dönitz
Donitz, Hitler’s legatee of defeat, promoted the success of the Nazi aggressions by instructing his pack of submarine killers to conduct warfare at sea with the illegal ferocity of the jungle.
Erich Raeder
Raeder, the political admiral, stealthily built up the German Navy in defiance of the Versailles Treaty, and then put it to use in a series of aggressions which he had taken a leading part in planning.
Baldur von Schirach
Von Schirach, poisoner of a generation, initiated the German youth in Nazi doctrine, trained them in legions for service in the SS and Wehrmacht, and delivered them up to the Party as fanatic, unquestioning executors of its will.
Fritz Sauckel
Sauckel, the greatest and cruellest slaver since the Pharaohs of Egypt, produced desperately needed manpower by driving foreign peoples into the land of bondage on a scale unknown even in the ancient days of tyranny in the kingdom of the Nile.
Alfred Jodl
Jodl, betrayer of the traditions of his profession, led the Wehrmacht in violating its own code of military honour in order to carry out the barbarous aims of Nazi policy.
Franz von Papen
Von Papen, pious agent of an infidel regime, held the stirrup while Hitler vaulted into the saddle, lubricated the Austrian annexation, and devoted his diplomatic cunning to the service of Nazi objectives abroad.
Arthur Seyess-Inquart
Seyss-Inquart, spearhead of the Austrian fifth column, took over the government of his own country only to make a present of it to Hitler, and then, moving north, brought terror and oppression to the Netherlands and pillaged its economy for the benefit of the German juggernaut.
Konstantin von Neurath
Von Neurath, the old-school diplomat, who cast the pearls of his experience before the Nazis, guided Nazi diplomacy in the early years, soothed the fears of prospective victims, and as Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia strengthened the German position for the coming attack on Poland.
Albert Speer
Speer, as Minister of Armaments and Production, joined in planning and executing the programme to dragoon prisoners of war and foreign workers into German war industries, which waxed in output while the labourers waned in starvation.
Hans Fritzsche
Fritzsche, radio propaganda chief, by manipulation of the truth goaded German public opinion into frenzied support of the regime, and anaesthetised the independent judgement of the population so that they did their masters’ bidding without question.
Martin Bormann
Bormann, who has not accepted our invitation to this reunion, sat at the throttle of the vast and powerful engine of the Party, guiding it in the ruthless execution of Nazi policies, from the scourging of the Christian Church to the lynching of captive Allied airmen.
The activities of all these defendants, despite their varied backgrounds and talents, were joined with the efforts of other conspirators not now in the. dock, who played still other essential roles: They blend together into one consistent and militant pattern animated by a common objective to reshape the map of Europe by force of arms. Some of these defendants were ardent members of the Nazi movement from its birth. Others, less fanatical, joined the common enterprise later, after success had made participation attractive by the promise of rewards. This group of latter-day converts remedied a crucial defect in the ranks of the original true believers, for as Dr. Siemers has pointed out in his summation:
“… There were no specialists among the National Socialists for the particular tasks. Most of the National Socialist collaborators did not previously follow a trade requiring technical education.”
It was the fatal weakness of the early Nazi band that it lacked technical competence. It could not from among its own ranks make up a government capable of carrying out all the projects necessary to realize its aims. Therein lies the special crime and betrayal of men like Schacht and von Neurath, Speer and von Papen, Raeder and Donitz, Keitel and Jodl. It is doubtful whether the Nazi master plan could have succeeded without their specialized intelligence which they so willingly put at its command. They did so with knowledge of its announced aims and methods, and continued their services after practice had confirmed the direction in which they were tending. Their superiority to the average run of Nazi mediocrity is not their excuse. It is their condemnation.
The dominant fact which stands out from all the thousands of pages of the record of this trial is that the central crime of the whole group of Nazi crimes -the attack on the peace of the world -was clearly and deliberately planned. The beginning of these wars of aggression was not an unprepared and spontaneous springing to arms by a population excited by some current indignation. A week before the invasion of Poland Hitler told his military commanders: “I shall give a propagandist cause for starting war -never mind whether it be plausible or not. The victor shall not be asked later on whether we told the truth or not. In starting and making a war, it is not the right that matters, but victory.”
The propagandist incident was duly provided by dressing concentration camp inmates in Polish uniforms, in order to create the appearance of a Polish attack on a German frontier radio station. The plan to occupy Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg first appeared as early as August, 1938, in connection with the plan for attack on Czechoslovakia. The intention to attack became a programme in May, 1939, when Hitler told his commanders that:
“The Dutch and Belgian air bases must be occupied by armed forces. Declarations of neutrality must be ignored.”
Thus, the follow-up wars were planned before the first was launched. These were the most carefully plotted wars in all history. Scarcely a step in their terrifying succession and progress failed to move according to the master blueprint or the subsidiary schedules and timetables until long after the crimes of aggression were consummated. Nor were the war crimes and the crimes against humanity unplanned, isolated or spontaneous offences. Apart from our undeniable evidence of their plotting, it is sufficient to ask whether six million people could be separated from the population of several nations on the basis of their blood and birth, could be destroyed and their bodies disposed of, unless the operation had fitted into the general scheme of government. Could the enslavement of five millions of labourers, their impressment into service, their transportation to Germany, their allocation to work where they would be most useful, their maintenance, if slow starvation can be called maintenance, and their guarding have been accomplished if it did not fit into the common plan? Could hundreds of concentration camps located throughout Germany, built to accommodate hundreds of thousands of victims, and each requiring labour and materials for construction, manpower to operate and supervise, and close gearing into the economy -could such efforts have been expended under German autocracy if they had not suited the plan? Has the Teutonic passion for organization suddenly become famous for its toleration of non-conforming activity? Each part of the plan fitted into every other. The slave labour programme meshed with the needs of industry and agriculture, and these in turn synchronised with the military machine. The elaborate propaganda apparatus geared with the programme to dominate the people and incite them to a war which their sons would have to fight. The armament industries were fed by the concentration camps. The concentration camps were fed by the Gestapo. The Gestapo was fed by the spy system of the Nazi Party. Nothing was permitted under the Nazi iron rule that was not in accordance with the programme.
Everything of consequence that took place in this regimented society was but a manifestation of a premeditated and unfolding purpose to secure the Nazi State a place in the sun by casting all others into darkness.
COMMON DEFENCES AGAINST THE CHARGE OF COMMON RESPONSIBILITY
The defendants meet this overwhelming case, some by admitting a limited, responsibility, some by putting the blame on others, and some by taking the position, in effect, that while there have been enormous crimes there are no criminals. Time will not permit me to examine each individual and particular defence, but there are certain lines of defence common to so many cases that they deserve some consideration.
Counsel for many of the defendants seek to dismiss the charge of a common plan or conspiracy on the ground that the pattern of the Nazi plan does not fit into the concept of conspiracy applicable in German law to the plotting of a highway robbery or a burglary. Their concept of conspiracy is in the terms of a stealthy meeting in the dead of night, in a secluded hide-out, in which a group of felons plot every detail of a specific crime. The Charter forestalls resort to such parochial and narrow concepts of conspiracy taken from local law by using the additional and non-technical term, “common plan”. Omitting entirely the alternative term of “conspiracy”, the Charter reads that “leaders, organisers, instigators, and accomplices participating in the formulation or execution of a common plan to commit” any of the described crimes “are responsible for all acts performed by any persons in execution of such plan”. The Charter concept of a common plan really represents the conspiracy principle in an international context. A common plan or conspiracy to seize the machinery of a State, to commit crimes against the peace of the world, to blot a race out of existence, to enslave millions, and to subjugate and loot whole nations cannot be thought of in the same terms as the plotting of petty crimes, although the same underlying principles are applicable. Little gangsters may plan who will carry a pistol and who a stiletto, who will approach a victim from the front and who from behind, and where they will waylay him. But in planning war, the pistol becomes a Wehrmacht, the stiletto a Luftwaffe. Where to strike is not a choice of dark alleys, but a matter of world geography. The operation involves the manipulation of public opinion, the law of the State, the police power, industry, and finance. The baits and bluffs must be translated into a nation’s foreign policy. Likewise, the degree of stealth which points to a guilty purpose in, a conspiracy will depend upon its object. The clandestine preparations of a State against international society, although camouflaged to those abroad, might be quite open and notorious among its own people. But stealth is not an essential ingredient of such planning. Parts of the common plan may be proclaimed from the housetops, as anti-Semitism was, and parts of it kept under cover, as rearmament for a long time was. It is a matter of strategy how much of the preparation shall be made public, as was Goering’s announcement in 1935 of the creation of an air force, and how much shall be kept covert, as in the case of the Nazis’ use of shovels to teach “labour corps” the manual of arms. The forms of this grand type of conspiracy are amorphous, the means are opportunistic, and neither can divert the law from getting at the substance of things.
The defendants counted, however, that there could be no conspiracy involving aggressive war because (1) none of the Nazis wanted war; (2) rearmament was only intended to provide the strength to make Germany’s voice heard in the family of nations; and (3) the wars were not in fact aggressive wars but were defensive wars against a “Bolshevik menace”.
When we analyse the argument that the Nazis did not want war it comes down, in substance, to this: “The record looks bad indeed -objectively -but when you consider the state of my mind -subjectively I hated war. I knew the horrors of war. I wanted peace.” I am not so sure of this. I am even less willing to accept Goering’s description of the General Staff as pacifist. However, it will not injure our case to admit that as an abstract proposition none of these defendants liked war. But they wanted things which they knew they could not get without war. They wanted their neighbours’ lands and goods. Their philosophy seems to be that if the neighbours would not acquiesce, then they are the aggressors and are to blame for the war. The fact is, however, that war never became terrible to the Nazis until it came home to them, until it exposed their deceptive assurances to the German people that German cities, like the ruined one in which we meet, would be invulnerable. From then on, war was terrible.
But again the defendants claim: “To be sure, we were building guns. But not to shoot. They were only to give us weight in negotiating.” At its best this argument amounts to a contention that the military forces were intended for blackmail, not for battle. The threat of military invasion which forced the Austrian Anschluss, the threats which preceded Munich, and Goering’s threat to bomb the beautiful city of Prague if the President of Czechoslovakia did not consent to the Protectorate, are examples of what the defendants had in mind when they talked of arming to back negotiation.
But from the very nature of German demands, the day was bound to come when some country would refuse to buy its peace, would refuse to pay Dane-geld, “For the end of that game is oppression and shame, And the nation that plays it is lost.”
Did these defendants then intend to withdraw German demands, or was Germany to enforce them and manipulate propaganda so as to place the blame for the war on the nation so unreasonable as to resist? Events have answered that question, and documents such as Admiral Carl’s memorandum, earlier quoted, leave no doubt that the events occurred as anticipated.
But some of the defendants argue that the wars were not aggressive and were only intended to protect Germany against some eventual danger from the “menace of Communism”, which was something of an obsession with many Nazis.
At the outset this argument of self-defence fails because it completely ignores this damning combination of facts clearly established in the record: first, the enormous and rapid German preparations for war; second, the repeatedly avowed intentions of the German leaders to attack, which I have previously cited; and third, the fact that a series of wars occurred in which German forces struck the first blows, without warning, across the borders of other nations.
Even if it could be shown -which it cannot -that the Russian war was really defensive, such is demonstrably not the case with those wars which preceded it.
It may also be pointed out that even those who would have you believe that Germany was menaced by Communism also compete with each other in describing their opposition to the disastrous Russian venture. Is it reasonable that they would have opposed that war if it were undertaken in good faith in self-defence.
It is sought to balance the frivolous self-defence theory against the facts, as advocates often do, by resort to a theory of law. Dr. Jahrreiss, in his scholarly argument for the defence, rightly points out that no treaty provision and no principle of law denied Germany, as a sovereign nation, the right of self-defence. He follows with the assertion for which there is authority in classic International Law, that:
“… every State is alone judge of whether in a given case it is waging a war of self-defence”.
It is not necessary to examine the validity of an abstract principle which does not apply to the facts of our case. I do not doubt that if a nation arrived at a judgement that it must resort to war in self-defence, because of conditions affording reasonable grounds for such an honest judgement, any Tribunal would accord it great and perhaps conclusive weight, even if later events proved that judgement mistaken.
But the facts in this case call for no such deference to honest judgement because no such judgement was ever pretended, much less honestly made.
In all the documents which disclose the planning and rationalisation of these attacks, not one sentence has been or can be cited to show an honest fear of attack. It may be that statesmen of other nations lacked the courage forthrightly and fully to disarm. Perhaps they suspected the secret rearmament of Germany. But if they hesitated to abandon arms, they did not hesitate to neglect them. Germany well knew that her former enemies had allowed their armaments to fall into decay, so little did they contemplate another war. Germany faced a Europe that not only was unwilling to attack, but was too weak and pacifist even adequately to defend, and went to the very verge of dishonour, if not beyond, to buy its peace. The minutes we have shown you of the Nazis’ secret conclaves identify no potential attacker. They bristle with the spirit of aggression and not of defence. They contemplate always territorial expansion, not the maintenance of territorial integrity.
Minister of War von Blomberg, in his 1937 directive prescribing general principles for the preparation for war of the armed forces, has given the lie to these feeble claims of self-defence. He stated at that time:
“The general political situation justifies the supposition that Germany need not consider an attack on any side. Grounds for this are, in addition to the lack of desire for war in almost all nations, particularly the Western Powers, the deficiencies in the preparedness for war in a number of States and of Russia in particular.”
Nevertheless, he recommended: “a continuous preparation for war in order to (a) counter-attack at any time, and (b) to enable the military exploitation of politically favourable opportunities should they occur”.
If these defendants may now cynically plead self-defence, although no honest need of self-defence was asserted or contemplated by any responsible leader at that time, it reduces non-aggression treaties to a legal absurdity. They become additional instruments of deception in the hands of the aggressor, and traps for well-meaning nations. If there be in non-aggression pacts an implied condition that each nation may make a bona fide judgement as to the necessity for self-defence against imminent threatened attack, it certainly cannot be invoked to shelter those who never made any such judgement at all.
In opening this case I ventured to predict that there would be no serious denial that the crimes charged were committed, and that the issue would concern the responsibility of particular defendants. The defendants have fulfilled that prophecy. Generally, they do not deny that these things happened, but it is contended that they “just happened”, and that they were not the result of a common plan or conspiracy.
One of the chief reasons the defendants say why there was no conspiracy is the argument that conspiracy was impossible with a dictator. The argument runs that they all had to obey Hitler’s orders, which had the force of law m the German State, and hence obedience could not be made the basis of a criminal charge. In this way it is explained that while there have been wholesale killings, there have been no murderers.
This argument is an effort to evade Article 8 of the Charter, which provides that the order of the Government or of a superior shall not free a defendant from responsibility but can only be considered in mitigation. This provision of the Charter corresponds with the justice and with the realities of the situation, as indicated in defendant Speer’s description of what he considered to be the common responsibility of the leaders of the German nation; he said that … with reference to decisive matters, there was a joint responsibility. There must be a joint responsibility among the leaders, because who else could take the responsibility for the development of events, if not the close associates who work with and around the head of the State?
And again he told the Tribunal that … it was impossible after the catastrophe to evade this joint responsibility, and that if the war had been won, the leaders would also have laid claim to joint responsibility.
Like much of defence counsel’s abstract arguments, the contention that the absolute power of Hitler precluded a conspiracy crumbles in the face of the facts of record. The Fuehrerprinzip of absolutism was itself a part of the common plan, as Goering has pointed out. The defendants may have become the slaves of a dictator, but he was their dictator. To make him such was, as Goering has testified, the object of the Nazi movement from the beginning. Every Nazi took this oath:
“I pledge eternal allegiance to Adolf Hitler. I pledge unconditional obedience to him and the Fuehrers appointed by him.”
Moreover, they forced everybody else in their power to take it. This oath was illegal under German law, which made it criminal to become a member of an organization in which obedience to “unknown superiors or unconditional obedience to known superiors is pledged”. These men destroyed free government in Germany and now plead to be excused from responsibility because they became slaves. They are in the position of the boy of fiction who murdered his father and mother and then pleaded for leniency because he was an orphan.
What these men have overlooked is that Adolf Hitler’s acts are their acts. It was these men among millions of others, and it was these men leading millions of others, who built up Adolf Hitler and vested in his psychopathic personality not only innumerable lesser decisions but the supreme issue of war or peace. They intoxicated him with power and adulation. They fed his hates and aroused his fears. They put a loaded gun in his eager hands. It was left to Hitler to pull the trigger, and when he did they all at that time approved. His guilt stands admitted, by some defendants reluctantly, by some vindictively. But his guilt is the guilt of the whole dock, and of every man in it.
But it is urged that these defendants could not be in agreement on a common plan or conspiracy because they were fighting among themselves or belonged to different factions or cliques. Of course, it is not necessary that men should agree on everything in order to agree on enough things to make them liable for a criminal conspiracy. Unquestionably there were conspiracies within the conspiracy, and intrigues and rivalries and battles for power. Schacht and Goering disagreed, but over which of them should control the economy, not over whether the economy should be regimented for war. Goering claims to have departed from the plan because, through Dahlerus, he conducted some negotiations with men of influence in England just before the Polish war. But it is perfectly clear that this was not an effort to prevent aggression against Poland but to make that aggression successful and safe by obtaining English neutrality. Rosenberg and Goering may have had some differences as to how stolen art should be distributed, but they had none about how it should be stolen. Jodl and Goering may have disagreed about whether to denounce the Geneva Convention, but they never disagreed about violating it. And so it goes through the whole long and sordid story. Nowhere do we find a single instance where any one of the defendants stood up against the rest and said: “This thing is wrong and I will not take part in it.” Wherever they differed, their differences were as to method or jurisdiction, but always within the framework of the common plan.
Some of the defendants also contend that in any event there was no conspiracy to commit war crimes or crimes against humanity because Cabinet members never met with the military commanders to plan these acts. But these crimes were only the inevitable and incidental results of the plan to commit the aggression for purposes of Lebensraum. Hitler stated, at a conference with his commanders, that:
“The main objective in Poland is the destruction of the enemy and not the reaching of a certain geographical line.” Frank picked up the tune and suggested that when their usefulness was exhausted, “… then, for all I care, mincemeat can be made of the Poles and Ukrainians and all the others who run around here -it does not matter what happens”.
Reichskommissar Koch in the Ukraine echoed the refrain:
“I will draw the very last out of this country. I did not come to spread bliss ….”
This was Lebensraum in its seamy side. Could men of their practical intelligence expect to get neighboring lands free from the claims of their tenants without committing crimes against humanity?
The last stand of each defendant is that even if there was a conspiracy, he was not in it. It is therefore important in examining their attempts at avoidance of responsibility to know, first of all, just what it is that a conspiracy charge comprehends and punishes.
In conspiracy we do not punish one man for another man’s crime. We seek to punish each for his own crime of joining a common criminal plan in which others also participated. The measure of the criminality of the plan and therefore of the guilt of each participant is, of course, the sum total of crimes committed by all in executing the plan. But the gist of the offence is participation in the formulation or execution of the plan. These are rules which every society has found necessary in order to reach men, like these defendants, who never get blood on their own hands but who lay plans that result in the shedding of blood. All over Germany today, in every zone of occupation, little men who carried out these criminal policies under orders are being convicted and punished. It would present a vast and unforgivable caricature of justice if the men who planned these policies and directed these little men should escape all penalty.
These men in this dock, on the face of this record, were not strangers to this programme of crime, nor was their connection with it remote or obscure. We find them in the very heart of it. The positions they held show that we have chosen defendants of self-evident responsibility. They are the very highest surviving authorities in their respective fields and in the Nazi State. No one lives who, at least until the very last moments of the war, outranked Goering in position, power, and influence. No soldier stood above Keitel and Jodl, and no sailor above Raeder and Donitz. Who can be responsible for the double-faced diplomacy if not the Foreign Ministers, von Neurath and Ribbentrop, and the diplomatic handyman, von Papen? Who should be answerable for the oppressive administration of occupied countries if Gauleiter, Protectors, Governors and Commissars such as Frank, Seyss-Inquart, Frick, von Schirach, von Neurath, and Rosenberg are not? Where shall we look for those who mobilised the economy for total war if we overlook Schacht and Speer and Funk? Who was the master of the great slaving enterprise if it was not Sauckel? Where shall we find the hand that ran the concentration camps if it was not the hand of Kaltenbrunner? Who whipped up the hates and fears of the public, and manipulated the Party organizations to incite these crimes, if not Hess, von Schirach, Fritzsche, Bormann and the unspeakable Julius Streicher? The list of defendants is made up of men who played indispensable and reciprocal parts in this tragedy. The photographs and the films show them again and again together on important occasions. The documents show them agreed on policies and on methods, and all working aggressively for the expansion of Germany by force of arms.
Each of these men made a real contribution to the Nazi plan. Each man had a key part. Deprive the Nazi regime of the functions performed by a Schacht, a Sauckel, a von Papen, or a Goering, and you have a different regime. Look down the rows of fallen men and picture them as the photographic and documentary evidence shows them to have been in their days of power. Is there one who did not substantially advance the conspiracy along its bloody path towards its bloody goal? Can we assume that the great effort of these men’s lives was directed towards ends they never suspected? To escape the implications of their positions and the inference of guilt from their activities, the defendants are almost unanimous in one defence. The refrain is heard time and again: these men were without authority, without knowledge, without influence, without importance. Funk summed up the general self-abasement of the dock in his plaintive lament that:
“I always, so to speak, came up to the door. But I was not permitted to enter.”
In the testimony of each defendant, at some point there was reached the familiar blank wall: nobody knew anything about what was going on. Time after time we have heard the chorus from the dock:
“I only heard about these things here for the first time.”
These men saw no evil, spoke none, and none was uttered in their presence. This claim might sound very plausible if made by one defendant. But when we put all their stories together, the impression which emerges of the Third Reich, which was to last a thousand years, is ludicrous. If we combine only the stories of the front bench, this is the ridiculous composite picture of Hitler’s Government that emerges. It was composed of:
A No. 2 man who knew nothing of the excesses of the Gestapo which he created, and never suspected the Jewish extermination programme although he was the signer of over a score of decrees which instituted the persecution of that race;
A No. 3 man who was merely an innocent middleman transmitting Hitler’s orders without even reading them, like a postman or delivery boy;
A Foreign Minister who knew little of foreign affairs and nothing of foreign policy;
A Field-Marshal who issued orders to the armed forces but had no idea of the results they would have in practice;
A Security Chief who was of the impression that the policing functions of his Gestapo and SD were somewhat on the lines of directing traffic;
A Party philosopher who was interested in historical research, and had no idea of the violence which his philosophy was inciting in the twentieth century;
A Governor-General of Poland who reigned but did not rule;
A Gauleiter of Franconia whose occupation was to pour forth filthy writings about the Jews, but who had no idea that anybody would read them;
A Minister of the Interior who knew not even what went on in the interior of his own office, much less the interior of his own department, and nothing at all about the interior of Germany;
A Reichsbank President who was totally ignorant of what went in and out of the vaults of his bank;
A Plenipotentiary for the War Economy who secretly marshalled the entire economy for armament, but had no idea it had anything to do with war.
This may seem like a fantastic exaggeration, but this is what you would actually be obliged to conclude if you were to acquit these defendants.
They do protest too much. They deny knowing what was common knowledge. They deny knowing plans and programmes that were as public as Mein Kampf and the Party programme.
They deny even knowing the contents of documents which they received and acted upon. Nearly all the defendants take two or more conflicting positions. Let us illustrate the inconsistencies of their positions by the record of one defendant -who, if pressed, would himself concede that he is the most intelligent, honourable and innocent man in the dock. That is Schacht. And this is the effect of his own testimony -but let us not forget that I recite it not against him alone, but because most of its self-contradictions are found in the testimony of several defendants.
Schacht did not openly join the Nazi movement until it had won, nor openly desert it until it had lost. He admits that he never gave it public opposition, but asserts that he never gave it private loyalty. When we demand of him why he did not stop the criminal course of the regime in which he was a Minister, he says he had not a bit of influence. When we ask why he remained a member of the criminal regime, he tells us that by sticking on he expected to moderate its programme. Like a Brahmin among Untouchables, he could not bear to mingle with the Nazis socially, but never could he afford to separate from them politically. Of all the Nazi aggressions by which he now claims to have been shocked, there is not one that he did not support before the world with the weight of his name and prestige. Having armed Hitler to blackmail a continent, his answer now is to blame England and France for yielding. Schacht always fought for his position in a regime he now affects to despise. He sometimes disagreed with his Nazi confederates about what was expedient in reaching their goal, but he never dissented from the goal itself. When he did break with them in the twilight of the regime, it was over tactics, not principles. From then on he never ceased to urge others to risk their positions and their necks to forward his plots, but never on any occasion did he hazard either of his own. He now boasts that he personally would have shot Hitler if he had had the opportunity, but the German newsreel shows that even after the fall of France, when he faced the living Hitler, he stepped out of line to grasp the hand he now claims to loathe and hung upon the words of the man he now says he thought unworthy of belief. Schacht says he steadily “sabotaged” the Hitler Government. Yet the most relentless secret service in the world never detected him doing the regime any harm until long after, he knew the war to be lost and the Nazis doomed. Schacht, who dealt in “hedges” all his life, always kept himself in a position to claim that he was in either camp. The plea for him is as specious on analysis as it is persuasive on first sight. Schacht represents the most dangerous and reprehensible type of opportunism -that of the man of influential position who is ready to join a movement that he knows to be wrong because he thinks it is winning.
These defendants, unable to deny that they were the men in the very highest ranks of power, and unable to deny that the crimes I have outlined actually happened, know that their own denials are incredible unless they can suggest someone who is guilty.
The defendants have been unanimous, when pressed, in shifting the blame on other men, sometimes on one and sometimes on another. But the names they have repeatedly picked are Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich, Goebbels and Bormann. All of these are dead or missing. No matter how hard we have pressed the defendants on the stand, they have never pointed the finger at a living man as guilty. It is a temptation to ponder the wondrous workings of a fate which has left only the guilty dead and only the innocent alive. It is almost too remarkable.
The chief villain on whom blame is placed -some of the defendants vie with each other in producing appropriate epithets -is Hitler. He is the man at whom nearly every defendant has pointed an accusing finger.
I shall not dissent from this consensus, nor do I deny that all these dead and missing men shared the guilt. In crimes so reprehensible that degrees of guilt have lost their significance they may have played the most evil parts. But their guilt cannot exculpate the defendants. Hitler did not carry all responsibility to the grave with him. All the guilt is not wrapped in Himmler’s shroud. It was these dead men whom these living chose to be their partners in this great conspiratorial brotherhood, and the crimes that they did together they must pay for one by one.
It may well be said that Hitler’s final crime was against the land he had ruled. He was a mad “messiah” who started the war without cause and prolonged it without reason. If he could not rule he cared not what happened to Germany. As Fritzsche has told us from the stand, Hitler tried to use the defeat of Germany for the self-destruction of the German people. He continued the fight when he knew it could not be won, and continuance meant only ruin. Speer, in this courtroom, has described it as follows:
“… The sacrifices which were made on both sides after January, 1945, were senseless. The dead of this period will be the accusers of the man responsible for the continuation of that fight, Adolf Hitler, and the ruined cities which in this last phase lost tremendous cultural values and in which a colossal number of dwellings were destroyed …. The German people remained faithful to Adolf Hitler until the end. He betrayed them knowingly. He finally tried to throw them into the abyss ….”
