Reichskommissar

“ The Nazi Leadership Corps consisted of the directors and principal executors of the Nazi Party, which was the force lying behind and dominating the whole German state. The Reichs Cabinet was the facade through which the Nazi Party translated its will into legislative, administrative, and executive acts. The two pillars on which the security of the regime rested were the armed forces, directed and controlled by the General Staff and High Command, and the police forces—the Gestapo, the SA, the SD, and the SS. These organizations exemplify all the evil forces of the Nazi regime. ”

“ Even today, after reading this document through again—it has already been given to me here—I consider this memorandum unobjectionable. It expressly provides that members of enemy forces, that is members of any enemy force, if captured by the police, should be taken to the nearest Wehrmacht office after being identified. I know that in the French sector the French police did their full share in arresting these troops and putting them in safe charge. They collaborated in preventing these acts of sabotage. ”

“ MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: And if you were to combat successfully the Nazi regime, you had to have manpower which only the Army had; is that right?
GISEVIUS: Yes, only people who could be found in the Army; but at the same time we also attempted to influence certain people in the Police, and we needed all the decent officials in the ministries, and the broad masses of the people altogether.
MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: But the Wehrmacht was the source of power capable of dealing with the SS and the Gestapo if the generals had been willing? ”

“ These organizations penetrated the whole German life. The country was subdivided into little Nazi principalities of about 50 households each, and every such community had its recognized Party leaders, Party police, and its undercover, planted spies. These were combined into larger units with higher ranking leaders, executioners, and spies, the whole forming a pyramid of power outside of the law, with the Führer at its apex, the local Party officials constituting its broad base, which rested heavily on the German population. ”

“ Why do you always talk of fighting? You have conquered the State, and if something does not please you, then just make a law and regulate it differently? Why must you always talk of fighting? For you have every power! Over what do you fight? Outer-politically? You have the Wehrmacht—it will wage the fight if it is required. ”

“ The responsible Communist official in a 235 regiment is called the Commissar, the others are called “political workers,” and constitute the “cell.” In my own unit, numbering nearly 200 men, there were never more than half-a-dozen Communists or “political workers,” and they were regarded with hatred and disgust by the others. Their chief duty obviously was to eavesdrop and report suspicious remarks, but their efforts were crowned with no great success because the commissar, to whom the Communists reported, was himself a sham Communist and a personal friend of my commander. ”

“ If the entire corps is actually an order which lives according to these laws and realizes that one part cannot exist without the other—you are unimaginable without the General SS, and the latter is not imaginable without you. ”

“ The assessment of fines of money or goods, as well as the ordering of the seizure of hostages and the shooting of inhabitants of the territory in which the acts of sabotage have taken place, can only be done by the General Commissar, insofar as the Reich Commissar himself does not intervene. The most sparing use of the seizing of hostages is to be made. ”

“ The police organizations were recruited from ardent partisans who enlisted blindly to do the dirty work the leaders planned. The Reich Cabinet was the governmental facade for Nazi Party Government and in its members legal as well as actual responsibility was vested for the entire program. ”

“ The Fuehrer and Reichs Chancellor has ordered that Sections of the Armed Forces march into the Sudeten-German territory, beginning 1 October, 1938. There will be no general mobilization of the Armed Forces (or case "X") . Units already mobilized, will, for the time being, remain at their present posts.
2. Coincident with the crossing of the Reich frontier, the Commander in Chief of the Army will assume full powers in the territory to be occupied, together with authority to transfer this power to the C's in C of the Armies. ”

“ The main reason why the prisoners were in such bad condition towards the end of the war, why so many thousands of them were found sick and emaciated in the camps, was that every internee had to be employed in the armament industry to the extreme limit of his forces. The Reichsführer constantly and on every occasion kept this goal before our eyes, and also proclaimed it through the Chief of the Main Economic and Administrative Office, Obergruppenführer Pohl, to the concentration camp commanders and administrative leaders during the so-called commanders’ meetings. ”

“ The Generalstaatskommissar has expressed quite clearly and unambiguously through the Landeskommandant and Colonel Seisser that he is determined to use force against any group that attempts to bring about a violent change. As military commander of Kampfbund Bayern, I insist that differences of opinion-even if they are so serious that they render a concerted effort of individual groups impossible -- cannot prevent me and the combined military might of the Kampfbund from casting our lot with any group that meets the force of the Reichswehr and Landespolizei with force. Signed, Kriebel. ”

“ The Reichsfuehrer SS and Chief of the German Police thus must be able to carry out with the aid of his agencies his police measures concerning the interests of the Reich as a whole. This, however, will be done in such a way that the measures to be adopted will first be submitted to me and carried out only when I give my consent. In the General Government, the Police is the Armed Forces. ”

“ If the Reich Ministry of Justice had failed to give the man up, the police would have broken the resistance by force; the condemned [351] person could not be saved. During the war, civilian and military command offices in numerous cases were seriously charged with the fact that through a defense which they had to consider as useless, they had sacrificed many lives. Such a useless sacrifice it would have been if the Reich Ministry of Justice had instructed the prison authorities, via the executive office, to resist the police. ”

“ Witness, at the beginning of your examination you stated that when you were ordered to the Reichsführer SS Himmler, he told you that the carrying out of this order of the Führer was to be left to the SS and that the SS had been ordered to do it. What is to be understood under this general title SS?
HOESS: According to the explanations of the Reichsführer, this could only mean the men guarding the concentration camps. According to the nature of the order only concentration camp crews and not the Waffen-SS could be concerned with the carrying out of this task. ”