Hitler ordered everyone else to fight to the last and then retreated into death by his own hand. But he left life as he lived it, a deceiver; he left the official report that he had died in battle. This was the man whom these defendants exalted to a Fuehrer. It was they who conspired to get him absolute authority over all of Germany. And in the end he and the system they had created for him brought the ruin of them all. As stated by Speer in cross-examination:
“… the tremendous danger of the totalitarian system, however, only became really clear at the moment when we were approaching the end. It was then that one could see what the principle really meant, namely, that every order should be carried out without criticism. Everything that has become known during this trial, especially with regard to orders which were carried out without any consideration, has proved how evil it .was in the end…. Quite apart from the personality of Hitler, on the collapse of the totalitarian system in Germany it became clear what tremendous dangers there are in a system of that kind. The combination of Hitler and this system has brought about these tremendous catastrophes in the world.”
But let me for a moment turn devil’s advocate. I admit that Hitler was the chief villain. But for the defendants to put all blame on him is neither manly nor true. We know that even the head of the State has the same limits to his senses and to the hours of his days as do lesser men. He must rely on others to be his eyes and ears as to most that goes on in a great empire. Other legs must run his errands; other hands must execute his plans.
On whom did Hitler rely for such things more than upon these men in the dock? Who led him to believe he had an invincible air armada if not Goering? Who kept disagreeable facts from him? Did not Goering forbid Field-Marshal Milch to warn Hitler that in his opinion Germany was not equal to the war upon Russia? Did not Goering, according to Speer, relieve General Galland of his air force command for speaking of the weaknesses and bungling of the air force? Who led Hitler, utterly untravelled himself, to believe in the indecision and timidity of democratic peoples if not Ribbentrop, von Neurath, and von Papen? Who fed his illusion of German invincibility if not Keitel, Jodl, Raeder, and Donitz? Who kept his hatred of the Jews inflamed more than Streicher and Rosenberg? Who would Hitler say deceived him about conditions in concentration camps if not Kaltenbrunner, even as he would deceive us? These men had access to Hitler and often could control the information that reached him and on which he must base his policy and his orders. They were the Praetorian Guard, and while they were under Caesar’s orders, Caesar was always in their hands.
If these dead men could take the witness stand and answer what has been said against them, we might have a less distorted picture of the parts played by these defendants. Imagine the stir that would occur in the dock if it should behold Adolf Hitler advancing to the witness box, or Himmler with an armful of dossiers, or Goebbels, or Bormann with the reports of his Party spies, or the murdered Roehm or Canaris. The ghoulish defence that the world is entitled to retribution only from the cadavers is an argument worthy of the crimes at which it is directed.
We have presented to this Tribunal an affirmative case based on incriminating documents which are sufficient, if unexplained, to require a finding of guilt on Count One against each defendant. In the final analysis, the only question is whether the defendants’ own testimony is to be credited as against the documents and other evidence of their guilt. What, then, is their testimony worth?
The fact is that the Nazi habit of economising in the use of truth pulls the foundations out from under their own defences. Lying has always been a highly approved Nazi technique. Hitler, in Mein Kampf, advocated mendacity as a policy. Von Ribbentrop admits the use of the “diplomatic lie”. Keitel advised that the facts of rearmament be kept secret so that they could be denied at Geneva. Raeder deceived about rebuilding the German Navy in violation of Versailles. Goering urged Ribbentrop to tell a “legal lie” to the British Foreign Office about the Anschluss, and in so doing only marshalled him the way he was going. Goering gave his word of honour to the Czechs and proceeded to break it. Even Speer proposed to deceive the French into revealing the specially trained among their prisoners.
Nor is the lie direct the only means of falsehood. They all speak with a Nazi double meaning with which to deceive the unwary. In the Nazi dictionary of sardonic euphemisms “Final solution” of the Jewish problem was a phrase which meant extermination; “Special treatment” of prisoners of war meant killing; “Protective custody” meant concentration camp; “Duty labour” meant slave labour; and an order to “take a firm attitude” or “take positive measures” meant to act with unrestrained savagery. Before we accept their word at what seems to be its face value, we must always look for hidden meanings. Goering assured us, on his oath, that the Reich Defence Council never met “as such”. When we produced the stenographic minutes of a meeting at which he presided and did most of the talking, he reminded us of the “as such” and explained this was not a meeting of the Council “as such” because other persons were present. Goering denies “threatening” Czechoslovakia. He only told President Hacha that he would “hate to bomb the beautiful city of Prague”.
Besides outright false statements and those with double meanings, there are also other circumventions of truth in the nature of fantastic explanations and absurd professions. Streicher has solemnly maintained that his only thought with respect to the Jews was to resettle them on the island of Madagascar. His reason for destroying synagogues, he blandly said, was only because they were architecturally offensive. Rosenberg was stated by his counsel to have always had in mind a “chivalrous solution” to the Jewish problem. When it was necessary to remove Schuschnigg after the Anschluss, Ribbentrop would have had us believe that the Austrian Chancellor was resting at a “villa”. It was left to cross-examination to reveal that the “villa” was Buchenwald concentration camp. The record is full of other examples of dissimulations and evasions. Even Schacht showed that he, too, had adopted the Nazi attitude that truth is any story which succeeds. Confronted on cross-examination with a long record of broken vows and false words, he declared in justification -and I quote from the record:
“I think you can score many more successes when you want to lead someone if you don’t tell them the truth than if you tell them the truth.”
This was the philosophy of the National Socialists. When for years they have deceived the world, and masked falsehood with plausibilities, can anyone be surprised that they continue that habit of a lifetime in this dock? Credibility is one of the main issues of this trial. Only those who have failed to learn the bitter lessons of the last decade can doubt that men who have always played on the unsuspecting credulity of generous opponents would not hesitate to do the same now.
It is against such a background that these defendants now ask this Tribunal to say that they are not guilty of planning, executing, or conspiring to commit this long list of crimes and wrongs. They stand before the record of this trial as bloodstained Gloucester stood by the body of his slain King. He begged of the widow, as they beg of you: “Say I slew them not.” And the Queen replied, “Then say they were not slain. But dead they are ….” If you were to say of these men that they are not guilty, it would be as true to say that there has been no war, there are no slain, there has been no crime.” Of course there is much more that could be included. The crimes of the Nazi beggar the imagination. Their use of the entire machinery of the State, the willing cooperation of business, the churches, medical institutions, and ordinary men and women who informed on neighbors, appropriated the homes and property of the Jews, men and women who cheerfully burned books condemned by the Nazis. Likewise, there were the men of the Einsatzgrüppen who murdered over a million Jews up close and personal, those that ran the gas chambers, gave lethal injections to children and the disabled, conducted barbarous medical experiments, and those that supervised a slave labor program that caused massive suffering and death. The list of crimes could go on ad infinitum. Sadly, they can and are happening again.
Seventy-six years ago today the Soviet Red Army’s 100th Division liberated the Auschwitz Concentration Camp. There were somewhere between 7000 and 9000 prisoners left in the camp when the Soviet soldiers liberated it. The camp’s crematoria had been destroyed as well as most of the gas chambers. The SS had evacuated most of the surviving inmates and slave laborers by forced march to railhead miles away from the camp, in order to take them to other Concentration Camps deeper in Germany; Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Ravensbruck, and others.
Even though Auschwitz was liberated, the Nazis continued to exterminate Jews at other camps. Likewise in vain attempts to cover up their crimes and keep killing Jews through forced labor conducted forced marches in freezing winter weather to keep them from being liberated. These marches were both deadly and inhuman. Even Heinrich Himmler the supreme architect of the policy of annihilation had forbidden them in order to escape justice at the hands of the Allies who he was already attempting clandestine contact. Many of these actions were the work of SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann who supervised the Holocaust after the death of his chief, Reinhard Heydrich. Even though the Third Reich was collapsing under the hammer blows of the Western Allies and Soviets, and the defection of critical allies like Finland, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria from the Axis fold.
Even Rudolf Höss the former Commandant of Auschwitz, who admitted to killing over one and a half-million Jews, was appalled by the senseless brutality of what he saw. Höss, the meticulous killer of millions, was shocked by the columns of emaciated and Jews, with no winter clothing or in many cases not even shoes that that he witnessed. These were the people Eichmann marched from Budapest and other cities and camps to Austria and Czechoslovakia in late 1944 and 1945. to keep the Russians from liberating them, even against the orders of Heinrich Himmler himself. But Eichmann felt the heartbeat of Adolf Hitler who remained determined to kill every last Jew in German held Europe as he led Germany into its Götterdämmerung.
There have been many episodes of genocide in human history, but none were more pointedly directed at a single group of people based on race hatred than the Holocaust of the Nazis and their allies against the Jews. While it is true that the Nazis exterminated millions of other people than the nearly six million Jews they dispatched during the Holocaust, but they were secondary targets of his race hatred. This is important, as the late Christopher Hitchens noted:
“We should not at all allow ourselves to forget the millions of non-Jewish citizens of Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, and other Slav territories who were also massacred. But for me the salient fact remains that anti-Semitism was the regnant, essential, organizing principle of all the other National Socialist race theories. It is thus not to be thought of as just one prejudice among many.”
Hitchens was right, without the primary Nazi hatred and determination to obliterate the Jews from the face of the earth, their other atrocities would never occurred. Today, that rabid anti-semitism is again raising its evil head in Eastern and Western Europe, the Middle East, and even in the United States. We have seen it in the resurgence of heavily armed and violent Neo-Nazi and White Supremacist groups in the United States whose ranks include current and former military personnel and law enforcement officers. The same is true in Europe. In the United States many members of these Anti-Semitic militant groups led the attack on the United States Capitol after being incited to do so by for ex-President Donald Trump.
Red Army officers and soldiers who had seen the worst of Nazi atrocities committed in Russia, the Belarus, the Ukraine and the Baltic states were unprepared for what they witnesses when the liberated Auschwitz:
Battle-hardened soldiers who were used to death were shocked by the Nazis’ treatment of prisoners. Red Army general Vasily Petrenko, commander of the 107th Infantry Division, remarked, “I who saw people dying every day was shocked by the Nazis’ indescribable hatred toward the inmates who had turned into living skeletons. I read about the Nazis’ treatment of Jews in various leaflets, but there was nothing about the Nazis’ treatment of women, children, and old men. It was in Auschwitz that I found out about the fate of the Jews.”
Ivan Martynushkin, then a 21-year-old lieutenant recounted his experience at Auschwitz in 2015:
“We saw emaciated, tortured, impoverished people…. Those were the people I first encountered. … We could tell from their eyes that they were happy to be saved from this hell. Happy that now they weren’t threatened by death in a crematorium. Happy to be freed. And we had the feeling of doing a good deed — liberating these people from this hell.” He told the Daily Mail: “I had seen towns destroyed…. I had seen the destruction of villages. I had seen the suffering of our own people. I had seen small children maimed. There was not one village which had not experienced this horror, this tragedy, these sufferings.”
He was not alone.
Commander Vasily Gromadsky was one of the first to enter the “death camp”:
There was a lock on the gate. I didn’t know if it was the main entrance or what. I ordered men to break the lock. There wasn’t anyone there. We walked another 200 meters and saw prisoners in striped shirts running towards us, about 300 of them.
We became wary, since we had been warned that the Germans could be in disguise. But they were real prisoners. They were crying, embracing us. They told us that millions of people had been killed there. I can still remember them telling us how the Germans had sent 12 wagons of baby carriages from Auschwitz.
Journalists from the 38th army Usher Margulis and Gennady Savin entered the camp after the soldiers. This what they remember:
We entered the brick building and looked inside the rooms. The doors weren’t closed. In the first room there was a huge pile of children’s clothes: little coats, jackets, sweaters, many of them with bloodstains. In the next room there were boxes filled with dental crowns and golden dentures. In the third room there were boxes with woman’s hair. And then a woman [a prisoner – Russia Beyond] brought us to a room filled with boxes with women’s bags, lampshades, wallets, purses and other leather items. She said: “All this is made from human skin.”
After Auschwitz was liberated, the Soviets appointed a new commandant was to administer the town, Grigory Yelisavetinsky. On Feb. 4, 1945 he wrote to his wife:
“There’s a children’s barrack in the camp. Jewish children of all ages (twins) were taken there. The Germans carried out experiments on them as if they were rabbits. I saw a 14-year-old boy whose veins had been injected with kerosene for some “scientific” purpose.
Then a piece of his body was cut off and sent to a laboratory in Berlin, while it was replaced with another piece of the body. Now he lies in a hospital all covered with deep rotting ulcers and nothing can be done to help him. There’s a beautiful girl walking around the camp. She’s mad. I’m surprised that not all the people here have gone mad.”
Eva Mozes Kor was 10 years old when she spotted the soldiers. She was one of a group of hundreds of children who had been left behind, and she had endured medical experiments during her imprisonment. She remembered how the soldiers gave her “hugs, cookies and chocolate….We were not only starved for food but we were starved for human kindness.”
The human kindness of the Soviet Soldiers characterized the liberation. The shocked soldiers helped set up hospitals on site, and townspeople volunteered to help. For months, Polish Red Cross workers labored to save the dying and treat the living, working without adequate food or supplies and helping prisoners get in touch with their loved ones. About 7,500 of those liberated on 27 January 1945 survived.
It is impossible for an objective person to deny these facts. Hate crimes against Jews are blossoming around the world like toxic mushrooms. The new perpetrators are the descendants of the former perpetrators, Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox Christians, Muslims, and secularists who embrace the same social Darwinism that motivated many of the Nazis and many are central to the ever growing core or Holocaust Deniers.
Or course the non-Muslim opponents of the Jews today also despise dark skinned minorities, non-Christians, not to mention atheists. secularists, and political liberals and progressives, even if they are White and Christian, thus what Hitchens says is still as accurate as it was when he wrote those words.
So here we are, Holocaust Remembrance Day, 2021. The question is, will we allow it to happen again? The late Iris Chang, who documented the Rape Of Nanking noted: “to forget a holocaust is to kill twice.” Sadly, I believe that without a sea change in public opinion and knowledge about the Holocaust, genocide, and anti-semitism we will see it happen again. The attack on the Capitol was just a foretaste of what they would do if they even succeed in taking power.
But will we allow it to happen again? I would hope not, but I have to say that human nature and the course of events is leading me to believe that it will happen again, maybe even in our lifetime.
That may be difficult to accept, but it is reality. What is the alternative to telling the truth? Except to perpetuate a lie, except to take the side of the perpetrators, and those who would do the same today. That includes many of former President Trump’s most loyal supporters, Evangelical Christians who while outwardly allying with Israel, only do so in that their interpretation of Biblical prophecy might be fulfilled. That interpretation is that Christians will be raptured from the earth, and during a seven year Great Tribulation the Anti-Christ will conquer his foes and that in the end over two-thirds of all Jews will be killed, while the surviving Jews convert to follow Christ. Evangelical Christianity’s beliefs about Israel are not out of love or concern for Jews, the nation of Israel, but to use them to promote their own political and theological agendas. If I was a Jew of any kind I would reject any of their offers.
Honestly, I cannot deem such politicized and racist theology to be Christian, or respectful and considerate of the elder brother of the Christian faith, Judaism, without which Christianity wouldn’t exist. Let me repeat that. Without Judaism Christianity would not exist, and the treatment of the Jews by the Christian Church has been shameful for the majority of its existence. I say that as a Christian.
In the 1930s and 1940s the Nazis created the euphemism the Jewish Question in order to remove the aspect of humanity from their policy. It wasn’t about human beings, it was about people that they considered sub-human minority that they were able to demonize to expedite their elimination. Hitchens wrote:
“Die Judenfrage,’ it used to be called, even by Jews. ‘The Jewish Question.’ I find I quite like this interrogative formulation, since the question—as Gertrude Stein once famously if terminally put it—may be more absorbing than the answer. Of course one is flirting with calamity in phrasing things this way, as I learned in school when the Irish question was discussed by some masters as the Irish ‘problem.’ Again, the word ‘solution’ can be as neutral as the words ‘question’ or ‘problem,’ but once one has defined a people or a nation as such, the search for a resolution can become a yearning for the conclusive. Endlösung: the final solution.”
Thus, once one labels the Jews, or for that matter any other despised minority a question, or a problem, we place ourselves on the path to to Genocide. But the Trump administration and his followers did that since 2015 regarding Mexicans and other Hispanics, Arabs, Haitians, Sub-Saharan Africans, and too many others. Many died, women were forcibly sterilized by physicians employed or contracted by the our Border and Emigration departments.
That is why I cannot be silent. I have to proclaim the words of Ellie Wiesel:
“I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”
Silence it no longer an option, and to again quote Wiesel: “For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.”
We must bear witness, for if we do not it will happen again. Humanity is the one constant in history, and there are no exceptions once one begins down the path to labeling the fate of races, nations, and peoples a question or a problem which they can resolve with a solution, the more comprehensive, total, or final, the better. There are certainly plenty of people, including Trump’s closest advisors who would make draconian laws in order to enable the government to commit genocide.
Historian Yehuda Bauer wrote:
“The horror of the Holocaust is not that it deviated from human norms; the horror is that it didn’t. What happened may happen again, to others not necessarily Jews, perpetrated by others, not necessarily Germans. We are all possible victims, possible perpetrators, possible bystanders.”
In the wake of an number of situations that I have seen and have watched in morbid fascination be debated on my Facebook, and Twitter timelines, as well a potential Holocaust Denier who commented on my blog a year ago, I realize that with the prevailing attitudes being stoked by men like former President Trump, his media supporters, and sadly, far too many Conservative Christians, that a Holocaust not unlike Hitler’s will quite probably happen again, and the Jews, followed by the Trump Cult’s liberal political opponents, American Blacks, Muslims, Mexican and Central American immigrants and refugees and a multitude of others find themselves the targets of first political and economic isolation followed by legal or extralegal means of political persecution, imprisonment, and extermination. Just read and listen to what members of the GOP, political pundits, and yes right wing political preachers say, preach, or write.
I will fight it, butI have no doubt of the power, passion, and petulance of people consumed by race hatred under the guise of patriotism. They are going to undercut any Constitutional liberties of their opponents and will misused the Constitution, our laws, or even Christian theology to bring on another Holocaust.
27 January is important, but the work of preventing even worse still remains. There are no “good Nazis or White Supremacists” today. I will be damned if I do not fight them by any means fair or unfair. I will identify them, show their faces and make them defend themselves and their beliefs in public, because they are indefensible. Such people should be publicly identified and shamed. If they commit crimes as they did on 6 January they should be prosecuted to the maximum extent of the law, and I include the former President, the Senators, and Representatives, state office holders, military personnel active, reserve, and retired, and law enforcement officers who aided and abetted that assault on our country, democracy, and Constitution. They are insurrectionists who are guilty of inciting sedition and rebellion against the United States, who are still intent on their revolution to overturn our government, a valid election, and our Constitution. They are worse than the Confederate rebels, they are no different than the Nazis, and any American of any political party, religious affiliation, or race should disavow them and oppose them at every opportunity.
This is a time to stand against these criminals masquerading as Senators and Congressmen, and oppose their attempts to destroy the American experiment for an authoritarian, fascist, racist, and theocratic dictatorship which will certainly bring forth another Holocaust, and yes, Jews will be the primary target before anyone else.
I do battle with Holocaust deniers and Neo-Nazis on an almost daily basis. Some have threatened my life and that of my family for over a decade and most of them also call themselves Christians. That I cannot allow to go unrevealed and I will expose them for who and what they are. I will not resort to violence, but if need be I will defend myself with whatever means necessary as I will my Jewish friends and anyone else’s whose lives are threatened by the current Neo-Nazi and White Supremacist and others committed to perpetuating the lies and violence of America’s leading Fascist, former President Donald John Trump.
I return again to the Nuremberg Trials and the opening statement of the American Chief Prosecutor, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson. I first wrote this in the wake of Trump’s firing of Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer for resisting Trump’s order to allow a convicted war criminal from retaining his SEAL Trident following ordering the Navy to restore his rank so he could retire. During the same period of time Trump pardoned other convicted American war criminals whose crimes were unspeakable. Of course over the past year Trump used every Federal law enforcement agency he could to conduct surveillance with military aircraft, and then unleash violently attack mostly peaceful protestors in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, and arrest many without charges before releasing them.
I could go further and recount incident after incident to complete a profile of an authoritarian leader with no regard for American law, international law, the laws of war, and human rights. A man perfectly willing to allow more that a quarter of a million Americans die of a pandemic that he knew would be worse than anything imaginable. Likewise he had willing accomplices in Congress, and in nearly every Federal agency charged with the security, health, and safety of all Americans, who have been his willing helpers to bulldoze the Constitutional rights of all Americans, including trying to overthrow the results of a fully legal election that he lost by nearly Seven Million votes.
These are the kinds of incidents that led to Hitler succeeding in turning the Wehrmacht, the German Armed Forces into a compromised organ of state that for the most part did his bidding with few complaints as long as victory looked certain. With last year’s action against Secretary of the Navy Spencer, and his firing of Secretary of Defense Mark Esper shortly after the election, because Esper, who was mostly a yes man to Trump refused to send Army troops into action against demonstrators and opposed Trumps desire to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 in order to provide cover for it, Trump attempted to politicize the military against American citizens exercising their constitutional rights.
The nine volumes of the Major War Crime trial proceedings are something that anyone that studies the Nazi period, or international law must read. In reading them one gets a feel for the process itself and the overall fairness of it.
Justice Jackson’s opening and closing statements in the trial are considered to be among the most important and compelling addresses in legal history, as well as masterful rhetoric which connected with the audience and still do today. One legal analyst wrote:
The form components connected with all who participated as an audience at the time and kept the attentiveness of the audience, to change international criminal law forever. The settings broke, and notably continue to break, down the barriers for even those who still read the discourse today. Finally, the narrative’s connectivity is an absolute active function, as the memory and legacy of the tragedy that the Nazis inflicted upon humanity will forever evoke emotion for anyone exposed to this opening statement… With its emotional charge, legal rationale, and human viewpoint, it cannot be denied that this narrative not only held a strong rhetorical effectiveness for the judicial panel hearing the case, but also the world at the time it was given. Patrick Iyampillai, “A Grave Responsibility: A Rhetorical Critique of the Opening Statement at Nuremberg Using the Narrative Perspective”
I have posted with commentary Jackson’s introduction, and his discussion of the Nazi battles against Free Labor Unions, and the Churches. Today I move on to his discussion of the criminal racial Nazi War Against the Jews in Germany and across occupied Europe. This is one of the most important aspects of his opening statement because of its relevance today as anti-Semitism and violence against Jews grows more open and more common in Europe and the United States.
When you read them you get a sense of the moral authority that Jackson championed and the manner in which he tied these crimes in to the the crimes that he previously had dealt with in his speech before the tribunal.
I have read many authoritative histories of the Holocaust and the Nazi genocide committed against the Jews. I have also read the accounts of the Nazi perpetrators. These are vitality important, but what is often missing from them is Jackson’s skill as a prosecutor to hammer away at the guilt of those who committed these heinous actions. Sometimes a detached historian attempting to convey the facts, fails provide the moral rhetoric of a prosecutor to fully convey the extent of the evil that was committed by the Nazis Against the Jews. Thus, Jackson’s speech should be a jumping off point before one begins to study the Holocaust. It may not sound fair, but one has to understand the moral outrage of the Nazi crimes before one can appreciate the truth about the Nazi crimes.
Sadly, the crimes of the Nazis evoke little outrage today. When neo-Nazis demonstrated in Charlottesville in the summer of 2017, killing a counter-protestor and beating others, President Trump equivocated and said that there “were very good people on both sides.” Time after time we witness the spectacle of political leaders in the United States, Hungary, Poland, Germany, France, and Russia using blatant anti-Semitism, and racism to remind others that they are the superior race; and most of their supporters make no protest. The examples of their political words, and the crimes directly linked to racism and anti-Semitism are now far too numerous to even bother to list, and they are added to on what seems like a daily basis.
Do not get me wrong, history is important, facts matter, and anti-Semitism and racism are a poison that seems to infect the human race. Historian Christopher Browning wrote:
“I fear that we live in a world in which war and racism are ubiquitous, in which the powers of government mobilization and legitimization are powerful and increasing, in which a sense of personal responsibility is increasingly attenuated by specialization and bureaucratization, and in which the peer group exerts tremendous pressures on behavior and sets moral norms. In such a world, I fear, modern governments that wish to commit mass murder will seldom fail in their efforts for being unable to induce “ordinary men” to become their “willing executioners.
The Nazis were guilty. Their crimes were horrific, and one cannot as a human being simply relegate them to the depths of history when before our eyes their apologists seek to again use race hatred to gain power; in some countries they are The stakes are far too high. As historian Timothy Snyder has so poignantly written:
“The European history of the twentieth century shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands. It would serve us well today to understand why.”
The fact is what happened in the Holocaust was not an aberration of human nature. Genocide is not confined to the Nazis. Rwanda, Cambodia, Armenia, the Balkans, Nanking, Stalin’s genocide of Ukrainians, Kazakhs, Belorussians, and other non-Russian citizens of the Soviet Union, and the American extermination of the indigenous Native American tribes are not ancient history. Historian Gerhard Weinberg wrote:
“It’s very, very important for people to get a sense of what the potentialities of people really are, what the dangers of ignorance can be. It is in this context, that a supposedly advanced society risks descending into the sewer, that the Holocaust is a warning to people who think of themselves as an advanced, modern society….”
With that, I give you Jackson’s dissection of the Nazi Crimes Against the Jews which he delivered on the afternoon of November 21st, 1945.
The most savage and numerous crimes committed by the Nazis were those against the Jews. Those in Germany, in 1933, numbered about 500,000. In the aggregate, they had made for themselves positions which excited envy, and had accumulated properties which excited the avarice of the Nazis. They were few enough to be helpless and numerous enough to be held up as a menace.
Let there be no misunderstanding about the charge of persecuting Jews. What we charge against these defendants is not those arrogances and pretensions which frequently accompany the intermingling of different peoples and which are likely, despite the honest efforts of Government, to produce regrettable crimes and convulsions. It is my purpose to show a plan and design to which all Nazis were fanatically committed to annihilate all Jewish people. These crimes were organised and promoted by the Party Leadership, executed and protected by the Nazi officials, as we shall convince you by written orders of the Secret State Police itself.
The persecution of the Jews was a continuous and deliberate policy. It was a policy directed against other nations as well as against the Jews themselves. Anti-Semitism was promoted to divide and embitter the democratic peoples and to soften their resistance to the Nazi aggression. As Robert Ley declared in Der Angriff on 14 May, 1944, “the second German secret weapon is Anti-Semitism because, if it is constantly pursued by Germany, it will become a universal problem which all nations will be forced to consider.”
Anti-Semitism also has been aptly credited with being a “spearhead of terror.” The ghetto was the laboratory for testing repressive measures. Jewish property was the first to be expropriated, but the custom grew and included similar measures against Anti-Nazi Germans, Poles, Czechs, Frenchmen, and Belgians. Extermination of the Jews enabled the Nazis to bring a practised hand to similar measures against Poles, Serbs, and Greeks. The plight of the Jew was a constant threat to opposition or discontent among other elements of Europe’s population -Pacifists, Conservatives, Communists, Catholics, Protestants, Socialists. It was in fact, a threat to every dissenting opinion and to every non-Nazi’s life.
The persecution policy against the Jews commenced with non-violent measures, such as disfranchisement and discriminations against their religion, and the placing of impediments in the way of success in economic life. It moved rapidly to organised mass violence against them, physical isolation in ghettos, deportation, forced labour, mass starvation, and extermination. The Government, the Party formations indicted before you as criminal organisations, the Secret State Police, the Army, private and semi-public associations, and “spontaneous” mobs that were carefully inspired from official sources, were all agencies that were concerned in this persecution. Nor was it directed against individual Jews for personal bad citizenship or unpopularity. The avowed purpose was the destruction of the Jewish people as a whole, as an end in itself, as a measure of preparation for war, and as a discipline for conquered peoples.
The conspiracy or common plan to exterminate the Jew was so methodically and thoroughly pursued, that despite the German defeat and Nazi prostration this Nazi aim largely has succeeded. Only remnants of the European Jewish population remain in Germany, in the countries which Germany occupied, and in those which were her satellites or collaborators. Of the 9,600,000Jews who lived in Nazi-dominated Europe, 6o per cent. are authoritatively estimated to have perished-5,700,000 Jews are missing from the countries in which they formerly lived, and over 4,500,000 cannot be accounted for by the normal death rate nor by immigration; nor are they included among displaced persons. History does not record a crime ever perpetrated against so many victims or one ever carried out with such calculated cruelty.
You will have difficulty, as I have, to look into the faces of these defendants and believe that in this Twentieth Century human beings could inflict such sufferings as will be proved here, on their own countrymen as well as upon their so-called “inferior” enemies. Particular crimes, and the responsibility defendants for them, are to be dealt with by the Soviet Government’s Counsel, when committed in the East, and by Counsel for the Republic of France committed in the West. I advert to them only to show their magnitude as evidence of a purpose and a knowledge common to all defendants, of an official plan rather than of a capricious policy of some individual commander, and to show such a continuity of Jewish persecution, from the rise of the Nazi conspiracy to its collapse, as forbids us to believe that any person could be identified with any part of Nazi action without approving this most conspicuous item in their programme.
The Indictment itself recites many evidences of the anti-Semitic persecutions. The defendant Streicher led the Nazis in anti-Semitic bitterness and extremism. In an article appearing in Der Sturmer on 19th March, he complained that Christian teachings have stood in the way of “racial solution of the Jewish question in Europe,” and quoted enthusiastically as the Twentieth Century solution the Fuehrer’s proclamation Of 24th February, 1943, that “the Jew will be exterminated.” And on 4th November, 1943, Streicher declared in Der Sturmer that the Jews “have disappeared from Europe and that the Jewish ‘Reservoir of the East’ from which the Jewish plague has for centuries beset the people of Europe, has ceased to exist.” Streicher now has the effrontery to tell us he is “only a Zionist”; he says he only wants to return the Jews to Palestine.
But on 7th May, 1942, his newspaper Der Sturmer had this to say: “It is also not only a European problem! The Jewish question is a world question! Not only is Germany not safe in the face of the Jews as long as one Jew lives in Europe, but also the Jewish question is hardly solved in Europe so long as Jews live in the rest of the world.”
Hans Frank Hitler’s Lawyer and Governor General of Occupied Poland
And the defendant Hans Frank, a lawyer by profession I say with shame, summarised in his diary in 1944 the Nazi policy thus:
“The Jews are a race which has to be eliminated; whenever we catch one, it is his end.” (Document No. 2233-PS, Vol. 1944, p. 26.)
And earlier, speaking of his function as Governor-General of Poland, he confided to his diary this sentiment:
“Of course I cannot eliminate all lice and Jews in only a year’s time.” (2233-PS, Vol. IV, 1940, p. 1159)
I could multiply endlessly this kind of Nazi ranting, but I will leave it to the evidence and turn to the fruit of this perverted thinking.
The most serious of the actions against Jews were outside of any law, but the law itself was employed to some extent. There were the infamous Nuremberg decrees of 15th September, 1935. (“Reichsgesetzblatt,” 1935, Part 1, p. 1146.) The Jews were segregated into ghettos and put into forced labour; they were expelled from their professions; their property was expropriated; all culturallife, the Press, the theatre, and schools were prohibited them; and the S.D. was made responsible for them. (212-PS, 069-PS.) This was an ominous guardianship as the following order for “The Handling of the Jewish Question” shows:
“The competency of the Chief of the Security Police and Security Service, who is charged with the mission of solving the European Jewish question, extends even to the occupied eastern provinces. . . .
An eventual act by the civilian population against the Jews is not to be prevented as long as this is compatible with the maintenance of order and security in the rear of the fighting troops. . . .
The first main goal of the German measures must be the strict segregation of Jewry from the rest of the population. In the execution of this, first of all, is the seizing of the Jewish populace by the introduction of a registration order and similar appropriate measures…
Then immediately, the wearing of the recognition sign, consisting of a yellow Jewish star, is to be brought about and all rights of freedom for Jews are to be withdrawn. They are to be placed in ghettos, and at the same time, are to be separated according to sex. The presence of many more or less closed Jewish settlements in White Ruthenia and in the Ukraine makes this mission easier. Moreover, places are to be chosen which make possible the full use of the Jewish manpower in case labour needs are present. The entire Jewish property is to be seized and confiscated, with the exception of that which is necessary for a bare existence. As far as the economical situation permits, the power of disposal of their property is to be taken from the Jews as soon as possible through orders and other measures given by the commissariat, so that the moving of property will quickly cease.”
“Any cultural activity will be completely forbidden to the Jew. This includes the outlawing of the Jewish Press, the Jewish theatres and schools.
“The slaughtering of animals according to Jewish rites is also to be prohibited.” (212-PS).
Obergrüppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich Architect of the Final Solution
The anti-Jewish campaign became furious following the assassination in Paris of the German Legation Councillor von Rath. Heydrich, Gestapo head, sent a telegram to all Gestapo and S.D. offices with directions for handling “spontaneous” uprisings anticipated for the nights of 9th and 10th November, 1938, so as to aid in destruction of Jewish-owned property and protect that of Germans. No more cynical document ever came into evidence. Then there is a report by an S.S. Brigade Leader, Dr. Stahlecher to Himmler, which recites that:
“Similarly, native anti-Semitic forces were induced to start pogroms against Jews after capture, though this inducement proved to be very difficult.
Following out orders, the Security Police was determined to solve the Jewish question with all possible means and most decisively. But it was desirable that the Security Police should not put in an immediate appearance, at least at the beginning, since the extraordinarily harsh measures were apt to stir even German circles. It had to be shown to the world that the native population itself took the first action by way of natural reaction against the suppression by Jews during several decades and against the terror exercised by the Communists during the preceding period.”
In view of the extension of the area of operations and the great number of duties which had to be performed by the Security Police, it was intended from the very beginning to obtain the co-operation of the reliable population for the fight against vermin – that is mainly the Jews and Communists. Beyond our directing of the first spontaneous actions of self-cleansing, which will be reported elsewhere, care had to be taken that reliable people should be put to the cleansing job, and that they were appointed auxiliary members of the Security Police.”
Kowno. To our surprise it was not easy at first to set in motion an extensive pogrom against Jews. Klimatis, the leader of the partisan unit, mentioned above, who was used for this purpose primarily, succeeded in starting a pogrom on the basis of advice given to him by a small advanced detachment acting in Kowno, and in such a way that no German order or German instigation was noticed from the outside. During the first pogrom in the night from 25 to 26.6 the Lithuanian partisans did away with more than 1,500 Jews, set fire to several Synagogues or destroyed them by other means and burned down a Jewish dwelling district consisting of about 60 houses. During the following nights about 2,300 Jews were made harmless in a similar way. In other parts of Lithuania similar actions followed the example of Kowno, though smaller and extending to the Communists who had been left behind.
These self-cleansing actions went smoothly because the Army authorities who had been informed showed understanding for this procedure. From the beginning it was obvious that only the first days after the occupation would offer the opportunity for carrying out pogroms. After the disarmament of the partisans the self-cleansing actions ceased necessarily.
It proved much more difficult to set in motion similar cleaning actions in Latvia.”
From the beginning it was to be expected that the Jewish problem in the East could not be solved by pogroms alone. In accordance with basic orders received, however, the cleansing activities of the Security Police had to aim at the complete annihilation of the Jews…
“The sum total of Jews liquidated in Lithuania amounts to 71,105. . . .” (L-180)
Of course, it is self-evident that these “uprisings” were managed by the government and the Nazi Party. If we were in doubt, we could resort to Streicher’s memorandum of 14th April, 1939, which says, “The anti-Jewish action of November, 1938, did not arise spontaneously from the people.. Part of the party formation has been charged with the execution of the anti-Jewish action.” (406-PS) Jews as a whole were fined a billion Reichsmarks. They were excluded from all businesses, and claims against insurance companies for their burned properties were confiscated, all by the decree of the defendant Goering. (Reichsgesetzblatt, 1938, Part 1, pp. 1579-1582.)
Synagogues were the objects of a special vengeance. On 10th November, 1938, the following order was given: “
“By order of the Group Commander, all Jewish Synagogues in the area of Brigade 50 have to be blown up or set afire. The operation will be carried out in civilian clothing…. Execution of the order will be reported….( 1721-PS.) Some 40 teletype messages, from police headquarters, which will be introduced to you, will tell the fury with which all Jews were pursued in Germany on those awful November nights. The S.S. troops were turned loose and the Gestapo supervised. Jewish-owned property was destroyed. The Gestapo ordered twenty to thirty thousand “well-to-do Jews” to be arrested. Concentration camps were to receive them and the order provided healthy Jews, fit for labour, were to be taken (3051-PS).
As the German frontiers were expanded by war, so the campaign against the Jews expanded. The Nazi plan never was limited to Germany; always it contemplated extinguishing the Jew in Europe and often in the world. In the West, the Jews were killed and their property, taken over. But the campaign achieved its zenith of savagery in the East. The Eastern Jew has suffered as no people ever suffered. Their sufferings were carefully reported to the Nazi authorities to show faithful adherence to the Nazi design. I shall refer only to enough of the evidence of these to show the extent of the Nazi design for killing Jews.
If I should recite these horrors in words of my own, you would think me intemperate and unreliable. Fortunately, we need not take the word of any witness but the Germans themselves. I invite you now to look at a few of the vast number of captured German orders and reports that will be offered in evidence, to see what a Nazi invasion meant. We will present such evidence as the report of “Einsatzgruppe (Action Group) A” of 15th October, 1941, which boasts that in overrunning the Baltic States, “Native Anti-Semitic forces were induced to start pogroms against the Jews during the first hours after occupation.” The report continues:
“From the beginning it was to be expected that the Jewish problem in the East could not be solved by pogroms alone. In accordance with the basic orders received, however, the cleansing activities of the Security Police had to aim at a complete annihilation of the Jews. Special detachments reinforced by selected units -in Lithuania partisan detachments, in Latvia units of the Latvian auxiliary police -therefore performed extensive executions both in the towns and in rural areas. The actions of the execution detachments were performed smoothly.”
“The sum total of the Jews liquidated in Lithuania, according to the report, amounts to 71,105. During the pogroms in Kowno 3,800 Jews were eliminated, in the smaller towns about 1,200 Jews.”
“In Latvia, up to now a total of 30,000 Jews was executed. Five hundred were eliminated by pogroms in Riga.” (L-180.)
This is a captured report from the Commissioner of Sluzk on 20th October, 1941, which describes the scene in more detail.
It says:-“… The first lieutenant explained that the police battalion had received the assignment to effect the liquidation of all Jews here in the town of Sluzk, within two days … Then I requested him to postpone the action one day. However, he rejected this with the remark that he had to carry out this action everywhere and in all towns and that only two days were allotted for Sluzk. Within these two days the town of Sluzk had to be cleared of Jews by all means … All Jews without exception were taken out of the factories and shops and deported in spite of our agreement. It is true that part of the Jews was moved by way of the ghetto, where many of them were processed and still segregated by me, but a large part was loaded directly on trucks and liquidated without further delay outside of the town.. For the rest, as regards the execution of the action, I must point out to my deepest regret that the latter bordered already on sadism. The town itself offered a picture of horror during the action. With indescribable brutality on the part of the German police officers and particularly the Lithuanian partisans, the Jewish people, but also among them White Ruthenians, were taken out of their dwellings and herded together. Everywhere in the town shots were to be heard and in different streets the corpses of shot Jews accumulated. The White Ruthenians were in greatest distress to free themselves from the encirclement. Regardless of the fact that the Jewish people, among whom were also tradesmen, were mistreated in a terribly barbarous way in the face of the White Ruthenian people, the White Ruthenians themselves were also worked over with rubber clubs and rifle butts. There was no question of an action against the Jews anymore. It rather looked like a revolution…”( 1104-PS.)
There are reports which merely tabulate the numbers slaughtered. Another example is an account of the work of Einsatzgruppen of Sipo and S.D. in the East which relates that “in Estonia, all Jews were arrested immediately upon the arrival of the Wehrmacht.”
Jewish men and women above the age of sixteen and capable of work were drafted for forced labour. Jews were subjected to all sorts of restrictions and all Jewish property was confiscated.
All Jewish males above the age of sixteen were executed, with the exception of doctors and elders. Only 500 of an original 4,500 Jews remained.
37,180 persons have been liquidated by the Sipo and S.D. in White Ruthenia during October.
In one town, 337 Jewish women were executed for demonstrating a “provocative attitude.” In another, 380 Jews were shot for spreading vicious propaganda.
And so the report continues, listing town after town, where hundreds upon hundreds of Jews were murdered.
In Vitebsk 3,000 Jews were liquidated because of the danger of epidemics.
In Kiev, 33,771 Jews were executed On 29th/ 30th September in retaliation for some fires which were set off there.
In Zhitomir, 3,145 Jews “had to be shot” because, judging from experience they had to be considered as the carriers of Bolshevik propaganda.
In Kherson, 410 Jews were executed in reprisal against acts of sabotage. In the territory east of the Djnepr, the Jewish problem was “solved” by the liquidation Of 4,891 Jews and by putting the remainder into labour battalions of up to 1,000 persons. (R-102.)
Other accounts tell not of the slaughterso much as of the depths of degradation to which the tormentors stooped. For example, we will show the report made to defendant Rosenberg about the Army and the S.S. in the area under Rosenberg’s jurisdiction, which recited the following:
“Details in the presence of S.S. man, a Jewish dentist has to break all gold teeth and fillings out of mouth of German and Russian Jews before they are executed.”
Men, women and children are locked into barns and burned alive.
Peasants, women and children, are shot on the pretext that they are suspected of belonging to bands. (R-135.)
We of the Western world heard of gas wagons in which Jews and political opponents were asphyxiated. We could not believe it. But here we have the report of 16th May, I942, from the German S.S. Officer Becker, to his supervisor in Berlin, which tells this story;
“Gas vans in C group can be driven to execution spot, which is generally stationed ten to fifteen kilometres from main road, only in dry weather. Since those to be executed become frantic if conducted to this place, such vans become immobilised in wet weather.
Gas vans in D group were camouflaged as cabin trailers, but vehicles well known to authorities and civilian population which calls them ‘Death Vans.’
The writer of the letter, Becker, ordered all men to keep as far away as possible during gassing. Unloading van after the gassing has ‘atrocious spiritual and physical effect’ on men and they should be ordered not to participate in such work.” (501-PS.)
Liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto 1943
I shall not dwell on this subject longer than to quote one more sickening document which evidences the planned and systematic character of these Jewish persecutions. I hold a report written with Teutonic thoroughness as to detail, illustrated with photographs to authenticate its almost incredible text, and beautifully bound in leather with the loving care bestowed to a proud work. It is the original report of the S.S. Brigade General Stroop in charge of the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, and its title page carries the inscription, “The Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw no longer exists.” It is characteristic that one of the captions explains that the photograph concerned shows the driving out of Jewish “bandits”; those whom the photograph shows being driven out are almost entirely women and little children. It contains a day-by-day account of the killings mainly carried out by the S.S. Organisation, too long to relate, but let me quote General Stroop’s summary:
“The resistance put up by the Jews and bandits could only be suppressed by energetic actions of our troops day and night. The Reichsfuehrer S.S. ordered therefore on 23rd April, 1943, the cleaning out of the ghetto with utter ruthlessness and merciless tenacity. I, therefore, decided to destroy and burn down the entire ghetto without regard to the armament factories. These factories were systematically dismantled and then burned. Jews usually left their hideouts, but frequently remained in the burning buildings and jumped out of the windows only when the heat became unbearable. They then tried to crawl with broken bones across the street into buildings which were not afire. Sometimes they changed their hideouts during the night into the ruins of burned buildings. Life in the sewers was not pleasant after the first week. Many times we could hear loud voices in them. S.S. men or policemen climbed bravely through the manholes to capture these Jews. Sometimes they stumbled over Jewish corpses; sometimes they were shot at. Tear gas bombs were thrown into the manholes and the Jews driven out of the sewers and captured. Countless numbers of Jews were liquidated in sewers and bunkers through blasting. The longer the resistance continued the tougher became the members of the Waffen S.S., Police and Wehrmacht, who always discharged their duties in an exemplary manner. Frequently Jews who tried to replenish. their food supplies during the night or to communicate with neighbouring groups were exterminated.” (1061-PS) “
“This action eliminated,” says the S.S. commander, “a proved total of 56,065. To that we have to add the number killed through blasting, fire, etc., which cannot be counted.”
We charge that all atrocities against Jews were the manifestation and culmination of the Nazi plan to which every defendant here was a party. I know very well that some of these men did take steps to spare some particular Jew for some personal reason from the horrors that awaited the unrescued Jew. Some protested that particular atrocities were excessive, and discredited the general policy. While a few defendants may show efforts to make specific exceptions to the policy of Jewish extermination, I have found no instance in which any defendant opposed the policy itself or sought to revoke or even modify it.
Determination to destroy the Jews was a binding force which at all times cemented the elements of this conspiracy. On many internal policies there were differences among the defendants. But there is not one of them who has not echoed the rallying cry of Naziism: DEUTSCIILAND ERWACHE-JUDA VERRECKE (Germany Awake-Jewry Perish!)
I come to the discussion of terrorism and to preparation for the war.
How a Government treats its own inhabitants generally is thought to be no concern of other Governments or of international society. Certainly few oppressions or cruelties would warrant the intervention of foreign powers. But the German mistreatment of Germans is now known to pass in magnitude and savagery any limits of what is tolerated by modern civilisation. Other nations, by silence, would take a consenting part in such crimes. These Nazi persecutions, moreover, take character as international crimes because of the purpose for which they were undertaken.
The purpose, as we have seen, of getting rid of the influence of free labour, the churches and the Jews was to clear their obstruction to the precipitation of aggressive war. If aggressive warfare in violation of treaty obligation is a matter of international cognisance, the preparations for it must also be of concern to the international community. Terrorism was the chief instrument for securing the cohesion of the German people in war purposes. Moreover, these cruelties in Germany served as atrocity practice to discipline the membership of the criminal organisation to follow the pattern later in occupied countries.
The Selection Process at the Auschwitz Railhead
Though the police formations that are before you accused as criminal organisations, the Nazi Party leaders, aided at some point in their basic and notorious purpose by each of the individual defendants, instituted a reign of terror. These espionage and police organisations were utilised to hunt down every form of opposition and to penalise every nonconformity. These organisations early founded and administered concentration camps -Buchenwald in 1933, Dachau in 1934. But these notorious names were not alone. Concentration camps came to dot the German map and to number scores. At first they met with resistance from some Germans. We have a captured letter from Minister of Justice Gurtner to Hitler which is revealing. A Gestapo official had been prosecuted for crimes committed in a camp at Hohenstein, and the Nazi Governor of Saxony had promptly asked that the proceeding be quashed. The Minister of Justice in June of 1935 protested because, as he said, “In this camp unusually grave mistreatments of prisoners has occurred at least since Summer 1939. The prisoners not only were beaten with whips, without cause, similarly as in the Concentration Camp Bredow near Stettin until they lost consciousness, but they were also tortured in other manners, e.g., with the help of a dripping apparatus constructed exclusively for this purpose, under which prisoners had to stand until they were suffering from serious purulent wounds of the scalp.” (787-PS)
The Shoes of the Gassed
I shall not take time to detail the ghastly proceedings in these concentration camps. Beatings, starvings, tortures, and killings were routine -so routine that the tormentors became blase and careless. We have a report of discovery that in Plotzensee one night, 186 persons were executed while there were orders for only 150. Another report describes how the family of one victim received two urns of ashes by mistake. Inmates were compelled to execute each other. In 1942, they were paid five Reichsmarks per execution, but on 27th June, 1942, S.S. General Glucke ordered commandants of all concentration camps to reduce this honorarium to three cigarettes. In 1943, the Reichs leader of the S.S. and Chief of German Police ordered the corporal punishment on Russian women to be applied by Polish women and vice versa, but the price was not frozen. “As a reward, a few cigarettes” was authorised. Under the Nazis, human life had been progressively devalued, until it finally became worth less than a handful of tobacco -Ersatz tobacco. There were, however, some traces of the milk of human kindness. On 11th August, 1942, an order went from Himmler to the commandants of fourteen concentration camps that “only German prisoners are allowed to beat other German prisoners.” (2189-PS).
Mystery and suspense was added to cruelty in order to spread torture from the inmate to his family and friends. Men and women disappeared from their homes or business or from the streets, and no word came of them. The omission of notice was not due to overworked staff; it was due to policy. The Chief of the S.D. and Sipo reported that, in accordance with orders from the Fuehrer, anxiety should be created in the minds of the family of the arrested person. (668-PS.) Deportations and secret arrests were labelled, with a Nazi wit which seems a little ghoulish, “Nacht und Nebel” (Night and Fog). (L, 90, 833-PS.)
One of the many orders for these actions, gave this explanation:
“The decree carries a basic innovation. The Fuehrer and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces commands that crimes of the specified sort by civilians of the occupied territories are to be punished by the pertinent courts martial in the occupied territories only when (a) the sentence calls for the death penalty; and (b) the sentence is pronounced within eight days of arrest. Only when both conditions are met does the Fuehrer and Commander-in Chief of the Armed Forces hope for the desired deterrent effect from the conduct of punitive proceedings in the occupied territories. In other cases in the future, the accused are to be secretly brought to Germany, and the further conduct of the trial carried on here. The deterrent effect of these measures lies (a) in allowing the disappearance of the accused without a trace; (b) therein that no information whatsoever may be given about their whereabouts and their fate.” (833-PS.)
To clumsy cruelty, scientific skill was added. “Undesirables” were exterminated by injection of drugs into the bloodstream, by asphyxiation in gas chambers. They were shot with poison bullets, to study the effects (L-103); Then, to cruel experiments the Nazi added obscene ones. These were not the work of underling-degenerates, but of master-minds high in the Nazi conspiracy. On 20th May, 1942, General Field Marshal Milch authorised S.S. General Wolff to go ahead at Dachau Camp with so-called “cold experiments”; and four female gypsies were selected for the purpose. Himmler gave permission to carry on these “experiments” also in other camps (1617-PS). At Dachau, the reports of the “doctor” in charge show that victims were immersed in cold water until their body temperature was reduced to 26 degrees centigrade (8.24 degrees Fahrenheit) when they all died immediately. (1618-PS.) This was in August, 1942. But the “doctor’s” technique improved. By February, 1943, he was able to report that thirty persons were chilled to 27 to 29 degrees, their hands and feet frozen white, and their bodies “rewarmed” by a hot bath. But the Nazi scientific triumph was “rewarming with animal heat.” The victim, all but frozen to death, was surrounded with the bodies of living women until he revived and responded to his environment by having sexual intercourse. (1616-PS.) Here Nazi degeneracy reached its nadir.
I dislike to encumber the record with such morbid tales, but we are in the grim business of trying men as criminals, and these are the things that their own agents say happened. We will show you these concentration camps in motion pictures. just as the Allied armies found them when they arrived, and the measures General Eisenhower had to take to clean them up. Our proof will be disgusting and you will say I have robbed you of your sleep. But these are the things which have turned the stomach of the world and set every civilised hand against Nazi Germany.
Germany became one vast torture chamber. Cries of its victims were heard round the world and brought shudders to civilised people everywhere. I am one who received during this war most atrocity tales with suspicion and skepticism. But the proof here will be so overwhelming that I venture to predict not one word I have spoken will be denied. These defendants will only deny personal responsibility or knowledge.
Under the clutch of the most intricate web of espionage and intrigue that any modern State has endured, and persecution and torture of a kind that has not been visited upon the world in many centuries, the elements of the German population which were both decent and courageous were annihilated. Those which were decent but weak were intimidated. Open resistance, which had never been more than feeble and irresolute, disappeared. But resistance, I am happy to say, always remained, although it was manifest in only such events as the abortive effort to assassinate Hitler on 20th July, 1944. With resistance driven underground, the Nazi had the German State in his own hands.
But the Nazis not only silenced discordant voices. They created positive controls as effective as their negative case. Propaganda organs, on a scale never before known, stimulated the party and party formations with a permanent enthusiasm and abandon such as we, democratic people, can work up only for a few days before a general election. They inculcated and practised the Fuehrer-prinzip which centralised control of the Party and of the Party-controlled State over the lives and thought of the German people, who are accustomed to look upon the German State, by whomever controlled, with a mysticism that is incomprehensible to my people.
All these controls, from their inception were exerted with unparalleled energy and single-mindedness to put Germany on a war footing. We will show from the Nazis’ own documents their secret training of military personnel, their secret creation of a military air force. Finally, a conscript army was brought into being. Financiers, economists, industrialists, joined in the plan and promoted elaborate alterations in industry and finance to support an unprecedented concentration of resources and energies upon preparations for war. Germany’s rearmament so outstripped the strength of her neighbours that in about a year she was able to crush the whole military force of Continental Europe, exclusive of that of Soviet Russia, and then to push the Russian armies back to the Volga. These preparations were of a magnitude which surpassed all need of defence, and every defendant, and every intelligent German, well understood them to be for aggressive purposes.
Before resorting to open aggressive warfare, the Nazis undertook some rather cautious experiments to test the spirit of resistance of those who lay across their path. They advanced, but only as others yielded, and kept in a position to draw back if they found a temperament that made persistence dangerous.
On 7th March, 1936, the Nazis reoccupied the Rhineland and then proceeded to fortify it in violation of the Treaty of Versailles and the Pact of Locarno. They encountered no substantial resistance and were emboldened to take the next step, which was the acquisition of Austria. Despite repeated assurances that Germany had no designs on Austria, invasion was perfected. Threat of attack forced Schuschnigg to resign as Chancellor of Austria and put the Nazi defendant Seyss-Inquart in his place. The latter immediately opened the frontier and invited Hitler to invade Austria “to preserve order”. On 12th March the invasion began. The next day, Hitler proclaimed himself Chief of the Austrian State, took command of its armed forces, and a law was enacted annexing Austria to Germany.
Threats of aggression had succeeded without arousing resistance. Fears nevertheless had been stirred. They were lulled by an assurance to the Czechoslovak Government that there would be no attack on that country. We will show that the Nazi Government already had detailed plans for the attack. We will lay before you the documents in which those conspirators planned to create an incident to justify their attack. They even gave consideration to assassinating their own Ambassador at Prague in order to create a sufficiently dramatic incident. They did precipitate a diplomatic crisis which endured throughout the summer. Hitler set 30th September as the day when troops should be ready for action. Under the threat of immediate war, the United Kingdom and France concluded a pact with Germany and Italy at Munich on 29th September, 1938, which required Czechoslovakia to acquiesce in the cession of the Sudetenland to Germany. It was consummated by German occupation on 1st October, 1938.
The Munich Pact pledged no further aggression against Czechoslovakia, but the Nazi pledge was lightly given and quickly broken. On 15th March, 1939, in defiance of the Treaty of Munich itself, the Nazis seized and occupied Bohemia and Moravia, which constituted the major part of Czechoslovakia not already ceded to Germany. Once again the West stood aghast, but it dreaded war, it saw no remedy except war, and it hoped against hope that the Nazi fever for expansion had run its course. But the Nazi world was intoxicated by these unresisted successes in open alliance with Mussolini and in covert alliance with Franco. Then, having made a deceitful, delaying peace with Russia, the conspirators entered upon the final phase of the plan to renew war.