“ Nonetheless, the full support of the military leaders continued to be given to these activities.
The record is clear that the General Staff and High Command Group, including the defendants, who were members of the Group and numerous other members ordered, directed, and participated in war crimes and crimes against humanity as specified in counts 3 and 4 of the Indictment.
C. Conclusion. The world must bear in mind that the German High Command is not an evanescent thing, the creature of a decade of unrest, or a school of thought or tradition which is shattered or utterly discredited. ”

“ Such an office was necessary because the occupied territories required personnel and because the Reich commissioners in the occupied territories were directly under the Führer’s command. Written communications went in part through me. If personnel was to be provided for within this framework, then I would have had to do it. But I had no instrument for it. I had only a staff of 12 senior officials and I had no organization in the country; I had no executive officials in those countries. ”

“ He has made the statement in Berlin that he, if it is demanded from him, can naturally exercise force in such a manner that he has the police surround a village and get the men and women, in question, out by force, and then send them to Germany. ”

“ During the period of my activities in Berlin, information had already frequently reached me to the effect that there existed in the Reich a terror organization which had sworn the oath of mutual allegiance in life and death. It is expressly pointed out to men who are or who may be accepted into this brotherhood that they are under an obligation to submit to the secret court and that they are in duty bound when carrying out their tasks to feel that they belong in a high degree to the brotherhood and only in a smaller degree to Adolf Hitler. ”

“ They cannot escape the consequences of their collective acts by combining informally instead of formally. The essence of a general staff or a high command lies, not in the name you give it, but in the functions it performs; and the men comprised within the group as we have defined it in the Indictment do constitute a functional group, welded together by common responsibility, of those officers who had the principal authority and responsibility under Hitler for the plans and operations of the German Armed Forces. ”

“ We remain human because we do not torture our opponents. We must remain hard in annihilating them.”
I do not offer any evidence of the commission of these crimes, because that is to be done by prosecutors of the French Republic. But the position of the Defendant Seyss-Inquart as Reich Commissioner, the control which he exercised, which has been shown, particularly over the SS and Police, and the attitude of the man himself will make clear his authorization and participation in the crimes to be proved and are a further indication of his part in the common plan. ”

“ You were not seeking to shift responsibility in this matter to Bormann. You were the link between the occupied territories and Hitler.
LAMMERS: I was; but not exclusively, only for matters of secondary importance. The Reich commissioners were directly responsible to the Führer.
MAJOR JONES: I want to ask you some questions now, not about terror which existed in the territory that Germany conquered, but about the terror in Germany itself. You have testified as to the Defendant Frick that as Minister of the Interior he was in effect a man without power, a man of straw. ”

“ And I certainly repeated Hitler’s words, which were, “We must make an example,” since I was afraid of some further serious encroachments upon the Prisoners of War Organization in other ways, apart from this single case of the prisoners not being returned to the Wehrmacht. On reading the interrogation report I saw the statement by Graevenitz, or rather, Westhoff, to the effect that I had said, “They will be shot, and most of them must be dead already.” ”

“ From the very first months of the war it became clear to the Soviet Government that the innumerable crimes of the German fascist aggressors against the peaceful citizens of my mother country represented, not the excesses of undisciplined military units or the isolated crimes of individual officers and soldiers, but that they represented a system prepared in advance, not merely sanctioned by the criminal Hitler Government, but consciously planned and encouraged by this government. ”

“ As the German Parliament in no way resembles the British Parliament, so do the German, police in no way resemble the British police. The German police, mounted or unmounted, are armed with a revolver, a sword, and not infrequently provided with a machine-gun. They have powers of search and arrest without warrant. They are allowed at their discretion to strike or otherwise maltreat not only civilians, but soldiers. ”

“ When we reflect that scarcely in one case out of every hundred formal charges are preferred by the victims, who know themselves completely in the power of their tyrannous [xxiv] masters, the official record thus stated is indeed appalling. But here again the Kaiser himself, as chief commander of the army, must be held largely responsible; for his more than lenient treatment of the convicted offenders is nothing less than a direct encouragement to their fellows to continue in these fiendish practices. ”

“ The Nazi conspirators, and in particular the industrialists among them, embarked upon a huge re-armament program and set out to produce and develop huge quantities of materials of war and to create a powerful military potential.
5. With the object of carrying through the preparation for war the Nazi conspirators set up a series of administrative agencies and authorities. For example, in 1936 they established for this purpose the office of the Four Year Plan with the Defendant GÖRING as Plenipotentiary, vesting it with overriding control over Germany’s economy. ”

“ Some time ago the representatives of the churches had written to the Wehrmacht commander and to me, and they presented their conception against the execution of death sentences which the Wehrmacht commanders announced in the meantime. To this I can only say the following: The moment in which our men, fathers and sons with iron determination look towards their fate in the east and unflinchingly and steadfastly perform their highest pledge, it is unbearable to tolerate conspiracies whose goal is to weaken the rear of this eastern front. ”

“ THE CONSOLIDATION OF NAZI POWER We shall now consider the steps, which embraced the most hideous of crimes against humanity, to which the conspirators resorted in perfecting control of the German State and in preparing Germany for the aggressive war indispensable to their ends. ”

“ German criminal law will be applied to the following acts committed by a foreigner abroad, independently of the laws of the place of commitment:
1. Acts committed while holding a German government office, as a German soldier, or as member of the Reich Labor Service, or committed against a holder of an office of the German State or the Party, against a German soldier, or a member of the Reich Labor Service, while on duty, or relating to his duty;
2. Acts constituting treason or high treason against the German Reich;
3. Crimes committed with explosives;
4. Traffic in children and women ”