I will not prolong this address by detailing the steps leading to the war of aggression which began with the invasion of Poland on 1st September, 1939. The further story will be unfolded to you by the British Delegation from documents including those of the German High Command itself. The plans had been laid long in advance. As early as 1935 Hitler appointed the defendant Schacht to the position of “General Deputy for the War Economy.” (2261-PS) We have the diary of General Jodl (1780-PS); the “Plan Otto,” Hitler’s own order for attack on Austria in case trickery failed (C-102); the “Plan Green” which was the blueprint for attack on Czechoslovakia (338-PS); the plan for the War in the West (376-PS, 375-PS); Funk’s letter to Hitler dated 25th August, 1939, detailing the long course of economic preparation for war (699-PS); Keitel’s top-secret mobilisation order for 1939-40 prescribing steps to be taken during a “period of tension,” as it was described, during which no “‘ state of war’ will be publicly declared even if open war measures against the enemy will be taken.” This latter order (1699-PS) is in our possession despite a secret order issued on 16th March, 1945, when Allied troops were advancing into the heart of Germany, to burn these plans. We have also Hitler’s directive, dated 18th December, 1940, for the “Barbarossa Contingency,” which was a code name, outlining the strategy of the attack on Russia. That plan, in the original, bears the initials of the defendants Keitel and Jodl. They were planning the attack and planning it long in advance of the declaration of war. We have detailed information concerning the “Case White,” the plan for attack on Poland (2327-PS). That attack began the war. The plan was issued by Keitel on 3rd April, 1939. The attack did not come until September. Steps in preparation for the attack were taken by subordinate commanders, one of whom issued an order on 14th June providing that:
“The Commander-in-Chief of the Armies has ordered the working out of a plan of deployment against Poland which takes in account the demands of political leadership for the opening of the war by surprise and for quick successes.. I declare it the duty of the Commanding Generals, the Divisional Commanders, and the Commandants to limit as much as possible the number of persons who will be informed, and to limit the extent of the information, and ask that all suitable measures be taken to prevent persons not concerned from getting information.
The operation, in order to forestall an orderly Polish mobilisation and concentration, is to be opened by surprise with forces which are for the most part armoured and motorised, placed on alert in the neighbourhood of the border. The initial superiority over the Polish frontier-guards and surprise that can be expected with certainty are to be maintained by quickly bringing up other parts of the army as well to counteract the marching up of the Polish Army.
If the development of the political situation should show that a surprise at the beginning of the war is out of question, because of well-advanced defence preparations on the part of the Polish Army, the Commander-in-Chief of the Army will order the opening of the hostilities only after the assembling of sufficient additional forces The basis of all preparations will be to surprise the enemy..”( 2327-PS)
We also have the order for the attack on England, initialled again by Keitel and Jodl. It is interesting that it commences with a recognition that although the British military position is “hopeless,” they show not the slightest sign of giving in. (442-PS)
Not the least incriminating are the minutes of Hitler’s meeting with his high advisers.
As early as 5th November, 1937, Hitler told defendants Goering, Raeder, and Neurath, among others, that German rearmament was practically accomplished and that he had decided to secure by force, starting with a lightening attack on Czechoslovakia and Austria, greater living space for Germans in Europe no later that 1943-5 and perhaps as early as 1938. (368-PS) On the 23rd May, 1939, the Fuehrer advised his staff that:
“It is a question of expanding our living space in the East and of securing our food supplies over and above the natural fertility, thoroughgoing German exploitation will enormously increase the surplus.
There is therefore no question of sparing Poland, and we are left with the decision:
To attack Poland at the first suitable opportunity.
We cannot expect a repetition of the Czech affair. There will be war.” (L-79)
On 22nd August, 1939, Hitler again addressed members of the High Command, telling them when the start of military operations would be ordered. He disclosed that for propaganda purposes, he would provocate a good reason. “It will make no difference,” he announced, “whether this reason will sound convincing or not. After all, the victor will not be asked whether he talked the truth or not. We have to proceed brutally. The stronger is always right.” (1014-PS) On 23rd November, 1939, after the Germans had invaded Poland, Hitler made this explanation: “For the first time in history we have to fight on only one front. The other front is at present free, but no one can know how long that will remain so. I have doubted for a long time whether I would strike in the East and then in the West. Basically, I did not organise the armed forces in order not to strike. The decision to strike was always in me. Earlier or later I wanted to solve the problem. Under pressure it was decided that the East was to be attacked first.” (789-PS)
We know the bloody sequel. Frontier incidents were staged. Demands were made for cession of territory. When Poland refused, the German forces invaded on 1st September, 1939. Warsaw was destroyed; Poland fell. The Nazis, in accordance with plans, moved swiftly to extend their aggression throughout Europe and to gain the advantage of surprise over their unprepared neighbours, Despite repeated and solemn assurances of peaceful intentions, they invaded Denmark and Norway on 9th April, 1940; Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg on 10th May, 1940, Yugoslavia and Greece on 6th April 1941.
As part of the Nazi preparation for aggression against Poland and her allies, Germany, on 23rd April, 1939 had entered into a non-aggression pact with Soviet Russia. It uses only a delaying treaty intended to be kept no longer than necessary to prepare for its violation. On 22nd June, 1941, pursuant to long matured plans, the Nazis hurled troops into Soviet territory without any declaration of war. The entire European world was aflame.
The Nazi plans of aggression called for use of Asiatic allies, and they found among the Japanese men of kindred mind and purpose. They were brothers, under the skin.
Himmler records a conversation that he had on 31st January, 1939, with General Oshima, Japanese Ambassador at Berlin. He wrote:
“Furthermore, he (Oshima) had succeeded up to now in sending 10 Russians with bombs across the Caucasian frontier. These Russians had the mission to kill Stalin. A number of additional Russians, whom he had also sent across, had been shot at the frontier.” (2195-PS.)
On 27th September, 1940, the Nazis concluded a German-Italian-Japanese ten-year military and economic alliance by which those powers agreed “to stand by and co-operate with one another in regard to their efforts in Greater East Asia and regions of Europe respectively, wherein it is their prime purpose to establish and maintain a new order of things.”
On 5th March, 1941, a top secret directive was issued by defendant Keitel. It stated that “The Fuehrer had ordered instigation of Japan’s active participation in the war” an directed that “Japan’s military power has to be strengthened by the disclosure of German war experiences and support of a military, economic and technical nature has to be given.” The aim was stated to be to crush England quickly, thereby keeping the United States out of the war. (C-75)
On 29th March, 1941, Ribbentrop told Matsuoka, the Japanese Foreign Minister, that the German Army was ready to strike against Russia. Matsuoka in turn reassured Ribbentrop about the Far East. Japan, he reported, was acting at the moment as though she had no interest whatever in Singapore, but “intends to strike when the right moment comes.” (1877-PS) On April, 1941, Ribbentrop urged Matsuoka that entry of Japan into the war would “hasten the victory” and would be more in the interest of Japan than of Germany, since it would Japan a unique chance to fulfil her national aims and to play a leading part in Eastern Asia. (1882-PS.)
The proofs in this case will also show that the leaders of Germany were planning war against the United States from its Atlantic as well as instigating it from its Pacific approaches. A captured memorandum from the Fuehrer’s headquarters, dated 29th October, 1940, asks certain information as to air bases and reports further that:
“The Fuehrer is at present occupied with the question of the occupation of the Atlantic islands with a view to the prosecution of war against America at a later date. Deliberations on this subject are being embarked upon here.” (376-PS.)
On 7th December, 1941, a day which the late President Roosevelt declared “will live in infamy,” victory for German aggression seemed certain. The Wehrmacht was at the gates of Moscow. Taking advantage of the situation, and while her plenipotentiaries were creating a diplomatic diversion in Washington, Japan without declaration o war treacherously attacked the United States at Pearl Harbour and the Philippines. Attacks followed swiftly on the British Commonwealth and The Netherlands in the South-west Pacific. These aggressions met in the only way that they could be met, with instant declarations of war and with armed resistance which mounted slowly through many long months of reverse until finally the Axis was crushed to earth and deliverance for its victims was won.
Your Honour, I am about to take up “Crimes in the Conduct of War,” which is quite a separate subject. We are within five minutes of the recessing time. It will be very convenient for me it if will be agreeable to you.
THE PRESIDENT: We will sit again in 15 minutes’ time, (A recess was taken.)
THE PRESIDENT: The Tribunal must request that if it adjourns for I5 minutes, that members of the bar and others are back in their seats after an interval of 15 minutes. Mr. Justice Jackson, I understand that you wish to continue to 5.15, when you may be able to conclude your speech?
MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: I think that would be the most orderly way.
THE PRESIDENT: Yes, the Tribunal will be glad to do so.
MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: May it please your Honour, I will now take up the subject of “Crimes in the Conduct of War.”
Over the past few days I have been writing about War crimes, war criminals, and bringing them to justice while pointing out that some commanders, even in criminal nations have opposed and disobeyed such orders. Most of these articles have already with the Einsatzgruppen which were charged with carrying our the mass murder of Jews, Red Army Commissars, Soviet Officials, anyone believed to be a partisan, with or without proof, as well as “Life Unworthy of Life,” the physically handicapped, mentally ill, including disabled children. Their chain of command ran directly to SD Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann, and through him to SS Lieutenant General Reinhard Heydrich, SS Reichführer Heinrich Himmler to Adolf Hitler. Everything that concerned Hitler’s genocidal plan to exterminate the Jews, from emigration, to Ghettos, to the Einsatzgruppen and eventually death camps. Even when Himmler ordered the extermination of the Jews end, Eichmann did all that he could to continue exterminating them.
What caused me to revisit the subject was watching the biographical documentary of Benjamin Ferencz, the last remaining prosecutor from the Nuremberg Trials. Ferencz discovered the evidence to the Einsatzgruppen in Berlin, but not in time to have them prosecuted the Einsatzgruppen Trial. The Einsatzgruppen were four units composed of SS, SD, Waffen SS, and Order Police personnel, with a combined strength of about 3,000 personnel, commanded by SS, or SD Colonels or Generals.
The Einsatzgruppen had the mission of exterminating Jews, Gypsies, and Soviet Communist Party officials, or Red Army Commissars. They received additional support from Order Police Battalions, Wehrmacht Security Divisions, government and party officials in charge of the occupied territories, and from the Wehrmacht Army Group, Army, Army Corps, and Division Commanders in their areas of operations. The Einsatzgruppen murdered nearly a million and a half people up close and personal with pistols, rifles, and machine guns at close range over mass graves. They also pioneered the use of gas vans, which served as some of the initial gas chambers in the East. Many of their actions took place before the decision to implement the Final Solution.
However the Einsatzgruppen could not succeed in their policies without the cooperation of of the Wehrmacht, Government occupation authorities, and the Order Police they could not have murdered so many people. The story begins with Wehrmacht, principally the Army, without which the Einsatzgruppen could not have killed anyone. For the most part the Army and it’s senior commanders either gave their complete support to the Einsatzgruppen or turned a blind eye to their atrocities.
Contrary to the myth of a clean Wehrmacht, during the German invasion of the Soviet Union senior leaders of the Wehrmacht actively cooperated with the crimes of the Nazi regime against the Jews, Soviet prisoners of war, and Soviet citizens.
I have pointed out that Hitler’s ideology of the racial superiority of his Aryan Master Race and the corresponding view that the Jews and Slavs wereuntermenschenor subhuman justified the most extreme measures that the Nazis used to kill millions of innocent people through extermination, ethnic cleansing, and extermination.
There was a common myth after the Second World War that the regular German Army, the Wehrmacht, fought an honorable and clean war while the criminal actions of war crimes and genocide were the fault of Hitler, the Nazi Party, and the SS. It was a comforting myth because it allowed a great number of men who agreed with Hitler’s policies, and often assisted in them to maintain a fiction of honor and respectability. While for the most part the German Army in the West fought according to international norms of conduct, it was a different matter on the Easter Front, where following Hitler’s lead the Wehrmacht from its senior officers in down was often at the tip of the spear in enforcing Hitler’s racial and ideological war.
Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel
This came form the top. In addition to the Commissar order, also known as the Criminal Order, Field Marshal Keitel offered this directive to units fighting on the Easter Front:
“In view of the vast size of the conquered territories in the East, the forces available for establishing security in these areas will be sufficient only if instead of punishing resistance by sentencing the guilty in a court of law, the occupying forces spread such terror as is likely, by its mere existence, to crush every will to resist amongst the population.
The commanders concerned, together with all available troops, should be made responsible for maintaining peace within their areas. The commanders must find the means of keeping order within their areas, not by demanding more security forces, but by applying suitable drastic measures.”
Field Marshal Walter Von Reichenau
Commanders in the East used Keitel’s order as carte blanche authority to be even more severe than Keitel’s order specified. Field Marshal Walter Reichenau issued what is something’s known as theSeverity Orderto his 6th Army which was part of Field Marshal Gerd Von Rundstedt’s Army Group South. Von Rundstedt, who was not a Nazi and who maintained his “clean” reputation after the war expressed his“complete agreement”with it and urged other subordinates to issue similar orders. Reichenau’s order stated:
“The most important objective of this campaign against the Jewish-Bolshevik system is the complete destruction of its sources of power and the extermination of the Asiatic influence in European civilization. … In this eastern theatre, the soldier is not only a man fighting in accordance with the rules of the art of war, but also the ruthless standard bearer of a national conception. … For this reason the soldier must learn fully to appreciate the necessity for the severe but just retribution that must be meted out to the subhuman species of Jewry…”
Field Marshal Erich Von Manstein
An order was issued by General Erich Von Manstein to his Eleventh Army in November 1941 which stated in part:
“Jewry constitutes the middleman between the enemy in the rear and the remainder of the Red Armed Forces which is still fighting, and the Red leadership. More strongly than in Europe it holds all the key positions in the political leadership and administration, controls commerce and trades, and further forms the nucleus for all unrest and possible uprisings.
The Jewish-Bolshevist system must be exterminated once and for all. Never again must it encroach upon our European living space.
The German soldier has therefore not only the task of crushing the military potential of this system. He comes also as the bearer of a racial concept and as the avenger of all the cruelties’ which have been perpetrated on him and on the German people…
The food situation at home makes it essential that the troops should as far as possible be fed off the land and that furthermore the largest possible stocks should be placed at the disposal of the homeland. Particularly in enemy cities a large part of the population will have to go hungry. Nevertheless nothing which the homeland has sacrificed itself to contribute may, out of a misguided sense of humanity, be given to prisoners or to the population unless they are in the service of the German Wehrmacht.
The soldier must appreciate the necessity for the harsh punishment of Jewry, the spiritual bearer of the Bolshevist terror. This is also necessary in order to nip in the bud all uprisings which are mostly plotted by Jews…
Manstein claimed that he did not remember the order at his trial and that he sought to ensure that his troops did not engage in conduct not fitting of the honor of soldiers. He included the following in the order:“Severest action to be taken: against despotism and self-seeking; against lawlessness and lack of discipline; against every transgression of the honor of a soldier.”
In his defense at Nuremberg Generals Trial, Manstien attempted to mitigate the damning words of the order. He explained that“I do want to point out to you that if it says here that the system must be exterminated, then that is extermination of the Bolshevik system, but not the extermination of human beings.”Despite Manstein’s clarification of what he meant in the order it would be hard for soldiers and commanders receiving the order as written could hardly have been expect not to interpret it literally. Likewise his order mentions the intentional starvation of Soviet citizens and harsh invectives against the Jews.
Like Von Rundstedt, Manstein too would be rehabilitated and for the most part his complicity in Hitler’s racial and ideological war forgotten by historians and military men who admired his strategic, operational, and tactical acumen.
Colonel General Hermann Hoth
Colonel General Hermann Hoth, commander of a Panzer Group issued this order:
“Every trace of active or passive resistance or of any kind of machinations by the Bolshevik -Jewish agitators are [sic] to be immediately and pitilessly rooted out. The necessity of severe measures against elements foreign to people and kind must be understood precisely by the soldiers. These circles are the spiritual pillars of Bolshevism, the tablebearers [priests] of its murder organization, the helpers of the partisans. It consists of the same Jewish class of people which have done so much to harm our Fatherland and by its hostile activity…and anti-culture, which promotes anti-German currents in the whole world and which wants to be the bearer of revenge. Their annihilation is a law of self-preservation. Any soldier criticizing these measures has no memory of the former traitorous activity lasting for years carried on among our own people by Jewish-Marxist elements.”
Colonel General Erich Hoepner with SS Major General Walter Krüger of the 4th SS Infantry Division “Polizei”
Likewise, General Erich Hoepner issued the following order at the beginning of Operation Barbarossa:
The war against Russia is an important chapter in the German nation’s struggle for existence. It is the old battle of the Germanic against the Slavic people, of the defence of European culture against Muscovite-Asiatic inundation and of the repulse of Jewish Bolshevism. The objective of this battle must be the demolition of present-day Russia and must therefore be conducted with unprecedented severity. Every military action must be guided in planning and execution by an iron resolution to exterminate the enemy remorselessly and totally. In particular, no adherents of the contemporary Russian Bolshevik system are to be spared.
Hoepner issued a number of other orders directing how Jews should be treated and the commander of Einsatzgruppe A, SS Brigadier General Walter Stahlecker whose units killed nearly 250,000 Jews between July and December 1941 praised the cooperation of the Wehrmacht and in particular of Hoepner with his execution squads. Stahlecker described the cooperation of the Wehrmacht with his men as “generally very good”, and “in certain cases, as for example, with Panzer Group 4 under the command of General Hoepner, extremely close, one might say even warm.” The fact is that the Einsatzgruppen could not have ran up such massive numbers of deaths without the cooperation of the German Army leaders in Russia.
There are many other examples of German Army commanders at various levels issuing orders similar to Von Reichenau,Von Manstein, Hoth, and Hoepner as well as accounts of Wehrmacht units cooperating with the Einsatzgruppen in various mass extermination actions against the Jews, including the action at Babi Yar. In many cases the cooperation was quite close as evidenced by the report of the commander of Einsatzgruppe C to Berlin on November 3rd 1941:
In a great number of cases, it happened that the support of the Einsatzkommandos was requested by the fighting troops. Advance detachments of the Einsatzgruppe also participated in every large military action. They entered newly captured localities side by side with the fighting troops. Thus, in all cases, the utmost support was given. For example, in this connection, it is worth mentioning the participation in the capture of Zhitomir, where the first tanks entering the city were immediately followed by three cars of Einsatzkommando 4a.
As a result of the successful work of the Einsatzgruppe, the Security Police is also held in high regard, in particular by the HQ of the German Army. The liaison officers stationed in Army HQ are loyally briefed of all military operations, and, besides, they receive the utmost cooperation. The Commander of the 6th Army, Generalfeldmarschall von Richenau, has repeatedly praised the work of the Einsatzkommandos and, accordingly, supported the interests of the SD with his staff.
It is true that in some cases individual Wehrmacht officers refused to cooperate with the Einsatzgruppen in their operational areas, but without the cooperation of the Wehrmacht the extermination campaigns against the Jews and other Soviet citizens could not have been successful.
One has to ask what it takes for otherwise ordinary and law abiding people to carry out crimes of such magnitude. I believe that the answer is found in the racial ideology that posits certain races as being less than human. The examples of such belief in action litter human history and are not limited to the Germans of the Nazi era.
The truly disturbing thing is that the men who perpetrated the Nazi crimes against humanity and genocide were not unique. The actions of the Japanese army in China, Korea, and Southeast Asia to include the Rape of Nanking and their Unit 731; the American genocide committed against the Native American tribes and the enslavement of Blacks; the extermination of the Herero in German Southwest Africa, the Rwandan genocide, the mass killings of Bosnians by Bosnian Serbs, the Armenian genocide committed by the Turks, and far too many more examples show this to be the case. But as Israeli historian and Holocaust survivor Yehuda Bauer wrote:
“The horror of the Holocaust is not that it deviated from human norms; the horror is that it didn’t. What happened may happen again, to others not necessarily Jews, perpetrated by others, not necessarily Germans. We are all possible victims, possible perpetrators, possible bystanders.”
I think one of our problems is that we want to believe that evil is simply done be evil people. That is why when we see a Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, or the monsters of the so-called Islamic State, we are often strangely comforted. This is often because we can point to a single person with a wicked ideology and say “they are evil,” all the while forgetting that they are, or were, like us, also human.Once human beings decide that other human beings are less than human, then all bets are off, and that includes Americans. Over our history we have shown a taste for barbarity when we believe our opponents are less than human.
There is a scene in the movieNurembergin which an American psychologist named Gustave Gilbert questions the commandant of Auschwitz. When he asks the commandant if he felt guilty for the extermination of the Jews in his camp the commandant said“does a rat catcher feel guilty for killing rats.”Thereafter Gilbert confronts Herman Goering pointedly asking the number two Nazi“A rat catcher catching rats”. Is that the kind of thinking it takes to carry out state sanctioned mass murder? Not just blind obedience but also a belief that your victims are not human?”
Goering replies:Let me ask you this. What was Hiroshima? Was it not your medical experiment? Would Americans have dropped bombs as easily on Germany as it did upon Japan killing as many civilians as possible? I think not. To an American sensibility, a Caucasian child is considerably more human than a Japanese child…
What about the negro officers in your own army? Are they not allowed to command troops in combat? Can they sit on the same buses as the whites? The segregation laws in your country and the anti Semitic laws in mine, are they not a difference of degree?
The tragic thing is that while Gilbert was certainly correct in his question to Goering, Goering was also right. For all that is good about America there is a persistent strain of this kind of thinking which deems other people, especially non-white people as inferior racially, culturally, and intellectually. Over the decades we like to think that we have become better but the underlying attitudes are still present today, sometimes in plain view, but often just under our veneer of civility and good manners, but what maintains that civility is quite fragile. In his history of Auschwitz British historian Laurence Rees wrote:
“human behavior is fragile and unpredictable and often at the mercy of the situation. Every individual still, of course, has a choice as to how to behave, it’s just that for many people the situation is the key determinate in that choice.”
The German military officers who took part in the campaign in the East were terrifyingly normal. They were raised in an advanced society, highly cultured, well educated, and raised in the cradle of Protestantism, as well as Catholic Germany. Yet many of them became willing participants in crimes of their nation that are unimaginable. But the fact is that the character of nations can be as fragile as that if individuals. As Americans we like to think that we are different but our history often belies this, even our military history and this is part of our conundrum.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote of the struggle:
“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
When I taught ethics at the Joint Forces Staff College I challenged my students to deal with these kinds of questions. They are not easy and they require that we look into the darkest reaches of our hearts to see what we will do when we are confronted with choices to obey orders that go against the values of the institution but may reflect the more troubling aspects of our culture. Some of these men and women I am sure understood and will not break under pressure, but I am not so sure about others, and I worry about them in the crisis. The fact is we are only as good as we are in the crisis. Historian Timothy Snyder wrote something that we should not discount when asking the question about how ordinary men become war criminals:
“The European history of the twentieth century shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands. It would serve us well today to understand why.”
This is something that we most ponder because it would not take much in our present day where the old ethnic race hatreds, religious hatreds, and resurgent nationalism are again raising their head not only in our own country, but around the world. So until tomorrow,
This is another part of series of articles on the actions of Hitler’s SS and their Einsatzgruppen during their campaign of mass murder in Eastern Europe. This section is about the campaign in Russia. It is even more troubling than the previous sections, because in Russia, all pretense of civilization was dropped and even the German Army was heavily engaged in committing some of the most heinous and evil atrocities ever committed by a supposedly civilized and allegedly Christian people.
Likewise, it is important to remember that much of what happened before February 1942 occurred before the decision to implement the Final Solution and the beginning operations of the massive extermination camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Soribor, Belzec, and Treblinka in Poland. The latter three were simply extermination centers, while Auschwitz-Birkenau served a multiplicity of roles: death camp, medical experimentation center, work camp which provided laborers for German industry, and camp for Polish political dissidents. I will deal with these camps in future articles.
The tragedy is that other nations and people’s including Americans, British, French and the Belgians, as well as the Spanish, not to mention the Russians, Chinese, Turks, Japanese, Rwandans, and so many other have committed genocide, but nothing in their litany of genocide can compare with the Nazi Holocaust, even when the numbers added up to more. This is because nearly every ministry of the German Government was involved in them, and the Nazi Party, its officials, German Government ministries, the military and police, and German industry were involved to an extent not seen before or since.
The leaders of the Einsatzgruppen were according to General Telford Taylor:
“These defendants are not German peasants or artisans drafted into the Wehrmacht. They are not uneducated juveniles. They are lawyers, teachers, artists, and a former clergyman. They are, in short, men of education, who were in full possession of their faculties and who fully understood the grave and sinister significance of the program they embarked upon. They were part of the hard core of the SS. They did not give mere lip service to Himmler’s atrocious racial doctrines; they were chosen for this terrible assignment because they were thought to be men of sufficient ruthlessness to carry them out. They are hand-picked fanatics; every one of them was an officer of the SS … They are not unhappy victims, unwillingly pushed into crime by the tyranny of the Third Reich; these men, above all others, themselves, spread the Nazi doctrine with fire and sword.” (From “The Eichmann Kommandos: Hitler’s Executioners and the Einsatzgruppen Trial” by Justice Michael Musmanno, 1964)
Had not files been unearthed in the ruins of Berlin by a young Jewish American investigator, Benjamin Ferencz, the crimes of the Einsatzgruppen might never had been uncovered, or their leaders tried. Ferencz reported back to his superior Brigadier General Telford Taylor that he had evidence that another trial had to be added to the Nuremberg trials. Taylor agreed, and Ferencz, the youngest member of the prosecution team was appointed to prosecute these men, although he had never tried a case in his life.
Benjamin Ferencz Prosecuting the Accused during the Einsatzgruppen Trial, Ferencz is the last surviving prosecutor or defense attorney from the Nuremberg Trials still living, he was a driving force in the establishment of the International Criminal Court, which the United States has yet to Join.
The actions of the Nazis, if they were simply limited to just the Germans of that period could be explained away as a exception, but it is not. That is what makes these heinous crimes so troubling, as the people who committed them were not that different than us, or our own ancestors. Despite those the genocides perpetrated by others, those of the Nazis against the Jews are unique in their execution and evil. The entire police and military power of a nation were used first against their fellow citizens, and then against the Jews of every country they conquered or occupied in Europe. It was unique and thus the evil perpetrated by them was in a league of its own.
Eventually I will be revising these articles significantly and use them in a book that I have already begun to write “Walk, Remember, Bear Witness: Ensuring the Holocaust is not Forgotten after the Last Survivors and Witnesses Have Passed Away” This revision includes minor updates to grammar as well as to clarifying what was written in earlier editions which can be found on this site. All of these revised articles will need to be converted into a word document that I can edit and add new material and update footnotes and references.
Peace
Padre Steve+
The Nazi war against Russia was the ultimate test of Hitler’s ideological race war. Planning for the war with the Soviet Union began after the fall of France and during the opening stages of the Battle of Britain, when German and the Soviet Union were supposedly committed to their non-Aggression Pact, signed just before the invasion of Poland. On 21 July 1940 Hitler made“his intentions plain” to the Army leadership of his desire to invade and destroy the Soviet Union, and the head of the OKH, Field Marshal “von Brauchitsch set his planners to work.”119 Accordingly his staff at OKH began preparations for the offensive in the winter of 1940-41 following the Luftwaffe’s failure against Britain and postponement of Operation Sea Lion, the proposed invasion of Great Britain.
A war on multiple fronts was what all senior German officers feared, and the fact that Britain was still in the war and had opened yet another front in the Middle East against Italy which required German troops to keep the Italians from collapsing, Hitler decided to open another front. He announced his intention to “crush Soviet Russia in a quick campaign which was to begin no later than March 15, 1941, and before the end of the war with England.”120 Field Marshal Keitel noted the final decision came in “early December 1940” and from then he had “no doubt whatsoever that only some unforeseen circumstance could possibly alter his decision to attack.”121
The military plan initially focused on the destruction of “the Red Army rather than on any specific terrain or political objective,”122although the political and geographic objectives would arise in later planning and during the campaign, the goal of destroying the Red Army was of paramount importance to the destruction of the Soviet Union. Hitler stated: “What matters is that Bolshevism must be exterminated. In case of necessity, we shall renew our advance whenever a new center of resistance is formed. Moscow as the center of doctrine must disappear from the earth’s center….”123
Besides preparations aimed at the destruction of the Red Army and overthrow of the Soviet State, versus territorial gain, the “war against the Soviet Union was more openly ideological from the start.”124 The ideological prominence set the stage for the invasion and on March 3rd 1941 Hitler announced this to his assembled Generals by announcing:
“the forthcoming campaign is more than a mere armed conflict; it is a collision between two different ideologies…this war will not be ended merely by the defeat of the enemy armed forces” and that “the Jewish-Bolshevist intelligentsia must be eliminated….”125
Ordungspolizei Officers in Russia
The Jews remained the primary target of Hitler since he saw Jews and Bolsheviks as one. Because that was so important to him personally he realized that the task of eliminating the Jews was one that had to be conducted by Heinrich Himmler’s SS. He noted, that “this is a task so difficult that it cannot be entrusted to the Army.”126
Reichskommissars, civilian overlords from the Nazi Party political leadership, mostly those with experience as Gauleiters would be appointed to administer conquered areas. However, since normal civilian powers would be insufficient to eliminate the Bolsheviks Hitler noted that it “might be necessary “to establish organs of the Reichsfuhrer SS alongside the army’s Secret Field Police, even in the operational areas….”127 The “primary task” of the SS Einsatzgruppen and Police battalions was to liquidate “all Bolshevist leaders or commissars” if possible while still in the operations zones,”128 yet the orders were vague enough not to offend the sensibilities of Army leaders and did not contain “a syllable that in practice every Jew would be handed over to the extermination machine.”129
Wehrmacht Soldiers (not SS or Police) hanging civilians in Russia
As with almost all German operations which involved cooperation between the Army and the SS, the parties ensured very precise legal definitions and that existing agreements between the agencies, German laws, and army doctrine were followed. On 13 March an agreement was reached between the Army represented by General Wagner and the SS represented by SS-Brigadeführer Walter Schellenberg which stated in part, that “the Reichsführer SS has been given by the Führer special tasks within the operations zone of the Army…to settle the conflict between two opposing political systems.”130Likewise the agreement dictated that Himmler’s SS units would “act independently and on his own responsibility” while ensuring that “military operations are not affected by measures necessary to carry out his task.”131
Rounding up Jews in Russia
A further instruction was issued by Wagner on 26 March which gave the Army’s agreement for the use of the Einsatzgrüppen in the operations zone. The agreement spelled out the coordinating instructions between the Einsatzgruppen and army authorities in the operational zone and communications zones to the rear. Cooperation between the Army and the SS was based on already existing agreements between the SS and the Army, notably the “principals for co-operation between the State Secret Police and the Field Security organization of the Wehrmacht agreed with the Security branch of the War Ministry on 1 January 1937.”132
Zentralbild – IML / 1.8.1962 II.Weltkrieg 1939-45 Der überlebende halbwüchsige Sohn dieser ermordeten Familie wird an die Mordstelle herangeführt. Von dem hinter ihm stehenden faschistischen deutschen Offizier wurde er durch Genickschuss ermordet. (The surviving teenage son of this murdered family is brought to the scene of the murder. He was murdered by a shot in the neck by the fascist German officer standing behind him.) 5.7.1941 in Slorow, Ukraine A 0706/18/30
The most significant agreement that the Army reached with the SS was the Commissar Order. This order, sometimes known as the “Criminal Order”was used war as evidence at Nuremberg as against Keitel, Jodl and High Command of the Wehrmacht during the later Generals Trial. The order specified that the Army would cooperate with the SS and kill Soviet Political Commissars attached to the Red Army who were taken prisoner, as “they were not prisoners of war.” Another order specified that “in the event that a German soldier committed against civilians or prisoners, disciplinary action was optional….”133
This was a major break that the Wehrmacht made with its previous commitment to abide by the provisions of the Geneva and Hague Conventions. The new order noted a new attitude regarding political commissars and their protections under international law: “in this struggle consideration and respect for international law with regard to these elements is wrong.”134 Yet another new order released by Keitel’s OKW, the Army’s “Guidelines for the Conduct of Troops in Russia” issued on May 19, 1941 called for “ruthless and vigorous measures against Bolshevist inciters, saboteurs [and] Jews.” 135 The inclusion of the Jews made the Wehrmacht a willing accomplice to every charge leveled against German political and government organizations at Nuremberg.
Jewish Women Being Finished off In Russia
Shortly before the Commissar Order was issued Hitler previewed it to the generals saying that the war in Russia “cannot be conducted in a knightly fashion” and that the war against the Soviet Union would have to be waged with “unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness…”136
Hitler told the generals that they would have to “dispense with all of their outdated and traditional ideas about chivalry and the generally accepted rules of warfare: the Bolsheviks had long since dispensed with them.”137 He explained that he understood that his orders were beyond their comprehension but insisted, “I cannot and will not change my orders and I insist that that they be carried out with unquestioning and unconditional obedience.”138
General Franz Halder, Chief of the OKH, or the Army High Command took notes on Hitler’s speech. The notes are chilling to read as none of the Generals present could have understood them in any other way than Hitler meant them:
“Clash of two ideologies. Crushing denunciation of Bolshevism, identified with asocial criminality….We must forget the comradeship between soldiers. A Communist is no comrade before nor after the battle. This is a war of extermination….We do not wage war to preserve the enemy….War against Russia: Extermination of the Bolshevist Commissars and of the Communist intelligentsia….this is no job for military courts. The individual troop commanders must know the issues at stake. They must be leaders in the fight….This war will be very different from war in the West. In the East harshness today means leniency in the future. Commanders must make the sacrifice of overcoming their personal scruples.”139
Colonel General Franz Halder, Chief Of OKH
According to Von Brauchitsch a number of Generals protested the orders that Hitler was previewing in the briefing, and demanded that he take their protest to Hitler. 140 Von Brauchitsch refused to protest the order directly or otherwise bring it up to Hitler, but issued an order on his own authority “threatening dire penalties for excesses against civilians and prisoners of war” which he maintained at Nuremberg “was sufficient to nullify the Commissar Order.”141
But that was a lie, as during the campaign against the Soviet Union, von Brauchitsch told his commanders to “proceed with the necessary hardness.”142General Walter Warlimont noted that Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, who would “later emerge as an opponent of the Commissar Order…makes no special comment on the meeting or the restricted conference that followed.”143
At Nuremberg Keitel said that he “stubbornly contested” the clause “relating to the authority of the SS-Reichsführer… in the rearward operational areas.”144
At Nuremberg Keitel attempted to shift blame for order the to the Army High Command OKH under Halder. But his argument was easy to disprove because the order came out with his signature on behalf of Hitler, which was key evidence against him at Nuremberg. Keitel stated that “there was never any possibility of justifying them in retrospect by circumstances obtaining in the Russian campaign.”145
Some Wehrmacht commanders refused to publish the orders and “insisted that the Wehrmacht never implemented such policies…” blaming them instead on the SS, but in the campaign such refusals to publish the orders made little difference. One writer stated that “such protests were undoubtedly sincere, but in practice German soldiers were far from innocent. The senior professional officers were often out of touch with their subordinates.”146
Einsatzgruppe Mass Killing and Grave
The orders coming from Hitler, and signed by Keitel were a “license to kill, although not a great departure from German military traditions….” 147 as I noted in my article about the Legal and Military Foundations of Genocide. The effect of these orders was terrifying, for in a sense the Einsatzgruppen,even when operating with or near the Army “could commit ever crime known to God and man, so long as they were a mile or two away from the firing line.” 148 Additionally the Security Divisions of the Army, which were in charge of rear area security, were “instructed to give material and logistical support to…units of the Einsatzgruppen.”149 Even worse, other army units in rear areas “could be called on to assist Himmler’s SS police leaders” as the situation dictated, and few commanders refused to honor such requests. 150
Jews Digging their graves.
Adolf Eichmann
For the campaign against the Soviet Union, Himmler had his deputy, SS Obergrüppenfuhrer Reynard Heydrich, the Head of the Sicherheitsdienst or SD, assisted by Heydrich’s SD Deputy, SS-Obersturmbannführer(Lieutenant Colonel) Adolf Eichmann, the SS formed four Einsatzgruppen composed of SD, Waffen-SS and Police troops designated Einsatzgruppen A-D.
SS-Brigadeführer Dr. Franz Walter Stahlecker, Einsatzgruppen A
Einsatzgruppe A was assigned to Army Group North; it was commanded by SS-Brigadeführer Dr. Franz Walter Stahlecker. Stahlecker was killed in action against partisans in early 1942 and was replaced by SS Brigadeführer Heinz Jost.
Einsatzgruppe B was assigned to Army Group Center, and it was commanded by SS-Brigadeführer Arthur Nebe. Nebe returned to his job as Chief of the Kriminal Polizei at the Reichs Security Main Office in October 1941. He was ordered by the head of the Gestapo, SS General Heinrich Müller in the 50 British Officer escapees of Stalag Luft III, the Great Escape for execution in March 1944, and would be involved in the plot to kill Hitler. He went into hiding but was betrayed by a former mistress was arrested and executed at the personal order of Hitler. He was succeeded by SS Brigadeführer Erich Naumann.
Einsatzgruppe C was assigned to Army Group South and was commanded by SS-Gruppenführer Dr. Otto Rasch. Rasch who had been careful to ensure that every officer under his command personally murdered Jews was removed from his position in October 1941 and not returned to service in the SS. Units under his command conducted the Babi Yar Massacre, at Kiev in September 1941. He was employed by a German Oil company until the end of the war. He was a defendant at the Einsatzgruppen Trials but charges were dismissed due to his declining health and inability to take part in his defense. He died in 1948 while in custody. He was followed as commander of Einsatzgruppen C by SS-Gruppenführer und Generalleutnant der Polizei Max Thomas.
Otto Ohlendorf (standing) at the Einsatzgruppen Trial and in Uniform (below)
Lastly, Einsatzgruppe D was assigned to General Erich von Manstein’s 11th Army, which had the responsibility for operations along the Black Sea coast and the conquest of Crimea. It was commander by SS-Gruppenführer Prof. Otto Ohlendorf. During his command his units executed over 90,000 Jews, and at trial he offered no excuses but was brutally honest and unrepentant in what he had done.
The Einsatzgruppen were not standardized in manpower or equipment. In size they were The equivalent of battalions. The largest Einsatzgruppe was Einsatzgruppe A in the North with 990 assigned personnel 151while Einsatzgruppe D was the smallest and had only 550 troops assigned. 152 These units all had SS, SD or Police commanders. Though these units were not large, they also had the support of nine Ordungspolizei battalions, which were initially assigned to the invasion forces to supplement the operations of the Einsatzgruppen. 153
The Importance of the Ordnungspolizei Battalions
The police contingent would grow to be a massive force. By 1943, these Ordnungspolizei battalions would be grouped into regiments and number about 180,000 men assisted by 301,000 local non-German auxiliaries. 154 These units acted in concert with nine Army Security Divisions which handled rear area security. 155
Himmler was so secretive that he initially did not reveal the intent and planned use of the Ordnungspolizei units to the Einsatzgruppen commanders. Instead he told them that they had a “heavy task…to “secure and pacify” the Russian area using Sicherheitspolizei and SD methods.”156 Understanding the effect of these operations on the Ordungspolizei commanders and their personnel, Himmler told them that “in many cases it is considerably easier to lead a company in battle than to command a company responsible to…carry out executions, to deport people…to be always consistent, always uncompromising-that is in many cases far, far harder.”157
Russian Jew about to be executed in 1941 by Einsatzgruppe NCO, note the witnesses that include regular Army Personnel
The actions of all of the units are well documented; those of the most notorious, the Einsatzgruppen, but also the active and reserve Ordnungspolizei Battalions, the Army Security Divisions, and other Army or Luftwaffe units that directly aided or supported the killing of the Jews, and the locally recruited Schutzmannschaft battalions 158 which ruthlessly exterminated Jews and others in the operational area. No sooner had an Einsatzgruppe unit entered a city, a “deadly stranglehold” would grip the “Jewish inhabitants claiming thousands and thousands of victims day by day and hour by hour.”159
Babi Yar
Non-Jewish Russians were encouraged to conduct programs which Heydrich noted “had to be encouraged.” 160 An Einsatzgruppen D report numbered 153 noted: “During period covered by this report 3,176 Jews, 85 Partisans, 12 looters, 122 Communist functionaries shot. Total 79,276.”161 By the spring of 1942 Einsatzgruppe A had claimed “more than 270,000 victims, the overwhelming majority of whom were Jewish.”162 The total killed for all groups by early 1942 was 518,388 people, mostly Jews. 163 Germany’s Romanian ally acted against Jews in their operational areas as well. In Odessa, “on 23 October 1941 19,000 Jews were shot near the harbor… probably 200,000 Jews perished either at Romanian hands or after being turned over by the Romanians to the Germans.”164
To further cloud the ethics and morality, the operations against Jews were often called anti-partisan operations. Himmler referred to Einsatzgruppen as “anti-Partisan formations”165 while Wehrmacht Security divisions cooperating with the SS “murdered countless Soviet civilians and burned Russian settlements to the ground under the pretext of subduing partisan resistance.”166 The German attitude in Russia by 1941-1942 was that “all Jews are partisans and all partisans are Jews.” From 1943, all armed resistance was “banditry” and all Jews irrespective of circumstances were treated as “bandits.””167
Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau
Field Marshal Von Reichenau, commander of the German 6th Army issued an order in which he stated:
“The soldier in the Eastern territories is not merely a fighter according to the art of war but also a bearer of a ruthless national ideology and the avenger of the bestialities which had been inflicted upon German and racially related nations. Therefore the soldier must have full understanding for the necessity of a severe but just revenge on subhuman Jewry.”168
Likewise the distinguished Panzer commander, General Herman Hoth issued his own order of 17 November 1941 urging his troops to exact revenge on the Jews and Communists:
“Every trace of active or passive resistance or of any kind of machinations by the Bolshevik – Jewish agitators are [sic] to be immediately and pitilessly rooted out. The necessity of severe measures against elements foreign to people and kind must be understood precisely by the soldiers. These circles are the spiritual pillars of Bolshevism, the tablebearers [priests] of its murder organization, the helpers of the partisans. It consists of the same Jewish class of people which have done so much to harm our Fatherland and by its hostile activity…and anti-culture, which promotes anti-German currents in the whole world and which wants to be the bearer of revenge. Their annihilation is a law of self-preservation. Any soldier criticizing these measures has no memory of the former traitorous activity lasting for years carried on among our own people by Jewish-Marxist elements.”169
Jews digging their own graves
The commander of the Wehrmacht’s 221st Security Division endeavored to persuade his “subordinate units that the Jews were carriers of Bolshevik contamination and, therefore, the ultimate source of any sabotage or difficulty the division faced.”170 The extermination of the Jews and partisan war were closely intertwined with the Reich’s economic policies designed to exploit the natural resources of the Russia. This included the “hunger plan” which German authorities seemed to imagine that “millionfold starvation could be induced by requisitioning off all available grain and “shutting off” the cities.”171
Einsatzgruppe men and Ordungspolizei in action above and below: Yale Historian Timothy Snyder wrote in his book “On Tyranny” wrote: “The European history of the twentieth century shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands. It would serve us well today to understand why.”
The Wehrmacht’s complicity in these measures is demonstrated in the order drafted by Warlimont and signed by Keitel on 13 May 1941. That order, the “Decree on Exercising Military Jurisdiction in the Area of Barbarossa and Special Measures by the Troops” made it clear that international conventions regarding the treatment of civilians would not be observed in the Soviet Union. The order, relying on the historic precedent of German military law in regard to partisan activity stated:
I “Treatment of crimes committed by enemy civilians”
“1. Until further order the military courts and the courts martial will not be competent for crimes committed by enemy civilians.”
2. Francs-tireurs will be liquidated ruthlessly by the troops in combat or while fleeing. “
3. Also all other attacks by enemy civilians against the armed forces, its members, andauxiliaries will be suppressed on the spot by the troops with the most rigorous methods until the assailants are finished (niederkaempfen)”
4. Where such measures were not taken or at least were not possible, persons suspected of the act will be brought before an officer at once. This officer will decide whether they are to be shot. Against localities from which troops have been attacked in or treacherous manner, collective coercive measures be applied immediately upon the order of an officer of the rank of at least battalion etc., commander, if the circumstances do not permit a quick identification of individual perpetrators.”
II. “Treatment of crimes committed against inhabitants by members of the Wehrmacht and its auxiliaries”
1. With regard to offenses committed against enemy civilians by members of the Wehrmacht or by its auxiliaries prosecution is not obligatory, even where the deed is at the same time a military crime or misdemeanor….”172
Hitler was quite clear in his intent when he told General Halder that in 1941 that he “intended to level Moscow and Leningrad, to make them uninhabitable, so there would be no need to feed their populations during the winter.”173Economic officials held life and death power over villages. Those that met agricultural quotas were “likely to be spared annihilation and evacuation…the culmination of this process, during 1943, would be the widespread creation of “dead zones.””174
All told during the campaign against the Soviet Union the Einsatzgruppen, Ordnungspolizei, Army, and Local Security killed nearly 1.5 million Russian Jews. 175
Jewish Women Awaiting Execution
By 1942, over two million Soviet POW’s had been killed. 600,000 shot outright, 140,000 by the Einsatzkommandos.176Eventually about 3.3 million Soviet POWs died in German captivity through starvation, disease and exposure. 177
Most are included included in the total of over 10 million Red Army Combat deaths, but those starved were killed as prisoners, and not in combat, attesting to the inhumanity of their German captors. 178
But still the Jews as an indistinguishable part of the Jewish-Bolshevik menace, were the number one target of the Nazis wherever they went, especially in the Soviet Union. The distinguished German historian Karl Dietrich Bracher wrote, “The reality and irreality of the National Socialism were given their most terrible expression in the extermination of the Jews.”179
Arthur Nebe, from Jew killer to anti-Hitler plotter
Himmler and others continued to use euphemistic language to describe their efforts talking in terms of “Jewish resettlement.” 180 Terms such as special actions, special treatment, execution activity, cleansing and resettlement were used in place of the word murder.181At the same time these operations led to problems in the ranks, one SS trooper observed: “deterioration in morale among his own men who had to be issued increasing rations of vodka to carry out their killing orders.”182
Even commanders of the Einsatzgruppe were affected. Arthur Nebe would say “I have looked after so many criminals and now I have become one myself.” Nebe became an active participant in the July 20th plot against Hitler 183and a fellow conspirator would describe him as a “shadow of his former self, nerves on edge and depressed.” 184 Erich Bach-Zelewski, who led the SS anti- partisan operations, would suffer a nervous breakdown which included “hallucinations connected to the shootings of Jews” which hospitalized him in 1942. 185 Himmler would state in his Posen speech given in October 1943 that “to have gone through” the elimination of the Jews had “and remained decent, that has made us tough. This is an unwritten, never to be written, glorious page in our history.” 186
Proud and Unrepentant: Ohlendorf and Jost on Trial at Nuremberg
While while the Einsatzgruppen, Ordungspolizei battalions, the Wehrmacht Security Divisions, and locally recruited forces continued their Jew Hunts, another even more ghastly plan was being launched against the Jews in Nazi occupied territory. The Endlösung of the Jewish Problem had been set in motion.
To be continued…
Notes
119 Ibid. Megargee. War of Annihilation p.24
120 Ibid. Wheeler-Bennett TheNemesisof Power p.511
121 Ibid. Goerlitz. TheMemoirsof Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel. P.132
122 Glantz, David M. and House, Jonathan. When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler. University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, KS. 1995 p.31
123 Trevor-Roper, H.R. Hitler’sTableTalk1941-1944 with an introduction by Gerhard L Weinberg, Translated byNorman Cameron and R.H. Stevens, Enigma Books, New York, NY 2000. Originally published in Great Britain by Weidenfeld & Nicholoson, London 1953 p.6
124 Ibid. Megargee. War of Annihilation p.10 The campaign against the Soviet Union was to be much more openlyideological as compared to the campaign in Poland.
132 Ibid. Warlimont. InsideHitler’sHeadquarters pp. 158-159
133 Ibid. Glantz and House. When Titans Clashed p.56
134 Ibid. Davidowicz. TheWarAgainstthe Jews p.123
135 Ferguson, Niall. TheWar of the Worlds: Twentieth Century Conflict and the Descent of the West. The Penguin Press, New York, 2006 p.442
136 Ibid. Wheeler-Bennett. Nemesisof Power p.513
137 Ibid. Goerlitz. TheMemoirsof Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel. P.135
138 Ibid. Wheeler-Bennett. Nemesisof Power p.513
139 Hebert, Valerie Genevieve, Hitler’sGeneralson Trial: The Last War Crimes Tribunal at Nuremberg University of Kansas Press, Lawrence Kansas 2010 pp.77-78
140 Ibid. Wheeler-Bennett Nemesisof Power p.513 and footnote. He cites the three Army Group commanders, Leeb, Rundstedt and Bock. However Von Rundstedt’s biographer notes that “no evidence exists as to what VonRundstedt’s to this was at the time.” Messenger, Charles, The Last Prussian: A Biography of Field Marshal Gerd Von Rundstedt 1875-1953 Brassey’s (UK) London England 1991. p.134
155 Ibid. Shepherd WildWar in the East p.48. Shepherd notes the deficiencies of these units in terms of organization, manpower and equipment which he calls “far short of the yardstick of military excellence with which the Wehrmacht is so widely associated
156 Ibid. Höhne The Order of the Death’s Head p. 356 Only one of the Einsatzgruppen commanding officers was a volunteer, Arthur Nebe who was involved in the conspiracy to kill Hitler. It is believed by many that Nebe volunteered to earn the clasp to the Iron Cross to curry favor with Heydrich and that initially “Nebe certainly did not know that “employment in the east” was synonymous with the greatest mass murder in history.
157 Ibid. Bracher. TheGermanDictatorship p.422
158 Ibid. Blood Hitler’sBanditHunters p.55
159 Ibid. Höhne The Order of the Death’s Head p. 360 160 Ibid. Friedlander TheYearsofExtermination p.207 161 Ibid. Höhne The Order of the Death’s Head p. 360 162 Ibid. Tooze TheWages of Destruction p.481
163 Ibid. Ferguson. TheWar of the World p.446
164 Di Nardo, Richard L. Germany and the Axis Powers: From Coalition to Collapse. University Press of Kansas,Lawrence, KS. 2005 p.133 The Hungarians would also engage in ant-Jewish operations. Only the Italian army would not conduct operations against the Jews.
165 Ibid. Höhne The Order of the Death’s Head p. 369
166 Ibid. Wette TheWehrmacht p.127
167 Ibid. Blood. Hitler’sBanditHunters p.117
168 Ibid. Hebert p.94
169 Ibid. Hebert pp.94-95
170 Ibid. Shepherd. War in the Wild East pp.90-91
171 Ibid. Tooze TheWages of Destruction p.481
172 Ibid, Hebert p.86
173 Ibid. Magargee. War of Annihilation p.64
174 Ibid. Shepherd. War in the Wild East pp.127-128
175 Ibid. Davidowicz TheWarAgainstthe Jews from the table on page 403. This included 228,000 from the Baltic republics (90%) 245,000 from White Russia (65%) 900,000 from the Ukraine (60%) and 107,000 from Russia proper (11%)
176 Ibid. Rhodes. Mastersof Death p.241
177 Ibid. Glantz and House When Titans Clashed p.57
178 Ibid. Glantz and House. When Titans Clashed table on p.292
179 Ibid. Bracher. TheGermanDictatorship p.431
180 Ibid. Bracher. TheGermanDictatorship p.430
181 Ibid. Höhne The Order of the Death’s Head p. 367
182 Ibid. Rhodes. Mastersof Death p.225
183 Ibid. Rhodes Mastersof Death p.225
184 Ibid. Höhne The Order of the Death’s Head p. 363 185 Ibid. Höhne The Order of the Death’s Head p. 363 186 Ibid. Bracher. TheGermanDictatorship p.423
Since I posted an article about Hitler’s attack on Poland a few days ago, and wrote an article about the T4 Euthanasia program which was authorized the same day as the invasion of Poland, followed up by the our Hearts of Darkness; I am following it up with an older article dealing with Hitler’s first use of the Einsatzgruppen in dealing with Poles who might become leaders in an anti-Nazi Resistance as well as Jews.
Another section of the article dealing with the campaign of mass murder and genocide conducted by Hitler’s legions in Eastern Europe. This section deals with the actions of the Einsatzgrüppen in during the Polish campaign and occupation in 1939 and 1940. In it you will see that the while most of the killing was done by the SS that the German military high command was not guiltless. Some commanders attempted to stop SS actions, but they were the minority. Most simply turned a blind eye to what was going on and a few would lend their assistance to the Einsatzgrüppen.
Please note, that all of this took place before the first extermination camps began operations, and were accomplished well before the decision about the Final Solution. This killing was done up close and personal by the men of the Einsatzgruppen and the Police battalions, sometimes with the direct support and approval of the Wehrmacht. In all just a few thousand troops massacred hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews as well as the Polish gentile elites.
The precedent of the Polish Campaign would set the course of future Einsatzgruppen Operations in the Soviet Union and the Baltic states. Their actions showed that formerly law abiding and otherwise decent people could become mass murderers and war criminals. Many of these men had been honorable police officers until the Ordungspolizei and Germanderei, the City and County Police were absorbed by the SS, and their units and members used as part of the Police, and Reserve Police Battalions which assisted the Einsatzgruppen in their mass murder of Poles, and later of Russians, Ukrainians. Belorussians, Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians. As historian Timothy Snyder wrote:
“The European history of the twentieth century shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands. It would serve us well today to understand why.”
It is terribly uncomfortable, for as I always say, these men were little different than most of us, they were terribly ordinary. The real question for Americans is this: can once Fully trust formerly trusted officials of local, state and even Federal law enforcement agencies of being completely loyal to their oaths to the Constitution when the Justice Department, before it’s takeover by Trump Loyalists noted that Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists had already infiltrated police forces at every level, and that White Nationalist groups were the greater threat to national security than any other terrorist organization. Thus when local and state police authorities commit homicide against Black Citizens and then stand beside and support Neo-Nazis, they must be exposed and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law in order to protect and defend the great number of others who uphold the law, apply it equitably, and seek justice and and see their roles as servants, who protect and defend all citizens, not just those of those who are their race, creed, or political ideology.
Padre Steve+
Heinrich Himmler
The Polish campaign was a precursor to the Russian campaign and was not totally race driven. It contained elements of Germany’s perception of the injustice of Versailles which gave Poland the Danzig corridor and Germany’s desire to reconnect East Prussia to the Reich, as well as the perceived necessity to remove a potential enemy from its rear as it faced France, yet it was a campaign steeped in Nazi racial ideology. Poland resisted German efforts to ally itself with Germany in 1939, thus Hitler determined it “would be crushed first.”80
Meeting with military leaders on 23 May 1939 Hitler “made it plain that the real issue was not Danzig, but securing of Germany’s Lebensraum….”81 On 22 August Hitler enjoined the generals to “Close your hearts to pity! Act brutally! Eighty million people must obtain what is their right.”82
Even so, most military leaders failed to appreciate what Hitler was calling on them to do; Erich von Manstein would later note that “what Hitler had to say about an eventual war with Poland, could not, in my opinion, be interpreted as a policy of annihilation.”83
General Johannes Blaskowitz
Others such as Abwehr director Wilhelm Canaris was “utterly horrified.” As he read his notes to his closest colleagues “His voice trembled as he read, Canaris was acutely aware that he had witnessed something monstrous.”84 General Johannes Blaskowitz, the controversial commander of the German 8th Army who would become the military commander in Poland did not leave any notes about the meeting. However, his biographer noted that Blaskowitz “may have naively attached a military meaning to these terms since he was busy with military matters and soon to begin operations.” 85 As was noted before this was also the interpretation of Erich Manstein gave Hitler’s words, but one has to wonder as to the veracity of his statements. 86 Field Marshal Keitel noted that the speech was “delivered in the finest sense of psychological timing and application,” with Hitler molding “his words and phrases to suit his audience.”87
In light of the mixed interpretations by military leaders, it is possible that many misinterpreted Hitler’s intent and did not fully appreciated his ideology as they went into Poland, carefully secluding themselves in the narrow confines of their military world. While such an explanation is plausible for some, it is also true that many others in light of subsequent actions were in full agreement with Hitler. One author notes that “no man who participated in the FührerConferences….and there were present the highest ranking officers of the three services, could thereafter plead ignorance of the fact that Hitler had laid bare his every depth of infamy before them, and they had raised no voice in protest either then or later.”88 In July, General Wagner, the Quartermaster General issued orders that “authorized German soldiers to take and execute hostages in the event of attacks by snipers or irregulars.”89
Regardless of the meaning ascribed to Hitler’s speech by his generals, Hitler had already laid plans to destroy the Jews in Poland and decimate the Polish intelligentsia and leadership. Hitler gave Himmler the task of forming “Einsatzgrüppen to follow the German troops as they advanced into Poland and liquidate Poland’s upper class wherever it was to be found.”90 While senior party leaders remained at Hitler’s side following the conference, Himmler worked to coordinate his troops, including the reinforced Totenkopf battalions and Einsatzgrüppen with the Army. 91
Himmler began planning in early May and the Army, working in close collaboration with the SS decided to “use SS and police units to augment their own forces for security tasks.”92 Himmler established “five Einsatzgrüppen to accompany each of the numbered German armies at the start of the campaign.”93 Placed under the aegis of Reinhard Heydrich the groups were broken down into smaller units of 100-150 men and allotted to army corps. All senior posts were occupied by officers of the SD, the Sicherhietsdienst.94
Two additional Einsatzgrüppen were formed shortly after the invasion. 95Additionally three regiments of theSS Totenkopfverbande, under the direction of SS General Theodore Eicke were deployed in the rear areas of the advancing armies. These regiments were formed from the Concentration Camp guard units and eventually became the nucleus of the 3rd SS Panzer Division Totenkopf.96 The SS carefully shielded the real purpose of these units from the Army in the planning stages, while the Army might countenance anti-guerrilla operations and cooperate in arresting people who might lead resistance in Poland, the SS was not yet sure that the Army would support or countenance mass murder. 97 That being said, Heydrich worked with the Army to develop lists of up to 30,000 Poles to be arrested following the invasion including intellectuals, political leaders and clergy. 98
Himmler and Frank, Krakow, Spring 1940
To eliminate the Polish elites without disturbing the Army, Himmler and Heydrich gave the Army “only the bare minimum of information” as to their ultimate intent99 The deception was initially successful and many Wehrmacht commanders welcomed the assistance of the SS units for rear area security missions. Blaskowitz’s 8th Army defined the mission of the Einsatzgrüppen in the traditional doctrinal terms of the Ettapen, noting their mission as “the suppression of all anti-Reich and anti- German elements in the rear of the “fighting troops, in particular, counter espionage arrests of politically unreliable persons, confiscation of weapons, safeguarding of important counter- espionage materials etc…” 100General Wagner, the Quartermaster General issued orders in July 1939 that “authorized German soldiers to take and execute hostages in the event of attacks by snipers or irregulars.” Despite the deception, there was no way to disguise the murder of Polish intelligentsia and Jews once it began, and had the Army had the political acumen and moral courage it could have considerably restricted or even halted the terror campaign.101
Reinhardt Heydrich
The ensuing campaign in Poland demonstrated Hitler’s true intent. Heydrich openly discussed “murdering the Polish ruling class” of the aristocracy, Catholic clergy, communists and Jews at a meeting on September 7th, barely a week after the beginning of the invasion. 102 As the German armies advanced into Poland slicing through the badly deployed and inadequately equipped Polish Army the Einsatzgruppen and the Totenkopf Verbande followed in their wake, conducting mass arrests and executions of those Poles deemed to be a threat.
Many army leaders were worried about Polish soldiers left behind in rear areas as the armies advanced. In some cases that concern became a paranoid mindset and some generals believed that a “brutal guerrilla campaign has broken out everywhere and we are ruthlessly stamping it out.”103
Ordungspolizei Battalion preparing for Mass Murder
Yet some of the actions by Einsatzgruppen and Totenkopf Verbande against the Polish elites and the Jews drew Army reactions. The unit commanded by SS General Woyrsch “behaved with such unparalleled bestiality that it was thrown out of the operational area” by General List of 14th Army.” 104 Another unit, the TotenkopfverbandeBrandenburg came to Army attention when its commander remarked that the “SSVT would not obey Army orders.” The conclusion drawn by the Army General was that “the SSVT commander was following orders from some non-military authority to terrorize the local Jews.”105
These atrocities as well as those of other Waffen-SS units were hard to hide and brought reactions out of army commanders who sought to punish the offenders. Blaskowitz and a few other commanders attempted to put a halt to SS actions against Poles and Jews, 106 but most officers turned a blind eye to the atrocities or outright condoned them. It is believed that General Walter Model and many other senior officers “not only knew what was occurring in Poland but actually took part in what Colonel General Franz Halder himself described in October as “this devilish plan.””107
Notification of a Mass Execution, Warsaw, March 1941
It appears that many of the officers who objected were not motivated so much by humanitarian, moral or legal considerations, but rather by the effect on good order and discipline of their soldiers. 108 Likewise it is clear that many officers, even if they did not participate in the actions probably approved of them. Many of the early biographies and histories of this period were written by authors who were influenced by surviving German officers. Many of these men were being rehabilitated and helping the Americans and British meet the threat of the Soviet Union, made no or little mention of the Army’s part in these actions.
Both Himmler and Heydrich were sensitive to the perception of the Army and resented the fact that the Army believed them to be responsible for actions that they were carrying out under the direction and orders of Hitler himself, They also resented that their troops were characterized as “undisciplined gangs of murderers” by many Army officers. 109
Einsatzgruppen Execution in a Bydgoszcz Poland 1939
After crushing the Polish armies and dividing Poland with the help of the Red Army, the Germans established what became known as the Government General, which was headed by Hans Frank. The new civilian administration came into conflict with the military governor, General Blaskowitz. Appalled by the actions of the SS, Police and the Nazi administration. Blaskowitz made an “elaborate report on the atrocities of the SS,”110 expressing concern about his “extreme alarm about illegal executions, his worries about maintaining troop discipline under those circumstances, the failure of discussions with the SD and Gestapo and their assertions that they were only following SS Orders.” 111
The Synagogue in Bydgoszcz in 1939 with a Banner saying the “City is Cleansed of Jews”
While it is unclear if the memorandum made it to Hitler, it is clear that Hitler did know about the protest and Blaskowitz fell into disfavor and was reassigned after a period of continued conflict with the Nazi administration. Hitler was not impressed by the less than ruthless attitudes of Blaskowitz and other commanders. His reaction to Army objections regarding the methods of the SS and police units was characteristically acidic. Hitler’s military adjutant recalled that Hitler accused the Army’s leaders of using “Salvation Army” methods, and called their ideas regarding the occupation as “childish.”112
Following the reassignment of Blaskowitz, other officers that objected were also relieved of their commands or reassigned. General Georg von Külcher was relieved of command for protesting SS and police atrocities. 113
At the beginning of the campaign the SS units and their commanders fell under military justice, and a number of SS officers and their troops were convicted by Army courts-martial for their actions. But soon, SS Officers convicted by Army courts-martial were given amnesty by Hitler and Hitler “removed SS units from the jurisdiction of military courts,” on October 4th 1939. 114 While the army remained, it was no longer in charge and would actively assist the SS and Police in combat and further atrocities against civilians. In November 1939, One German officer, who later was a conspirator in the July 20th plot, remarked, “was ashamed to be German! The minority are dragging our good through the mud by murdering, looting and torching houses will bring disaster on the whole German people if we do not stop it soon…”115
Bodies of Einsatzgruppen Victims
The Army was soon relieved of responsibility for policing Poland which fell on the Ordungspolizei battalions and Gendarmerie. Many officers were pleased as they could now turn their backs on the situation there and begin to prepare for the campaign in the West.
Polish Jews Being Forced to Dig their Own Graves before being Murdered
The Ordungspolizei battalions and the Gendarmerie units were composed of mobilized city police and rural constabulary police. These men would soon wreak their own devastation on Poland in the coming months and years. 116Poland was also be the first use of mass evacuations of civilian populations to make room for German settlers, in the newly acquired Lebensraum. Poles were driven into the newly formed Government General and ethnic Germans moved into previously Polish occupied territories. By 1941 over 1,200,000 Poles and 300,000 Jews had been expelled and 497,000 ethnic Germans brought into provinces German had lost in 1919. 117
Prior to the war about 3.3 million Jews lived in Poland. The actions of the Einsatzgruppen and the Police brought a reign of terror to Poland’s Jews. The Jews were rounded up and sent to Ghettos from which they would be dispatched to the death camps following the decision to implement the “Final Solution.”After the war only some 50-70,000 Jews were found to have survived in Poland, the Polish Army and camps in Germany. A further 180,000 were repatriated from the Soviet Union. 118
To be continued….
Notes
80 Ibid. Weinberg. Visions of Victory p.8
81 Ibid. Goerlitz, History of the German General Staff p.346
82 Höhne, Heinze. The Order of the Death’s Head: The Story of Hitler’s SS. Translated by Richard Barry. PenguinBooks, New York and London, 2000. First English edition published by Martin Secker and Warburg Ltd. London 1969. Originally published as Der Orden unter dem Totenkopf, Verlag Der Spiegel, Hamburg 1966 p.259
83 Manstein, Erich von. Forward by B.H. Liddle Hart, Introduction by Martin Blumenson. Lost victories: The War Memoirs of Hitler’s Most Brilliant General. Zenith Press, St Paul MN 2004. First Published 1955 as Verlorene Siege, English Translation 1958 by Methuen Company p.29
84 Ibid. Hohne. Canaris p.347
85 Giziowski, Richard. TheEnigma of General Blaskowitz. Hppocrene Books, New York 1997 p.119
86 Ibid. Manstein. LostVictories p.29
87 Ibid. Goerlitz. TheMemoirsof Field Marshal Keitel p.87
88 Wheeler-Bennett, John. TheNemesisof Power: The German Army in Politics 1918-1945. St. Martin’s Press Inc. New York, NY 1954 p.448
89 Ibid. Megargee. War of Annihilation p.13
90 Ibid. Höhne The Order of the Death’s Head p.297
91 Padfield, Peter. Himmler. MJF Books, New York 1990 p.264
94 Ibid. Höhne The Order of the Death’s Head p.297 95 Ibid. Westermann. Hitler’sPoliceBattalions p.127 96 Ibid. Sydnor Soldiers of Destruction p.37
97 Ibid. Giziowski Blaskowitz p.120
98 Ibid. Witte. TheWehrmacht p.100
99 Ibid. Höhne The Order of the Death’s Head pp. 297-298
100 Ibid. Giziowski Blaskowitz p.120
101 Ibid. Höhne The Order of the Death’s Head p.298
102 Ibid. Witte. TheWehrmacht p.100
103 Newton, Steven H. Hitler’s Commander: Field Marshal Walter Model-Hitler’s Favorite General Da Capo Press a division of Perseus Books Group, Cambridge MA 2005. p.74
104 Ibid. Giziowski. TheEnigma of General Blaskowitz pp.165-166
105 Ibid. Sydnor, Soldiers of Destruction pp. 42-43 Note SSVT is the common abbreviation for Verfügungstruppe which was the early designation of the SS Totenkopf Verbande and some other Waffen SS Units.
106 Ibid. Goerlitz. Historyof the German General Staff p.359
107 Ibid. Newton. Hitler’sCommander p.78
108 Ibid. Witte TheWehrmacht p.102
109 Ibid. Höhne The Order of the Death’s Head p.298
110 Ibid. Goerlitz. Historyof the German General Staff .p.359 111 Ibid. Giziowski. TheEnigma of General Blaskowitz p.173 112 Ibid. Giziowski. TheEnigma of General Blaskowitz p.173
113 Ibid. Witte TheWehrmacht p.102
114 Burleigh, Michael and Wippermann, Wolfgang. The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945 Cambridge University Press, New York NY and Cambridge UK 1991. p.100
115 Ibid. Witte TheWehrmacht p.102
116 For a good account of one of the Police Battalions see Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher Browning Harper Perennial Publishers, San Francisco CA 1992
117 Reitlinger, Gerald. TheSS: Alibi of a Nation. The Viking Press, New York, 1957. Republished by Da Capo Press, New York, NY p.131
On July 31st 1941, barely over a month into the Nazi invasion of Russia, which at the time looked to be another sure win in the Nazi column. The Red Army had suffered immense losses. Hitler and the German High Command could sense victory in the offing, and on that day Hermann Goering, Hitler’s deputy sent a message to the head of the Reichs Security Main Office, SS Lieutenant General Reinhard Heydrich giving him express orders to plan for what the Nazis referred to as the Endlösung, or the final/total solution to what they called the Jewish problem.
Georing wrote:
“Supplementing the task assigned to you by the decree of January 24th 1939, to solve the Jewish problem by means of evacuation and emigration in the best possible way by according to present conditions, I hereby charge you to carry out preparations as regards organizational, financial, and material matters for a total solution (Gesamtlosung) of the Jewish question in all the territories of Europe under German occupation.
Where the competency of other organizations touches on this matter, the organizations are to collaborate.
I charge you further to submit to me as soon as possible a general plan of the administrative material and financial measures necessary for the carrying out the desired final solution (Endlosung) of the Jewish question.”
It was an order that Heydrich and his successors following his assassination by Czech partisans in 1942 would follow with deadly consequences to the Jews of Europe.
Reinhardt Heydrich
But the reality was set many years before when Adolf Hitler and other anti-Semites declared the Jews to be vermin, and sub-human. The German word is more sinister sounding, untermenschen. They simply refused to admit the Jews were fully human, and instead believed that the Jews were an alien subspecies, an infestation that had to be eradicated. In fact the very same kind of language that President Trump and many of his followers use to describe racial and religious minorities today: American blacks, Mexican Americans, Asians, Arabs of all religious beliefs, even Jews when they desire. They also use such language to describe political opponents.
The late Christopher Hitchens wrote:
“Die Judenfrage,’ it used to be called, even by Jews. ‘The Jewish Question.’ I find I quite like this interrogative formulation, since the question—as Gertrude Stein once famously if terminally put it—may be more absorbing than the answer. Of course one is flirting with calamity in phrasing things this way, as I learned in school when the Irish question was discussed by some masters as the Irish ‘problem.’ Again, the word ‘solution’ can be as neutral as the words ‘question’ or ‘problem,’ but once one has defined a people or a nation as such, the search for a resolution can become a yearning for the conclusive. Endlösung: the final solution.”
Hitchens, an Atheist was absolutely correct, when so many modern Christians, and other religionists of various types fail to see the danger. In fact, many of Trump’s most devoted religious followers, especially some supposedly conservative Christians blissfully embrace that ideology as would the members of any cult of death.
So much for their insistence of being pro-life when they join heavily armed White Supremacist and Neo-Nazi Groups, or at the minimum do nothing to condemn their overt acts of racist violence against Blacks, immigrants of all types, and LGBTQ people. They follow conspiracy theories blindly, reject science but not necessarily technology. Many deny the Coronavirus and refuse to comply with measures that could minimize the spread of the pandemic and treat it if it is a hoax. If I wasn’t a Christian there is nothing that these malignant sociopaths could ever do to make me follow their “no-god,” because their God is not Jesus the Christ but Donald the Deceiver, a man with more traits of an Anti-Christ than any American leader in history, with the possible exception of Jefferson Davis. Dietrich Bonhoeffer Said of such alleged Christians:
“Christianity stands or falls with its revolutionary protest against violence, arbitrariness and pride of power and with its plea for the weak. Christians are doing too little to make these points clear rather than too much. Christendom adjusts itself far too easily to the worship of power. Christians should give more offense, shock the world far more, than they are doing now. Christian should take a stronger stand in favor of the weak rather than considering first the possible right of the strong.”
Bonhoeffer’s words are a warning to everyone who abandons the Gospel in order to gain political, economic, and even police power to achieve their goals.
The fact is that once a people, be they Germans, Americans, English, Russians, Chinese, Japanese, Turks, Persians, or so many others throughout history determine that any racial, religious, or political group, that they loath is less than human, that in time their words will express their thoughts, and direct their actions. That my friends is a historic, religious, psychological, and sociological truth.
I hate to keep shouting this warning, of Yehuda Bauer who wrote:
“The horror of the Holocaust is not that it deviated from human norms; the horror is that it didn’t. What happened may happen again, to others not necessarily Jews, perpetrated by others, not necessarily Germans. We are all possible victims, possible perpetrators, possible bystanders.”
With every, tweet and every statement the American President continues to stoke the fires of race hatred, just as he did the past three days as Civil Rights hero lay in state at the U.S. Capital, as he crossed the Edmund Pettis Bridge for the last time and as he was laid to rest. Sadly, his followers seem to feed on it. I will not ever be a perpetrator, or a bystander, but it is possible that for speaking my views, I may someday be a victim, but I will go down fighting.
I hate cowardly bullies like the President, who dodged the draft five times, denigrates combat wounded, former POWs, and those suffering TBI, PTSD and Moral Injury as weak, while pardoning convicted war criminals. I show honor to the office that he holds, but have no respect for him as a person because he is worth of no respect.
In 2015 I realized exactly who he was and what he would do if he ever became President and I lost a lot of people who I thought were friends over it. He is an unrepentant racist, a White Supremacist, and a malignant narcissistic sociopath who has no empathy for anyone. He is his father’s horribly damaged child. Everything I said about him before he was elected in 2016 has proved to be right. My Oath of Office is to the Constitution, not him. He may occupy the office but he has ripped up and pissed on his oath to support and defend the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. When he took that oath he lied and followed it with a dystopian Inaugural Address that was fictional when he spoke it but has become fact during his reign of terror and death. As of today over 155,000 Americans have died of COVID 19, our Gross Domestic product declined by the most it ever has, and tens of millions of Americans are out of work as he overturns Civil Rights laws, sends DHS storm troopers to kidnapp American citizens off the street with no probable cause and no chargers. He attacks peaceful demonstrations using massive force in order to get a photo op, he intentionally repeats conspiracy theories, and debunked cures for Coronavirus, and he sells out American national security to Vladimir Putin, the former Soviet KGB Agent who is now President of Russia for life. He is worse than Vidkun Quisling, Henri Laval, Marshal Petain, and every other traitor who ever lived.
Gustave Gilbert, the American psychologist to the major Nazi War Criminals wrote of them words that could be equally applied to President Trump, his Administration, the vast majority of elected GOP representatives and senators, at Federal and State levels:
“In my work with the defendants (at the Nuremberg Trails 1945-1949) I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”
Gustave Gilbert and Christopher Hitchens words are as true today as when they were written, as are Yehuda Bauer’s.
However, I think that the most damning indictment comes from the First Pamphlet of the White Rose Resistance to Hitler written by a twenty-two year old German University student named Sophie Scholl. She wrote:
“Nothing is so unworthy of a civilized nation as allowing itself to be governed without opposition by an irresponsible clique that has yielded to base instinct. It is certain that today every honest German is ashamed of his government. Who among us has any conception of the dimensions of shame that will befall us and our children when one day the veil has fallen from our eyes and the most horrible of crimes – crimes that infinitely outdistance every human measure – reach the light of day.”
One day we will see them all in their horrible and inhuman reality. The sooner the better. If not anyone who opposes Trump might end up disappeared in a Nacht und Nebel or Night and Fog operation, or end up in a camp without any charges, and with an indefinite sentence, purely based on the whim of an amoral malignant narcissistic sociopath President and his equally sadistic Administration, Party, and Cult.
I have to tell to truth, it is my first duty to my faith and to my oath to the Constitution. General Ludwig Beck who resigned his post as the Chief of Staff of the German Army in the face of Hitler’s planned invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938 and died in the failed attempt to kill Hitler and end Nazi rule on July 20th 1944 said:
“It is a lack of character and insight, when a soldier in high command sees his duty and mission only in the context of his military orders without realizing that the highest responsibility is to the people of his country.”
And as Major General Henning Von Tresckow said:
“I cannot understand how people can still call themselves Christians and not be furious adversaries of Hitler’s regime.” One could easily substitute the name of Donald Trump for Hitler and it would not be much different. He also said “We have to show the world that not all of us are like him. Otherwise, this will always be Hitler’s Germany.” The same is true today. But do we have the courage to stand?
Last night I wrote about the Wannsee Conference yesterday. The references were more from films based on history than documents themselves. This is different, it uses the words of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders to deal with the conference at the Villa overlooking the lake in the south Berlin district of Wannsee.
Primo Levi wrote, “Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”
Seventy-eight years ago today a group of 15 relatively common men of various German government, police, and party agencies sat around a table and discussed the implementation of what is called the Final Solution. The meeting was chaired by SS Lieutenant General Reinhard Heydrich, who had been charged with the task of solving Germany’s “Jewish Problem” shortly after the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Hermann Goering, the number two man in the Nazi Reich sent Heydrich the following message:
Berlin, July 31st 1941
To: Gruppenfuhrer Heydrich
Supplementing the task assigned to you by the decree of January 24th 1939, to solve the Jewish problem by means of evacuation and emigration in the best possible way by according to present conditions, I hereby charge you to carry out preparations as regards organizational, financial, and material matters for a total solution (Gesamtlosung) of the Jewish question in all the territories of Europe under German occupation.
Where the competency of other organizations touches on this matter, the organizations are to collaborate.
I charge you further to submit to me as soon as possible a general plan of the administrative material and financial measures necessary for the carrying out the desired final solution (Endlosung) of the Jewish question.”
Goering
Heydrich
When Goering wrote Heydrich, the head of the Reichssiecherhiethauptampt (RSHA) or Reich Security Main Office, in July 1941 it seemed that Nazi victory in Europe was all but assured. Goering’s words were businesslike. Early measures taken by Heydrich to rid Germany and annexed Austria had been reasonably successful to rid those areas of their Jews through emigration and evacuation. These were not benign measures, people were forced to leave their homes, businesses, communities, and had most of their belongings taken from them in order to leave the Reich, and subjected to much violence and segregation.
However with the occupation of most of Europe following the Nazi military success and the looming occupation and subjugation of the Soviet Union the process of giving the Jews a chance to emigrate to lands outside Nazi control had come to an end. In fact the Nazis occupied the countries that may Jews had found refuge.
Less than six months after he received the directive from Goering, on January 20th 1942 Heydrich summoned representatives from various Reich agencies were called for what turned out to be a brief, two hour meeting which decided the fate of the Jews. The meeting was originally scheduled for early December 1941, but the combination of the Soviet counteroffensive at Moscow and the German declaration of war against the United States following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but was deflated for just over a month until the situation on the Eastern Front had been stabilized.
The meeting was held at an estate located in the southern suburbs of Berlin, called Wansee. Organized by Heydrich’s deputy Adolph Eichmann, involved Heydrich, Eichmann and 13 mid level representatives from various economic, governmental, justice and police entities.
At the conference Heydrich established his authority through Goering’s directive to overcome the bureaucratic and personal attempts of various attendees to take control of the Final Solution process. Despite objections from some attendees who favored sterilization and the use of Jews in the war armaments industries, Heydrich made it clear that the Final Solution would be a campaign of extermination. He was quite clear:
“Approximately 11 million Jews will be involved…in large single sex labor columns, Jews fit to work will work their way eastward constructing roads. Doubtless the large majority will be eliminated through natural causes. Any final remnant that survives will doubtlessly consist of the most resistant elements. They will have to be dealt with appropriately, because otherwise by natural selection, they would form the germ cell of a new Jewish revival.”
The Nazi leadership decided that its race war against the Jews needed to forge ahead. Within days of Wansee the orders went out and SS commanders at various concentration camps began devising more efficient means to exterminate Jews and other “sub-humans.” It was a matter of pride and efficiency for them. As Rudolph Hoess the Commandant of Auschwitz said at Nuremberg “the camp commandant at Treblinka told me that he had liquidated 80,000 in the course of one half year. He was principally concerned with liquidating all the Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto. He used monoxide gas, and I did not think that his methods were very efficient. So when I set up the extermination building at Auschwitz, I used Zyclon B….” Hoess estimated that some 2.5 million people were exterminated at Auschwitz at rates as high as 10,000 a day.
Einsatzgruppen in Action
Before the Conference took place, four Einsatzgruppen followed each of the German Army Groups and systematically began to massacre the Jews of every city and village which German soldiers captured. The Einsatzgruppen, Ordungspolizei battalions, Army Security Divisions and locally recruited units in fewer than six months, killed over a million and a half Soviet Jews, and the slaughter would continue unabated until the dying days of the Reich. One of the participants at the conference, the SS Major and commander of Einsatzkommando in Latvia, had been in charge of exterminating over 30,000 Jews, before the meeting was organized.
When the Nazis began their attack into the Soviet Union, Heinrich Himmler, Heydrich’s friend and superior told a gathering of senior SS leaders:
“I also want to mention a very difficult subject before you here, completely openly. It should be discussed among us, and yet, nevertheless, we will never speak about it in public…I am talking about the “Jewish evacuation” the extermination of the Jewish people.”
It is One of the things that is easily said. “The Jewish people is being exterminated,” every Party member will tell you, “perfectly clear, it’s part of our plans, we’re eliminating the Jews, exterminating them, ha!, a small matter.”
But then along they all come, all the decent upright Germans and each has his decent Jew. They all say: the others are all swine, but here is a first class Jew. And none of them has seen it, has endured it. Most of you will know what it means when 100 bodies lie together, or when there are 500 or 1000. And to have seen this through, and –with the exception of human weaknesses– to have remained decent, has made us hard and is a page of glory never mentioned and never to be mentioned….”
Himmler and his entourage
Whether the words are those of Goering, Heydrich, Hoess or Himmler, there is a certain businesslike banality to them. But these men, and many others like them orchestrated a campaign of genocide and race hatred unmatched in history. Yes, there have been other genocides, the Turks killing the Armenians during the First World War and the Hutu and Tutsi slaughter in Rwanda but neither they or the politically motivated campaigns of mass slaughter conducted by the Soviets, the Chinese Communists and the Khamer Rouge killing fields can match the systematized extermination campaign waged by the Nazis against the Jews.
The truly terrifying thing about the Nazi perpetrators of the Holocaust to me is that most of the men at Wannsee; as well as the men that commanded the Concentration camps and the Einsatzgruppen were very ordinary men who simply believed that they were doing their jobs.
They are all a very fascinating group of men to study. Very few could be described as psychopathic killers by nature. They were lawyers, doctors, career police officials, businessmen, and bureaucrats who carried out an extermination campaign that killed by their own numbers between 5.5 and 6 million Jews, not to mention others deemed to be subhuman including the handicapped, the mentally ill, homosexuals, and other non-Jewish minorities like the Gypsies not to mention the wide variety of those considered political enemies. But it was the Jews that bore the most tragic fate.
It is something that we must never forget.When it comes to Wannsee, the men there had few qualms about what they were doing. Most of those who opposed Heydrich did so because he was centralizing the power of action against the Jews in his Reich Main Security Office (RSHA) and subordinating the the other Reich ministries to it. But by the end of the conference all of the participants had agreed to Heydrich’s terms. Some did what they could afterwards to use their Bureaucratic abilities to prevent some of the protocols from being fully implemented, while others did all they could to implement it.
After the war it meant the difference between life and death for the attendees, except Heydrich who was killed by Czech partisans a few months after the Wannsee Conference, SS Major Rudolph Lange, who died fighting the Red Army toward, the end of the war, Martin Luther Unter Staatssekretär of the Foreign ministry who died of a heart attack, in a concentration camp after opposing Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop in 1945; Roland Freisler who represented the Ministry of Justice who died in early 1945 during a bombing attack on Berlin while serving as the head of Hitler’s extrajudicial People’s Court, and Gauleiter and Staatssekretär Alfred Meyer who committed suicide near the Weser River in May 1945. A few of the rest received the death penalty, but most received relatively brief prison sentences, and some lived to old age. In the end, only one, Friedrich Kritzinger showed remorse for his and his country’s actions during Nazi rule.
One man of fifteen. I wonder if the same ratio applies to the officials of the governments of evil, repressive, authoritarian regimes. Possibly even the one emerging in the United States.
The great American philosopher, Eric Hoffer once wrote, “Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all the unifying agents. Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil.”
Hatred is an amazing emotion. In the final scene of the movie Conspiracy which is about the Wansee Conference, at which fifteen officials of the Nazi government met to coordinate what became the Holocaust, the “Final Solution” of what the Nazis called, “the Jewish problem.” The movie is troubling because the men in the room were well-educated, high to mid-level officials from a variety of agencies who were called together to ensure that their respective agencies worked together.
At beginning of the movie, Kenneth Branagh who plays SS Lieutenant General Reinhard Heydrich describes the “problem to be solved”
“To begin, we have a storage problem in Germany with these Jews…. The laws enacted at Nuremberg, and we should drink a toast to Dr. Stuckart for devising them….They established the fundamental legality for the creation of a Jew-free society, a Jew-free economy for the world to see. And we, indeed, have eliminated the Jew from our national life. Now, more than that, the Jew himself must be physically eradicated from our living space…
Then, in acquiring Poland, we acquired two and a half million more. By last July, we were met with a new situation, we would, in very short order, be acquiring some five million Jews as we conquered Russia. The dimensions of this problem have magnified astoundingly. Five million…
At that time, last July, confronting this new situation, Reichsmarshal Goering prepared a directive, you have a copy. The operative words, if you’ll permit me to read:
“I hereby charge you with making all preparations.in regard to organizational and financial matters for bringing about a complete solution of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe.”
Now, for that, I read the cleansing of the entire continent of Europe.…in the second paragraph: “Wherever other governmental agencies
are involved these are to cooperate with you.” I hope. So on, so on… “as necessary for the accomplishment of the desired solution of the Jewish question.” This is our mandate, all of us.
Donald Trump has talked about expelling and deporting over 11 million Mexicans and other South or Central Americans from this country. True, many are here illegally, but at the same time most are working and paying taxes, doing the things that many Americans consider themselves too good to do. He has mentioned similar things in regard to Muslims, as well as banning any Muslim from coming to the country. He has talked about going along with the desire of the Christian Right to roll back the hard earned rights of Homosexuals, and he has no regard for African Americans and their rights, with the possible exception of Ben Carson, but I digress…
At the close of the meeting the decision to exterminate the Jews was agreed to by the assembled officials who pledged to work with each other, once they had been told of how the logistics of the operation would take place. Not all were happy, some were shocked, but all rolled over and agreed to cooperate with Heydrich.
At the end of the movie Heydrich is asked to share an allegorical story that one of the less enthusiastic conference participants, Reich Chancellery State Secretary, Dr. Wilhelm Kritzinger, told him about hatred of the Jews. Heydrich recalled the story to SS Major General Heinrich Müller and SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann.ueller and SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann:
“Yes, he told me a story about a man he’d known all his life, a boyhood friend. This man hated his father. Loved his mother fiercely. The mother was devoted to him……but the father beat him, demeaned him, disinherited him. Anyway, this boy grew to manhood and was still in his 30s when the mother died…this mother who had nurtured and protected him.She died. The man stood as they lowered her casket and tried to cry…but no tears came. The man’s father lived to old age, died when the son was in his 50s. At the father’s funeral, much to his son’s surprise…he could not control his tears. He was wailing, sobbing. He was apparently inconsolable. Lost, even. That was the story Kritzinger told me.
Eichmann said, “I don’t understand.”
Heydrich answered: “No? The man had been driven his whole life by hatred of his father. When the mother died, that was a loss. When the father died…when the hate had lost its object…then the man’s life was empty. Over.
Eichmann replied: “Interesting. That was Kritzinger’s warning. What? That we should not hate the Israelites?”
To which Heydrich said, “No, that it should not so fill our lives…that when they are gone, we have nothing left to live for. So says the story. I will not miss them”
I used to show the film as the final class in the ethics elective that I taught at the Joint Forces Staff College. After the film was over it never failed that at least one of the students would bring up pertinent comments about hate in our current political climate. Again I cannot go into details, but I can assure you that the conversation was always subdued and sobering. I think that all of us left better for it, for such men and women know that there is a Rubicon that cannot be crossed. In the troubling times that we live, that gives me some comfort.
The story is pertinent when one looks at what Donald Trump is doing right now. I really have to wonder how deep hatred such as his runs in this country, because unlike love, hatred is easy to conjure up. It is kind of like what you need to build a fire; fuel, oxygen and heat. To generate hatred on a massive scale all you need is a disaffected populace, a convenient target, and an agent to ignite the mixture.
Shrewd politicians, preachers, and pundits do this well. Donald Trump is showing himself to be a master of this. He, and others like him, and not just American politicians, pundits or preachers, mind you, demonize the target group or population and then let the hatred of their disaffected followers flow.
Leaders who are consumed with hate need a disaffected and angry base in order to rise to power; such was how Hitler, Stalin, and so many other despots gained power. They took advantage of a climate of fear, and found others to blame. For Hitler it was the Jews; while for Stalin it was various groups like the Ukrainians, or the Poles who were the devil to be feared and destroyed. For Trump it is Muslims, Mexicans, immigrants, liberals, and sometimes, even Jews.
Timothy Snyder in his book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin wrote:
“Dead human beings provided retrospective arguments for the rectitude of policy. Hitler and Stalin thus shared a certain politics of tyranny: they brought about catastrophes, blamed the enemy of their choice, and then used the death of millions to make the case that their policies were necessary or desirable. Each of them had a transformative utopia, a group to be blamed when its realization proved impossible, and then a policy of mass murder that could be proclaimed as a kind of ersatz victory.”
Snyder is quite correct, demonizing a people and making them some kind of “other”, “they”, or “them”, is a wonderful way to blame a group of people for the ills of society. It is also a good way to deflect the blame for the corporate failures of societies and governments onto a convenient scapegoat; and to blame others for the personal failures and petty jealousies of the people doing the demonizing. It also allows people to abandon ethics and the simple notion of the Golden Rule an engage in genocide.
Mass movements and their leaders; of which Trump is such a leader, are masters of hatred and demonizing any opponents. The technique Trump is using is not at all new, it has been used from antiquity but has become much more dangerous in the modern era with the spread of instant communications technology. History shows us all too clearly how it has happened and how easily it can happen again. Witch hunts, slavery and Jim Crow, the extermination of the Native Americans which inspired Hitler in his campaign of genocide and the Holocaust; the Soviet gulags and ethnic cleansings, the Rape of Nanking, the Chinese Communist “Cultural Revolution” the Rwandan genocide, Srebrenica, the Turkish genocide of the Armenians, and the current crimes against humanity of the so called Islamic State. Sadly, the list can go on and on.
All of these events simply required the elements of a disaffected population, a devil or scapegoat to blame, and a leader or leaders to ignite the volatile mixture; fuel, oxygen and heat. Hoffer was quite correct that “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil.” The really successful leaders of such movements understand this. For Hitler it was the Jews and other untermenschen; for American Southerners after the Civil it was the Blacks and their white supporters. For the American “Know Nothings” of the 1840s and 1850s it was immigrants, especially Irish and Germans who were Catholic; for Stalin it was non-Russian ethnic minorities. For the leaders of the Islamic State, it is Jews, Shi’ite Moslems, less than “faithful” Sunnis, Christians and well for that matter anyone who does not line up one hundred percent with them on every issue. The examples are so plentiful to support this fact that it is almost overwhelming.
The problem is that when any society, or government begins to label or stigmatize a race, religion, ethnicity, sexual preference, or political ideology, and then in the process demonize those people to the point that they become less than human we have reached a tipping point. We reach the point where we are just one crisis away from all of those crimes against humanity that we believe that we are no longer capable of doing. But sadly, we human beings are not nearly as evolved as we think and I think that the tipping point in the United States may be far closer than we could ever imagine.
I really do not think that we are too far from some tipping point where the politicians, pundits and preachers; especially those of the political right and the media whores who are more concerned about market share than truth, decide that their “devils” must be exterminated. Of course when they will do they will claim a higher moral, religious, or racial, purpose; or perhaps use the language of Manifest Destiny, the Lost Cause, or the Stab in the Back or some other historical myth that suffices to justify their actions.
In response to Trump and those who stoke the same kind of fear and hatred, I wonder just how many men that there are like Heydrich, who would execute the orders of someone like Trump that there are in our country this very minute. I shudder to think of it, and when I do, I am reminded of the closing words of Spencer Tracy when he pronounces judgement on the Nazi judges in the film Judgment at Nuremberg:
But this trial has shown that under a national crisis, ordinary – even able and extraordinary – men can delude themselves into the commission of crimes so vast and heinous that they beggar the imagination. No one who has sat through the trial can ever forget them: men sterilized because of political belief; a mockery made of friendship and faith; the murder of children. How easily it can happen. There are those in our own country too who today speak of the “protection of country” – of ‘survival’. A decision must be made in the life of every nation at the very moment when the grasp of the enemy is at its throat. Then, it seems that the only way to survive is to use the means of the enemy, to rest survival upon what is expedient – to look the other way. Well, the answer to that is ‘survival as what’? A country isn’t a rock. It’s not an extension of one’s self. It’s what it stands for. It’s what it stands for when standing for something is the most difficult! Before the people of the world, let it now be noted that here, in our decision, this is what we stand for: justice, truth, and the value of a single human being.”
I do hope that we follow a saner and less horrifying path, despite the election and past three years of the Trump Administration. I cannot abandon hope, nor can I be one that turns his eyes away from actions that range from separating immigrant and refugee families and placing children in cages on our southern border; assassinating members of nations that we are not at war with, regardless of how bad they are, while pardoning members of our military who were judged to be war criminals under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Of course that does not even mention how the President has undermined the institutions and laws of our country.
But I cannot lose hope or give up. In the words of Major General Henning von Tresckow, who died following multiple attempts to rid Germany of Hitler:
“We have to show the world that not all of us are like him. Otherwise, this will always be Hitler’s Germany.”
For me I am not comparing Trump to Hitler, but I believe he will be just as deadly to the United States as Hitler was to Germany. It all comes down to character, and as different as our President or the former Nazi Fuhrer are, neither had, or in the case of President Trump, have any character, nor did or do their enablers, and supporters; they are the perpetrators. Of course we know the victims, but then there are those who decide to look the other way, the bystanders who prefer survival to freedom. As Yehuda Bauer wrote:
“Thou shalt not be a victim, thou shalt not be a perpetrator, but, above all, thou shalt not be a bystander.”
I return again to the Nuremberg Trials and the opening statement of the American Chief Prosecutor, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson. Today I do it with a heavier heart than usual in the wake of Trump’s firing of Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer for resisting Trump’s order to allow a convicted war criminal from retaining his SEAL Trident following ordering the Navy to restore his rank so he could retire. These are the kinds of incidents that led to Hitler succeeding in turning the Wehrmacht, the German Armed Forces into a compromised organ of state that for the most part did his bidding with few complaints as long as victory looked certain. With today’s action Trump took his first real movement to compromise the military and turn it into his instrument of terror.
The nine volumes of the trial proceedings are something that anyone that studies the Nazi period, or international law must read. In reading them one gets a feel for the process itself and the overall fairness of it.
Jackson’s opening and closing statements in the trial are considered to be among the most important and compelling addresses in legal history, as well as masterful rhetoric which connected with the audience and still do today. One legal analyst wrote:
The form components connected with all who participated as an audience at the time and kept the attentiveness of the audience, to change international criminal law forever. The settings broke, and notably continue to break, down the barriers for even those who still read the discourse today. Finally, the narrative’s connectivity is an absolute active function, as the memory and legacy of the tragedy that the Nazis inflicted upon humanity will forever evoke emotion for anyone exposed to this opening statement… With its emotional charge, legal rationale, and human viewpoint, it cannot be denied that this narrative not only held a strong rhetorical effectiveness for the judicial panel hearing the case, but also the world at the time it was given. Patrick Iyampillai, “A Grave Responsibility: A Rhetorical Critique of the Opening Statement at Nuremberg Using the Narrative Perspective”
I have posted with commentary Jackson’s introduction, and his discussion of the Nazi battles against Free Labor Unions, and the Churches. Today I move on to his discussion of the criminal racial Nazi War Against the Jews in Germany and across occupied Europe. This is one of the most important aspects of his opening statement because of its relevance today as anti-Semitism and violence against Jews grows more open and more common in Europe and the United States.
When you read them you get a sense of the moral authority that Jackson championed and the manner in which he tied these crimes in to the the crimes that he previously had dealt with in his speech before the tribunal.
I have read many authoritative histories of the Holocaust and the Nazi genocide committed against the Jews. I have also read the accounts of the Nazi perpetrators. These are vitality important, but what is often missing from them is Jackson’s skill as a prosecutor to hammer away at the guilt of those who committed these heinous actions. Sometimes a detached historian attempting to convey the facts, fails provide the moral rhetoric of a prosecutor to fully convey the extent of the evil that was committed by the Nazis Against the Jews. Thus, Jackson’s speech should be a jumping off point before one begins to study the Holocaust. It may not sound fair, but one has to understand the moral outrage of the Nazi crimes before one can appreciate the truth about the Nazi crimes.
Sadly, the crimes of the Nazis evoke little outrage today. When neo-Nazis demonstrated in Charlottesville in the summer of 2017, killing a counter-protestor and beating others, President Trump equivocated and said that there “were very good people on both sides.” Time after time we witness the spectacle of political leaders in the United States, Hungary, Poland, Germany, France, and Russia using blatant anti-Semitism, and racism to remind others that they are the superior race; and most of their supporters make no protest. The examples of their political words, and the crimes directly linked to racism and anti-Semitism are now far too numerous to even bother to list, and they are added to on what seems like a daily basis.
Do not get me wrong, history is important, facts matter, and anti-Semitism and racism are a poison that seems to infect the human race. Historian Christopher Browning wrote:
“I fear that we live in a world in which war and racism are ubiquitous, in which the powers of government mobilization and legitimization are powerful and increasing, in which a sense of personal responsibility is increasingly attenuated by specialization and bureaucratization, and in which the peer group exerts tremendous pressures on behavior and sets moral norms. In such a world, I fear, modern governments that wish to commit mass murder will seldom fail in their efforts for being unable to induce “ordinary men” to become their “willing executioners.”
The Nazis were guilty. Their crimes were horrific, and one cannot as a human being simply relegate them to the depths of history when before our eyes their apologists seek to again use race hatred to gain power; in some countries they are The stakes are far too high. As historian Timothy Snyder has so poignantly written:
“The European history of the twentieth century shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands. It would serve us well today to understand why.”
The fact is what happened in the Holocaust was not an aberration of human nature. Genocide is not confined to the Nazis. Rwanda, Cambodia, Armenia, the Balkans, Nanking, Stalin’s genocide of Ukrainians, Kazakhs, Belorussians, and other non-Russian citizens of the Soviet Union, and the American extermination of the indigenous Native American tribes are not ancient history. Historian Gerhard Weinberg wrote:
“It’s very, very important for people to get a sense of what the potentialities of people really are, what the dangers of ignorance can be. It is in this context, that a supposedly advanced society risks descending into the sewer, that the Holocaust is a warning to people who think of themselves as an advanced, modern society
With that, I give you Jackson’s dissection of the Nazi Crimes Against the Jews which he delivered on the afternoon of November 21st, 1945.
The most savage and numerous crimes committed by the Nazis were those against the Jews. Those in Germany, in 1933, numbered about 500,000. In the aggregate, they had made for themselves positions which excited envy, and had accumulated properties which excited the avarice of the Nazis. They were few enough to be helpless and numerous enough to be held up as a menace.
Let there be no misunderstanding about the charge of persecuting Jews. What we charge against these defendants is not those arrogances and pretensions which frequently accompany the intermingling of different peoples and which are likely, despite the honest efforts of Government, to produce regrettable crimes and convulsions. It is my purpose to show a plan and design to which all Nazis were fanatically committed to annihilate all Jewish people. These crimes were organised and promoted by the Party Leadership, executed and protected by the Nazi officials, as we shall convince you by written orders of the Secret State Police itself.
The persecution of the Jews was a continuous and deliberate policy. It was a policy directed against other nations as well as against the Jews themselves. Anti-Semitism was promoted to divide and embitter the democratic peoples and to soften their resistance to the Nazi aggression. As Robert Ley declared in Der Angriff on 14 May, 1944, “the second German secret weapon is Anti-Semitism because, if it is constantly pursued by Germany, it will become a universal problem which all nations will be forced to consider.”
Anti-Semitism also has been aptly credited with being a “spearhead of terror.” The ghetto was the laboratory for testing repressive measures. Jewish property was the first to be expropriated, but the custom grew and included similar measures against Anti-Nazi Germans, Poles, Czechs, Frenchmen, and Belgians. Extermination of the Jews enabled the Nazis to bring a practised hand to similar measures against Poles, Serbs, and Greeks. The plight of the Jew was a constant threat to opposition or discontent among other elements of Europe’s population -Pacifists, Conservatives, Communists, Catholics, Protestants, Socialists. It was in fact, a threat to every dissenting opinion and to every non-Nazi’s life.
The persecution policy against the Jews commenced with non-violent measures, such as disfranchisement and discriminations against their religion, and the placing of impediments in the way of success in economic life. It moved rapidly to organised mass violence against them, physical isolation in ghettos, deportation, forced labour, mass starvation, and extermination. The Government, the Party formations indicted before you as criminal organisations, the Secret State Police, the Army, private and semi-public associations, and “spontaneous” mobs that were carefully inspired from official sources, were all agencies that were concerned in this persecution. Nor was it directed against individual Jews for personal bad citizenship or unpopularity. The avowed purpose was the destruction of the Jewish people as a whole, as an end in itself, as a measure of preparation for war, and as a discipline for conquered peoples.
The conspiracy or common plan to exterminate the Jew was so methodically and thoroughly pursued, that despite the German defeat and Nazi prostration this Nazi aim largely has succeeded. Only remnants of the European Jewish population remain in Germany, in the countries which Germany occupied, and in those which were her satellites or collaborators. Of the 9,600,000Jews who lived in Nazi-dominated Europe, 6o per cent. are authoritatively estimated to have perished-5,700,000 Jews are missing from the countries in which they formerly lived, and over 4,500,000 cannot be accounted for by the normal death rate nor by immigration; nor are they included among displaced persons. History does not record a crime ever perpetrated against so many victims or one ever carried out with such calculated cruelty.
You will have difficulty, as I have, to look into the faces of these defendants and believe that in this Twentieth Century human beings could inflict such sufferings as will be proved here, on their own countrymen as well as upon their so-called “inferior” enemies. Particular crimes, and the responsibility defendants for them, are to be dealt with by the Soviet Government’s Counsel, when committed in the East, and by Counsel for the Republic of France committed in the West. I advert to them only to show their magnitude as evidence of a purpose and a knowledge common to all defendants, of an official plan rather than of a capricious policy of some individual commander, and to show such a continuity of Jewish persecution, from the rise of the Nazi conspiracy to its collapse, as forbids us to believe that any person could be identified with any part of Nazi action without approving this most conspicuous item in their programme.
The Indictment itself recites many evidences of the anti-Semitic persecutions. The defendant Streicher led the Nazis in anti-Semitic bitterness and extremism. In an article appearing in Der Sturmer on 19th March, he complained that Christian teachings have stood in the way of “racial solution of the Jewish question in Europe,” and quoted enthusiastically as the Twentieth Century solution the Fuehrer’s proclamation Of 24th February, 1943, that “the Jew will be exterminated.” And on 4th November, 1943, Streicher declared in Der Sturmer that the Jews “have disappeared from Europe and that the Jewish ‘Reservoir of the East’ from which the Jewish plague has for centuries beset the people of Europe, has ceased to exist.” Streicher now has the effrontery to tell us he is “only a Zionist”; he says he only wants to return the Jews to Palestine.
But on 7th May, 1942, his newspaper Der Sturmer had this to say: “It is also not only a European problem! The Jewish question is a world question! Not only is Germany not safe in the face of the Jews as long as one Jew lives in Europe, but also the Jewish question is hardly solved in Europe so long as Jews live in the rest of the world.”
Hans Frank Hitler’s Lawyer and Governor General of Occupied Poland
And the defendant Hans Frank, a lawyer by profession I say with shame, summarised in his diary in 1944 the Nazi policy thus:
“The Jews are a race which has to be eliminated; whenever we catch one, it is his end.” (Document No. 2233-PS, Vol. 1944, p. 26.)
And earlier, speaking of his function as Governor-General of Poland, he confided to his diary this sentiment:
“Of course I cannot eliminate all lice and Jews in only a year’s time.” (2233-PS, Vol. IV, 1940, p. 1159)
I could multiply endlessly this kind of Nazi ranting, but I will leave it to the evidence and turn to the fruit of this perverted thinking.
The most serious of the actions against Jews were outside of any law, but the law itself was employed to some extent. There were the infamous Nuremberg decrees of 15th September, 1935. (” Reichsgesetzblatt,” 1935, Part 1, p. 1146.) The Jews were segregated into ghettos and put into forced labour; they were expelled from their professions; their property was expropriated; all culturallife, the Press, the theatre, and schools were prohibited them; and the S.D. was made responsible for them. (212-PS, 069-PS.) This was an ominous guardianship as the following order for “The Handling of the Jewish Question” shows:
“The competency of the Chief of the Security Police and Security Service, who is charged with the mission of solving the European Jewish question, extends even to the occupied eastern provinces. . . .
An eventual act by the civilian population against the Jews is not to be prevented as long as this is compatible with the maintenance of order and security in the rear of the fighting troops. . . .
The first main goal of the German measures must be the strict segregation of Jewry from the rest of the population. In the execution of this, first of all, is the seizing of the Jewish populace by the introduction of a registration order and similar appropriate measures…
Then immediately, the wearing of the recognition sign, consisting of a yellow Jewish star, is to be brought about and all rights of freedom for Jews are to be withdrawn. They are to be placed in ghettos, and at the same time, are to be separated according to sex. The presence of many more or less closed Jewish settlements in White Ruthenia and in the Ukraine makes this mission easier. Moreover, places are to be chosen which make possible the full use of the Jewish manpower in case labour needs are present. The entire Jewish property is to be seized and confiscated, with the exception of that which is necessary for a bare existence. As far as the economical situation permits, the power of disposal of their property is to be taken from the Jews as soon as possible through orders and other measures given by the commissariat, so that the moving of property will quickly cease.”
“Any cultural activity will be completely forbidden to the Jew. This includes the outlawing of the Jewish Press, the Jewish theatres and schools.
“The slaughtering of animals according to Jewish rites is also to be prohibited.” (212-PS).
Obergrüppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich Architect of the Final Solution
The anti-Jewish campaign became furious following the assassination in Paris of the German Legation Councillor von Rath. Heydrich, Gestapo head, sent a telegram to all Gestapo and S.D. offices with directions for handling “spontaneous” uprisings anticipated for the nights of 9th and 10th November, 1938, so as to aid in destruction of Jewish-owned property and protect that of Germans. No more cynical document ever came into evidence. Then there is a report by an S.S. Brigade Leader, Dr. Stahlecher to Himmler, which recites that:
“Similarly, native anti-Semitic forces were induced to start pogroms against Jews after capture, though this inducement proved to be very difficult.
Following out orders, the Security Police was determined to solve the Jewish question with all possible means and most decisively. But it was desirable that the Security Police should not put in an immediate appearance, at least at the beginning, since the extraordinarily harsh measures were apt to stir even German circles. It had to be shown to the world that the native population itself took the first action by way of natural reaction against the suppression by Jews during several decades and against the terror exercised by the Communists during the preceding period.”
In view of the extension of the area of operations and the great number of duties which had to be performed by the Security Police, it was intended from the very beginning to obtain the co-operation of the reliable population for the fight against vermin – that is mainly the Jews and Communists. Beyond our directing of the first spontaneous actions of self-cleansing, which will be reported elsewhere, care had to be taken that reliable people should be put to the cleansing job, and that they were appointed auxiliary members of the Security Police.”
Kowno. To our surprise it was not easy at first to set in motion an extensive pogrom against Jews. Klimatis, the leader of the partisan unit, mentioned above, who was used for this purpose primarily, succeeded in starting a pogrom on the basis of advice given to him by a small advanced detachment acting in Kowno, and in such a way that no German order or German instigation was noticed from the outside. During the first pogrom in the night from 25 to 26.6 the Lithuanian partisans did away with more than 1,500 Jews, set fire to several Synagogues or destroyed them by other means and burned down a Jewish dwelling district consisting of about 60 houses. During the following nights about 2,300 Jews were made harmless in a similar way. In other parts of Lithuania similar actions followed the example of Kowno, though smaller and extending to the Communists who had been left behind.
These self-cleansing actions went smoothly because the Army authorities who had been informed showed understanding for this procedure. From the beginning it was obvious that only the first days after the occupation would offer the opportunity for carrying out pogroms. After the disarmament of the partisans the self-cleansing actions ceased necessarily.
It proved much more difficult to set in motion similar cleaning actions in Latvia.”
From the beginning it was to be expected that the Jewish problem in the East could not be solved by pogroms alone. In accordance with basic orders received, however, the cleansing activities of the Security Police had to aim at the complete annihilation of the Jews…
“The sum total of Jews liquidated in Lithuania amounts to 71,105. . . .” (L-180)
Of course, it is self-evident that these “uprisings” were managed by the government and the Nazi Party. If we were in doubt, we could resort to Streicher’s memorandum of 14th April, 1939, which says, “The anti-Jewish action of November, 1938, did not arise spontaneously from the people.. Part of the party formation has been charged with the execution of the anti-Jewish action.” (406-PS) Jews as a whole were fined a billion Reichsmarks. They were excluded from all businesses, and claims against insurance companies for their burned properties were confiscated, all by the decree of the defendant Goering. (Reichsgesetzblatt, 1938, Part 1, pp. 1579-1582.)
Synagogues were the objects of a special vengeance. On 10th November, 1938, the following order was given: “
“By order of the Group Commander, all Jewish Synagogues in the area of Brigade 50 have to be blown up or set afire. The operation will be carried out in civilian clothing…. Execution of the order will be reported….( 1721-PS.) Some 40 teletype messages, from police headquarters, which will be introduced to you, will tell the fury with which all Jews were pursued in Germany on those awful November nights. The S.S. troops were turned loose and the Gestapo supervised. Jewish-owned property was destroyed. The Gestapo ordered twenty to thirty thousand “well-to-do Jews” to be arrested. Concentration camps were to receive them and the order provided healthy Jews, fit for labour, were to be taken (3051-PS).
As the German frontiers were expanded by war, so the campaign against the Jews expanded. The Nazi plan never was limited to Germany; always it contemplated extinguishing the Jew in Europe and often in the world. In the West, the Jews were killed and their property, taken over. But the campaign achieved its zenith of savagery in the East. The Eastern Jew has suffered as no people ever suffered. Their sufferings were carefully reported to the Nazi authorities to show faithful adherence to the Nazi design. I shall refer only to enough of the evidence of these to show the extent of the Nazi design for killing Jews.
If I should recite these horrors in words of my own, you would think me intemperate and unreliable. Fortunately, we need not take the word of any witness but the Germans themselves. I invite you now to look at a few of the vast number of captured German orders and reports that will be offered in evidence, to see what a Nazi invasion meant. We will present such evidence as the report of “Einsatzgruppe (Action Group) A” of 15th October, 1941, which boasts that in overrunning the Baltic States, “Native Anti-Semitic forces were induced to start pogroms against the Jews during the first hours after occupation.” The report continues:
“From the beginning it was to be expected that the Jewish problem in the East could not be solved by pogroms alone. In accordance with the basic orders received, however, the cleansing activities of the Security Police had to aim at a complete annihilation of the Jews. Special detachments reinforced by selected units -in Lithuania partisan detachments, in Latvia units of the Latvian auxiliary police -therefore performed extensive executions both in the towns and in rural areas. The actions of the execution detachments were performed smoothly.”
“The sum total of the Jews liquidated in Lithuania, according to the report, amounts to 71,105. During the pogroms in Kowno 3,800 Jews were eliminated, in the smaller towns about 1,200 Jews.”
“In Latvia, up to now a total of 30,000 Jews was executed. Five hundred were eliminated by pogroms in Riga.” (L-180.)
This is a captured report from the Commissioner of Sluzk on 20th October, 1941, which describes the scene in more detail.
It says:-“… The first lieutenant explained that the police battalion had received the assignment to effect the liquidation of all Jews here in the town of Sluzk, within two days … Then I requested him to postpone the action one day. However, he rejected this with the remark that he had to carry out this action everywhere and in all towns and that only two days were allotted for Sluzk. Within these two days the town of Sluzk had to be cleared of Jews by all means … All Jews without exception were taken out of the factories and shops and deported in spite of our agreement. It is true that part of the Jews was moved by way of the ghetto, where many of them were processed and still segregated by me, but a large part was loaded directly on trucks and liquidated without further delay outside of the town.. For the rest, as regards the execution of the action, I must point out to my deepest regret that the latter bordered already on sadism. The town itself offered a picture of horror during the action. With indescribable brutality on the part of the German police officers and particularly the Lithuanian partisans, the Jewish people, but also among them White Ruthenians, were taken out of their dwellings and herded together. Everywhere in the town shots were to be heard and in different streets the corpses of shot Jews accumulated. The White Ruthenians were in greatest distress to free themselves from the encirclement. Regardless of the fact that the Jewish people, among whom were also tradesmen, were mistreated in a terribly barbarous way in the face of the White Ruthenian people, the White Ruthenians themselves were also worked over with rubber clubs and rifle butts. There was no question of an action against the Jews anymore. It rather looked like a revolution…”( 1104-PS.)
There are reports which merely tabulate the numbers slaughtered. Another example is an account of the work of Einsatzgruppen of Sipo and S.D. in the East which relates that “in Estonia, all Jews were arrested immediately upon the arrival of the Wehrmacht.”
Jewish men and women above the age of sixteen and capable of work were drafted for forced labour. Jews were subjected to all sorts of restrictions and all Jewish property was confiscated.
All Jewish males above the age of sixteen were executed, with the exception of doctors and elders. Only 500 of an original 4,500 Jews remained.
37,180 persons have been liquidated by the Sipo and S.D. in White Ruthenia during October.
In one town, 337 Jewish women were executed for demonstrating a “provocative attitude.” In another, 380 Jews were shot for spreading vicious propaganda.
And so the report continues, listing town after town, where hundreds upon hundreds of Jews were murdered.
In Vitebsk 3,000 Jews were liquidated because of the danger of epidemics.
In Kiev, 33,771 Jews were executed On 29th/ 30th September in retaliation for some fires which were set off there.
In Zhitomir, 3,145 Jews “had to be shot” because, judging from experience they had to be considered as the carriers of Bolshevik propaganda.
In Kherson, 410 Jews were executed in reprisal against acts of sabotage. In the territory east of the Djnepr, the Jewish problem was “solved” by the liquidation Of 4,891 Jews and by putting the remainder into labour battalions of up to 1,000 persons. (R-102.)
Other accounts tell not of the slaughterso much as of the depths of degradation to which the tormentors stooped. For example, we will show the report made to defendant Rosenberg about the Army and the S.S. in the area under Rosenberg’s jurisdiction, which recited the following:
“Details in the presence of S.S. man, a Jewish dentist has to break all gold teeth and fillings out of mouth of German and Russian Jews before they are executed.”
Men, women and children are locked into barns and burned alive.
Peasants, women and children, are shot on the pretext that they are suspected of belonging to bands. (R-135.)
We of the Western world heard of gas wagons in which Jews and political opponents were asphyxiated. We could not believe it. But here we have the report of 16th May, I942, from the German S.S. Officer Becker, to his supervisor in Berlin, which tells this story;
“Gas vans in C group can be driven to execution spot, which is generally stationed ten to fifteen kilometres from main road, only in dry weather. Since those to be executed become frantic if conducted to this place, such vans become immobilised in wet weather.
Gas vans in D group were camouflaged as cabin trailers, but vehicles well known to authorities and civilian population which calls them ‘Death Vans.’
The writer of the letter, Becker, ordered all men to keep as far away as possible during gassing. Unloading van after the gassing has ‘atrocious spiritual and physical effect’ on men and they should be ordered not to participate in such work.” (501-PS.)
I shall not dwell on this subject longer than to quote one more sickening document which evidences the planned and systematic character of these Jewish persecutions. I hold a report written with Teutonic thoroughness as to detail, illustrated with photographs to authenticate its almost incredible text, and beautifully bound in leather with the loving care bestowed to a proud work. It is the original report of the S.S. Brigade General Stroop in charge of the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, and its title page carries the inscription, “The Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw no longer exists.” It is characteristic that one of the captions explains that the photograph concerned shows the driving out of Jewish “bandits”; those whom the photograph shows being driven out are almost entirely women and little children. It contains a day-by-day account of the killings mainly carried out by the S.S. Organisation, too long to relate, but let me quote General Stroop’s summary: “
“The resistance put up by the Jews and bandits could only be suppressed by energetic actions of our troops day and night. The Reichsfuehrer S.S. ordered therefore on 23rd April, 1943, the cleaning out of the ghetto with utter ruthlessness and merciless tenacity. I, therefore, decided to destroy and burn down the entire ghetto without regard to the armament factories. These factories were systematically dismantled and then burned. Jews usually left their hideouts, but frequently remained in the burning buildings and jumped out of the windows only when the heat became unbearable. They then tried to crawl with broken bones across the street into buildings which were not afire. Sometimes they changed their hideouts during the night into the ruins of burned buildings. Life in the sewers was not pleasant after the first week. Many times we could hear loud voices in them. S.S. men or policemen climbed bravely through the manholes to capture these Jews. Sometimes they stumbled over Jewish corpses; sometimes they were shot at. Tear gas bombs were thrown into the manholes and the Jews driven out of the sewers and captured. Countless numbers of Jews were liquidated in sewers and bunkers through blasting. The longer the resistance continued the tougher became the members of the Waffen S.S., Police and Wehrmacht, who always discharged their duties in an exemplary manner. Frequently Jews who tried to replenish. their food supplies during the night or to communicate with neighbouring groups were exterminated.” (1061-PS) “
“This action eliminated,” says the S.S. commander, “a proved total of 56,065. To that we have to add the number killed through blasting, fire, etc., which cannot be counted.”
We charge that all atrocities against Jews were the manifestation and culmination of the Nazi plan to which every defendant here was a party. I know very well that some of these men did take steps to spare some particular Jew for some personal reason from the horrors that awaited the unrescued Jew. Some protested that particular atrocities were excessive, and discredited the general policy. While a few defendants may show efforts to make specific exceptions to the policy of Jewish extermination, I have found no instance in which any defendant opposed the policy itself or sought to revoke or even modify it.
Determination to destroy the Jews was a binding force which at all times cemented the elements of this conspiracy. On many internal policies there were differences among the defendants. But there is not one of them who has not echoed the rallying cry of Naziism: DEUTSCIILAND ERWACHE-JUDA VERRECKE (Germany Awake-Jewry Perish!)
I come to the discussion of terrorism and to preparation for the war.
How a Government treats its own inhabitants generally is thought to be no concern of other Governments or of international society. Certainly few oppressions or cruelties would warrant the intervention of foreign powers. But the German mistreatment of Germans is now known to pass in magnitude and savagery any limits of what is tolerated by modern civilisation. Other nations, by silence, would take a consenting part in such crimes. These Nazi persecutions, moreover, take character as international crimes because of the purpose for which they were undertaken.
The purpose, as we have seen, of getting rid of the influence of free labour, the churches and the Jews was to clear their obstruction to the precipitation of aggressive war. If aggressive warfare in violation of treaty obligation is a matter of international cognisance, the preparations for it must also be of concern to the international community. Terrorism was the chief instrument for securing the cohesion of the German people in war purposes. Moreover, these cruelties in Germany served as atrocity practice to discipline the membership of the criminal organisation to follow the pattern later in occupied countries.
Through the police formations that are before you accused as criminal organisations, the Nazi Party leaders, aided at some point in their basic and notorious purpose by each of the individual defendants, instituted a reign of terror. These espionage and police organisations were utilised to hunt down every form of opposition and to penalise every nonconformity. These organisations early founded and administered concentration camps -Buchenwald in 1933, Dachau in 1934. But these notorious names were not alone. Concentration camps came to dot the German map and to number scores. At first they met with resistance from some Germans. We have a captured letter from Minister of Justice Gurtner to Hitler which is revealing. A Gestapo official had been prosecuted for crimes committed in a camp at Hohenstein, and the Nazi Governor of Saxony had promptly asked that the proceeding be quashed. The Minister of Justice in June of 1935 protested because, as he said, “In this camp unusually grave mistreatments of prisoners has occurred at least since Summer 1939. The prisoners not only were beaten with whips, without cause, similarly as in the Concentration Camp Bredow near Stettin until they lost consciousness, but they were also tortured in other manners, e.g., with the help of a dripping apparatus constructed exclusively for this purpose, under which prisoners had to stand until they were suffering from serious purulent wounds of the scalp.” (787-PS)
I shall not take time to detail the ghastly proceedings in these concentration camps. Beatings, starvings, tortures, and killings were routine -so routine that the tormentors became blase and careless. We have a report of discovery that in Plotzensee one night, 186 persons were executed while there were orders for only 150. Another report describes how the family of one victim received two urns of ashes by mistake. Inmates were compelled to execute each other. In 1942, they were paid five Reichsmarks per execution, but on 27th June, 1942, S.S. General Glucke ordered commandants of all concentration camps to reduce this honorarium to three cigarettes. In 1943, the Reichs leader of the S.S. and Chief of German Police ordered the corporal punishment on Russian women to be applied by Polish women and vice versa, but the price was not frozen. “As a reward, a few cigarettes” was authorised. Under the Nazis, human life had been progressively devalued, until it finally became worth less than a handful of tobacco -Ersatz tobacco. There were, however, some traces of the milk of human kindness. On 11th August, 1942, an order went from Himmler to the commandants of fourteen concentration camps that “only German prisoners are allowed to beat other German prisoners.” (2189-PS).
Mystery and suspense was added to cruelty in order to spread torture from the inmate to his family and friends. Men and women disappeared from their homes or business or from the streets, and no word came of them. The omission of notice was not due to overworked staff; it was due to policy. The Chief of the S.D. and Sipo reported that, in accordance with orders from the Fuehrer, anxiety should be created in the minds of the family of the arrested person. (668-PS.) Deportations and secret arrests were labelled, with a Nazi wit which seems a little ghoulish, “Nacht und Nebel” (Night and Fog). (L, 90, 833-PS.)
One of the many orders for these actions, gave this explanation:
“The decree carries a basic innovation. The Fuehrer and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces commands that crimes of the specified sort by civilians of the occupied territories are to be punished by the pertinent courts martial in the occupied territories only when (a) the sentence calls for the death penalty; and (b) the sentence is pronounced within eight days of arrest. Only when both conditions are met does the Fuehrer and Commander-in Chief of the Armed Forces hope for the desired deterrent effect from the conduct of punitive proceedings in the occupied territories. In other cases in the future, the accused are to be secretly brought to Germany, and the further conduct of the trial carried on here. The deterrent effect of these measures lies (a) in allowing the disappearance of the accused without a trace; (b) therein that no information whatsoever may be given about their whereabouts and their fate.” (833-PS.)
To clumsy cruelty, scientific skill was added. “Undesirables” were exterminated by injection of drugs into the bloodstream, by asphyxiation in gas chambers. They were shot with poison bullets, to study the effects (L-103); Then, to cruel experiments the Nazi added obscene ones. These were not the work of underling-degenerates, but of master-minds high in the Nazi conspiracy. On 20th May, 1942, General Field Marshal Milch authorised S.S. General Wolff to go ahead at Dachau Camp with so-called “cold experiments”; and four female gypsies were selected for the purpose. Himmler gave permission to carry on these “experiments” also in other camps (1617-PS). At Dachau, the reports of the “doctor” in charge show that victims were immersed in cold water until their body temperature was reduced to 26 degrees centigrade (8.24 degrees Fahrenheit) when they all died immediately. (1618-PS.) This was in August, 1942. But the “doctor’s” technique improved. By February, 1943, he was able to report that thirty persons were chilled to 27 to 29 degrees, their hands and feet frozen white, and their bodies “rewarmed” by a hot bath. But the Nazi scientific triumph was “rewarming with animal heat.” The victim, all but frozen to death, was surrounded with the bodies of living women until he revived and responded to his environment by having sexual intercourse. (1616-PS.) Here Nazi degeneracy reached its nadir.
I dislike to encumber the record with such morbid tales, but we are in the grim business of trying men as criminals, and these are the things that their own agents say happened. We will show you these concentration camps in motion pictures. just as the Allied armies found them when they arrived, and the measures General Eisenhower had to take to clean them up. Our proof will be disgusting and you will say I have robbed you of your sleep. But these are the things which have turned the stomach of the world and set every civilised hand against Nazi Germany.
Germany became one vast torture chamber. Cries of its victims were heard round the world and brought shudders to civilised people everywhere. I am one who received during this war most atrocity tales with suspicion and skepticism. But the proof here will be so overwhelming that I venture to predict not one word I have spoken will be denied. These defendants will only deny personal responsibility or knowledge.
Under the clutch of the most intricate web of espionage and intrigue that any modern State has endured, and persecution and torture of a kind that has not been visited upon the world in many centuries, the elements of the German population which were both decent and courageous were annihilated. Those which were decent but weak were intimidated. Open resistance, which had never been more than feeble and irresolute, disappeared. But resistance, I am happy to say, always remained, although it was manifest in only such events as the abortive effort to assassinate Hitler on 20th July, 1944. With resistance driven underground, the Nazi had the German State in his own hands.
But the Nazis not only silenced discordant voices. They created positive controls as effective as their negative case. Propaganda organs, on a scale never before known, stimulated the party and party formations with a permanent enthusiasm and abandon such as we, democratic people, can work up only for a few days before a general election. They inculcated and practised the Fuehrer-prinzip which centralised control of the Party and of the Party-controlled State over the lives and thought of the German people, who are accustomed to look upon the German State, by whomever controlled, with a mysticism that is incomprehensible to my people.
All these controls, from their inception were exerted with unparalleled energy and single-mindedness to put Germany on a war footing. We will show from the Nazis’ own documents their secret training of military personnel, their secret creation of a military air force. Finally, a conscript army was brought into being. Financiers, economists, industrialists, joined in the plan and promoted elaborate alterations in industry and finance to support an unprecedented concentration of resources and energies upon preparations for war. Germany’s rearmament so outstripped the strength of her neighbours that in about a year she was able to crush the whole military force of Continental Europe, exclusive of that of Soviet Russia, and then to push the Russian armies back to the Volga. These preparations were of a magnitude which surpassed all need of defence, and every defendant, and every intelligent German, well understood them to be for aggressive purposes.
Before resorting to open aggressive warfare, the Nazis undertook some rather cautious experiments to test the spirit of resistance of those who lay across their path. They advanced, but only as others yielded, and kept in a position to draw back if they found a temperament that made persistence dangerous.
On 7th March, 1936, the Nazis reoccupied the Rhineland and then proceeded to fortify it in violation of the Treaty of Versailles and the Pact of Locarno. They encountered no substantial resistance and were emboldened to take the next step, which was the acquisition of Austria. Despite repeated assurances that Germany had no designs on Austria, invasion was perfected. Threat of attack forced Schuschnigg to resign as Chancellor of Austria and put the Nazi defendant Seyss-Inquart in his place. The latter immediately opened the frontier and invited Hitler to invade Austria “to preserve order”. On 12th March the invasion began. The next day, Hitler proclaimed himself Chief of the Austrian State, took command of its armed forces, and a law was enacted annexing Austria to Germany.
Threats of aggression had succeeded without arousing resistance. Fears nevertheless had been stirred. They were lulled by an assurance to the Czechoslovak Government that there would be no attack on that country. We will show that the Nazi Government already had detailed plans for the attack. We will lay before you the documents in which those conspirators planned to create an incident to justify their attack. They even gave consideration to assassinating their own Ambassador at Prague in order to create a sufficiently dramatic incident. They did precipitate a diplomatic crisis which endured throughout the summer. Hitler set 30th September as the day when troops should be ready for action. Under the threat of immediate war, the United Kingdom and France concluded a pact with Germany and Italy at Munich on 29th September, 1938, which required Czechoslovakia to acquiesce in the cession of the Sudetenland to Germany. It was consummated by German occupation on 1st October, 1938.
The Munich Pact pledged no further aggression against Czechoslovakia, but the Nazi pledge was lightly given and quickly broken. On 15th March, 1939, in defiance of the Treaty of Munich itself, the Nazis seized and occupied Bohemia and Moravia, which constituted the major part of Czechoslovakia not already ceded to Germany. Once again the West stood aghast, but it dreaded war, it saw no remedy except war, and it hoped against hope that the Nazi fever for expansion had run its course. But the Nazi world was intoxicated by these unresisted successes in open alliance with Mussolini and in covert alliance with Franco. Then, having made a deceitful, delaying peace with Russia, the conspirators entered upon the final phase of the plan to renew war.
I will not prolong this address by detailing the steps leading to the war of aggression which began with the invasion of Poland on 1st September, 1939. The further story will be unfolded to you by the British Delegation from documents including those of the German High Command itself. The plans had been laid long in advance. As early as 1935 Hitler appointed the defendant Schacht to the position of “General Deputy for the War Economy.” (2261-PS) We have the diary of General Jodl (1780-PS); the “Plan Otto,” Hitler’s own order for attack on Austria in case trickery failed (C-102); the “Plan Green” which was the blueprint for attack on Czechoslovakia (338-PS); the plan for the War in the West (376-PS, 375-PS); Funk’s letter to Hitler dated 25th August, 1939, detailing the long course of economic preparation for war (699-PS); Keitel’s top-secret mobilisation order for 1939-40 prescribing steps to be taken during a “period of tension,” as it was described, during which no “‘ state of war’ will be publicly declared even if open war measures against the enemy will be taken.” This latter order (1699-PS) is in our possession despite a secret order issued on 16th March, 1945, when Allied troops were advancing into the heart of Germany, to burn these plans. We have also Hitler’s directive, dated 18th December, 1940, for the “Barbarossa Contingency,” which was a code name, outlining the strategy of the attack on Russia. That plan, in the original, bears the initials of the defendants Keitel and Jodl. They were planning the attack and planning it long in advance of the declaration of war. We have detailed information concerning the “Case White,” the plan for attack on Poland (2327-PS). That attack began the war. The plan was issued by Keitel on 3rd April, 1939. The attack did not come until September. Steps in preparation for the attack were taken by subordinate commanders, one of whom issued an order on 14th June providing that:
“The Commander-in-Chief of the Armies has ordered the working out of a plan of deployment against Poland which takes in account the demands of political leadership for the opening of the war by surprise and for quick successes.. I declare it the duty of the Commanding Generals, the Divisional Commanders, and the Commandants to limit as much as possible the number of persons who will be informed, and to limit the extent of the information, and ask that all suitable measures be taken to prevent persons not concerned from getting information.
The operation, in order to forestall an orderly Polish mobilisation and concentration, is to be opened by surprise with forces which are for the most part armoured and motorised, placed on alert in the neighbourhood of the border. The initial superiority over the Polish frontier-guards and surprise that can be expected with certainty are to be maintained by quickly bringing up other parts of the army as well to counteract the marching up of the Polish Army.
If the development of the political situation should show that a surprise at the beginning of the war is out of question, because of well-advanced defence preparations on the part of the Polish Army, the Commander-in-Chief of the Army will order the opening of the hostilities only after the assembling of sufficient additional forces The basis of all preparations will be to surprise the enemy..”( 2327-PS)
We also have the order for the attack on England, initialled again by Keitel and Jodl. It is interesting that it commences with a recognition that although the British military position is “hopeless,” they show not the slightest sign of giving in. (442-PS)
Not the least incriminating are the minutes of Hitler’s meeting with his high advisers.
As early as 5th November, 1937, Hitler told defendants Goering, Raeder, and Neurath, among others, that German rearmament was practically accomplished and that he had decided to secure by force, starting with a lightening attack on Czechoslovakia and Austria, greater living space for Germans in Europe no later that 1943-5 and perhaps as early as 1938. (368-PS) On the 23rd May, 1939, the Fuehrer advised his staff that:
“It is a question of expanding our living space in the East and of securing our food supplies over and above the natural fertility, thoroughgoing German exploitation will enormously increase the surplus.
There is therefore no question of sparing Poland, and we are left with the decision:
To attack Poland at the first suitable opportunity.
We cannot expect a repetition of the Czech affair. There will be war.” (L-79)
On 22nd August, 1939, Hitler again addressed members of the High Command, telling them when the start of military operations would be ordered. He disclosed that for propaganda purposes, he would provocate a good reason. “It will make no difference,” he announced, “whether this reason will sound convincing or not. After all, the victor will not be asked whether he talked the truth or not. We have to proceed brutally. The stronger is always right.” (1014-PS) On 23rd November, 1939, after the Germans had invaded Poland, Hitler made this explanation: “For the first time in history we have to fight on only one front. The other front is at present free, but no one can know how long that will remain so. I have doubted for a long time whether I would strike in the East and then in the West. Basically, I did not organise the armed forces in order not to strike. The decision to strike was always in me. Earlier or later I wanted to solve the problem. Under pressure it was decided that the East was to be attacked first.” (789-PS)
We know the bloody sequel. Frontier incidents were staged. Demands were made for cession of territory. When Poland refused, the German forces invaded on 1st September, 1939. Warsaw was destroyed; Poland fell. The Nazis, in accordance with plans, moved swiftly to extend their aggression throughout Europe and to gain the advantage of surprise over their unprepared neighbours, Despite repeated and solemn assurances of peaceful intentions, they invaded Denmark and Norway on 9th April, 1940; Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg on 10th May, 1940, Yugoslavia and Greece on 6th April 1941.
As part of the Nazi preparation for aggression against Poland and her allies, Germany, on 23rd April, 1939 had entered into a non-aggression pact with Soviet Russia. It uses only a delaying treaty intended to be kept no longer than necessary to prepare for its violation. On 22nd June, 1941, pursuant to long matured plans, the Nazis hurled troops into Soviet territory without any declaration of war. The entire European world was aflame.
The Nazi plans of aggression called for use of Asiatic allies, and they found among the Japanese men of kindred mind and purpose. They were brothers, under the skin.
Himmler records a conversation that he had on 31st January, 1939, with General Oshima, Japanese Ambassador at Berlin. He wrote:
“Furthermore, he (Oshima) had succeeded up to now in sending 10 Russians with bombs across the Caucasian frontier. These Russians had the mission to kill Stalin. A number of additional Russians, whom he had also sent across, had been shot at the frontier.” (2195-PS.)
On 27th September, 1940, the Nazis concluded a German-Italian-Japanese ten-year military and economic alliance by which those powers agreed “to stand by and co-operate with one another in regard to their efforts in Greater East Asia and regions of Europe respectively, wherein it is their prime purpose to establish and maintain a new order of things.”
On 5th March, 1941, a top secret directive was issued by defendant Keitel. It stated that “The Fuehrer had ordered instigation of Japan’s active participation in the war” an directed that “Japan’s military power has to be strengthened by the disclosure of German war experiences and support of a military, economic and technical nature has to be given.” The aim was stated to be to crush England quickly, thereby keeping the United States out of the war. (C-75)
On 29th March, 1941, Ribbentrop told Matsuoka, the Japanese Foreign Minister, that the German Army was ready to strike against Russia. Matsuoka in turn reassured Ribbentrop about the Far East. Japan, he reported, was acting at the moment as though she had no interest whatever in Singapore, but “intends to strike when the right moment comes.” (1877-PS) On April, 1941, Ribbentrop urged Matsuoka that entry of Japan into the war would “hasten the victory” and would be more in the interest of Japan than of Germany, since it would Japan a unique chance to fulfil her national aims and to play a leading part in Eastern Asia. (1882-PS.)
The proofs in this case will also show that the leaders of Germany were planning war against the United States from its Atlantic as well as instigating it from its Pacific approaches. A captured memorandum from the Fuehrer’s headquarters, dated 29th October, 1940, asks certain information as to air bases and reports further that:
“The Fuehrer is at present occupied with the question of the occupation of the Atlantic islands with a view to the prosecution of war against America at a later date. Deliberations on this subject are being embarked upon here.” (376-PS.)
On 7th December, 1941, a day which the late President Roosevelt declared “will live in infamy,” victory for German aggression seemed certain. The Wehrmacht was at the gates of Moscow. Taking advantage of the situation, and while her plenipotentiaries were creating a diplomatic diversion in Washington, Japan without declaration o war treacherously attacked the United States at Pearl Harbour and the Philippines. Attacks followed swiftly on the British Commonwealth and The Netherlands in the South-west Pacific. These aggressions met in the only way that they could be met, with instant declarations of war and with armed resistance which mounted slowly through many long months of reverse until finally the Axis was crushed to earth and deliverance for its victims was won.
Your Honour, I am about to take up “Crimes in the Conduct of War,” which is quite a separate subject. We are within five minutes of the recessing time. It will be very convenient for me it if will be agreeable to you.
THE PRESIDENT: We will sit again in 15 minutes’ time, (A recess was taken.)
THE PRESIDENT: The Tribunal must request that if it adjourns for I5 minutes, that members of the bar and others are back in their seats after an interval of 15 minutes. Mr. Justice Jackson, I understand that you wish to continue to 5.15, when you may be able to conclude your speech?
MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: I think that would be the most orderly way.
THE PRESIDENT: Yes, the Tribunal will be glad to do so.
MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: May it please your Honour, I will now take up the subject of “Crimes in the Conduct of War.”
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