https://nuremberg.law.harvard.edu/documents/450006-indictment-of-nazi-leaders
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The Pittsburgh Press (October 18, 1945)
24 of Hitler’s ringleaders indicted for plotting war
Atrocities, devastation unmatched in history charged by Allies
BERLIN (UP) – Twenty-four ringleaders of Hitlerite Germany were charged formally today with plotting and starting World War II and with barbarous atrocities, persecution and devastation unmatched in scope and savagery in the history of mankind.
A 25,000-word indictment which traced the course of a doomed “master race” from the infancy of Nazism to utter defeat, was handed down against Hermann Goering, Rudolf Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop and their accomplices. They will go on trial for their lives before a four-power court in Nuremberg, probably next month.**
The unprecedented document presented the horror-ridden history of Nazism in terms of disappearance of 5,700,000 European Jews; murder of four million persons in a single concentration camp; destruction of $135,800,000,000 worth of Russian property, and the treacherous and absolute disregard of honor among nations.
Put Japs in war
Germany was charged with persuading Japan to declare war against the United States, with violation of peace treaties as far back as 1899, with disregard of international agreements on the conduct of warfare and with murder, enslavement, plunder of private and public property, wanton destruction of cities and towns and devastation not justified by military necessity.
The 24 defendants, all but one of whom now are being held neat Nuernberg, were charged with individual responsibility for the crimes of Nazism. They were listed individually, identified in the Nazi leadership and charged specifically with the three major counts of the indictment – “crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity” and of a common conspiracy to commit those crimes.
Not yet in Allied custody but believed alive and still at large was Martin Bormann, successor to Hess as Hitler’s deputy, who was indicted along with the others so that there will be no chance that he might escape Allied justice.
Signed by Jackson
The indictment was signed by Robert Jackson, Supreme Court justice and U.S. prosecutor on the War Crimes Commission, and by the representatives of Great Britain, France and the Soviet Union. The defendants are expected to be given approximately a month to prepare their cases before they go on trial before the four-power tribunal, whose American member is Francis Biddle, former attorney general.
The report named places, dates, persons, numbers. It spoke in general terms of international violations and gave specific illustrations.
“The murders and ill-treatment of civilian populations were carried on by… shooting, hanging, gassing, starvation, gross overcrowding, systematic undernutrition, systematic imposition of labor tasks beyond the strength of those ordered to carry them out, inadequate provision of surgical and medical services, kickings, beatings, brutality and torture of all kinds, including the use of hot irons and, pulling out of fingernails and… experiments on living subjects,” one section said.
Those indicted
The 24 top Nazis named in the indictment were:
Hermann Goering: Former commander in chief of the German Air Force, a general in the elite guard and storm troops and former successor-designate to Hitler.
Rudolf Hess: Once designated as Hitler’s second choice for Fuehrer and formerly deputy Fuehrer until his flight to Britain in 1941.
Joachim von Ribbentrop: Former German foreign minister and a member of the secret Cabinet Council.
Franz von Papen: Former ambassador to Austria at the time of the Anschluss and later envoy to Turkey.
Walther Funk: Former Reichsminister of economics and president of the Reichsbank.
Hjalmar Schacht: Former president of the Reichsbank and minister without portfolio.
Alfred Rosenberg: Official Nazi Party philosopher and commissioner for occupied Russian territory.
Julius Streicher: Anti-Semitic leader.
Robert Ley: Leader of the Labor Front.
Hans Frank: Governor-General of Poland.
Ernst Kaltenbrunner: Chief of the dread Security and Criminal Cabinet Council.
Wilhelm Keitel: Chief of the High Command and a member of the secret Cabinet Council.
Grand Adm. Karl Doenitz: Commander-in-chief of the Navy and successor to Hitler.
Grand Adm. Erich Raeder: Former commander-in-chief of the Navy.
Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach: Head of the great Krupp arms trust.
Baldur von Schirach: Leader of the Nazi youth movement and leader of Vienna.
Fritz Sauckel: In charge of foreign slave labor.
Albert Speer: Head of the Todt construction agency and Reichsminister of production.
Martin Bormann: Chief of the Nazi Party Chancellery and Hitler’s secretary.
Col. Gen. Gustav Jodl: Chief of the General Staff.
Baron Konstantin von Neurath: Former foreign minister and “protector” of Bohemia-Moravia.
Arthur Seyss-Inquart: Former Reichscommissioner for Austria and the Netherlands.
Hans Fritzsche: Deputy to Propaganda Minister Paul Joseph Goebbels with jurisdiction over radio propaganda.
Wilhelm Frick: Former Reichsminister of the interior, “protector” of Bohemia-Moravia, Elite Guard general and a member of the secret Cabinet Council.
Conspicuously absent were Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler, known to be dead, and Adolf Hitler, who is considered generally to be dead although his body never has been found.
Listed as criminal organizations to which many of the defendants belonged was the Reich Cabinet; Hitler’s Council of Ministers; the leadership corps of the Nazi Party, an elite group of top Nazis; the SS, the secret police; Gestapo; SA, military organization of the Nazi Party, and the German General Staff and High Command.
All members of party
Each of the defendants was a member of the Nazi Party, the indictment said, and it was the “central core of the common plan for conspiracy” for world domination.
The rise of Hitler to the head of the Nazi Party in 1921 after the unsuccessful Munich putsch, his rise to German chancellor, the Reichstag fire and the denial of civil liberties to the German people were outlined in the document. After that all parties but the Nazi Party were abolished, labor unions were banned, the first concentration camps were established in 1933 to stamp out opposition within Germany. The SS and Gestapo began their reign of terror.
The indictment told of the Nazi attempt to kill Christianity in Germany and their shaping of the education of youth.
The persecution of Jews was outlined in detail and said that of 9,600,000 Jews in Nazi-dominated Europe, some 5,700,000 disappeared.
The Nazis were charged with the murder of Chancellor Engelbert Dolfuss who resisted their aggression in Austria and the killing of Social Democrat and Communist leaders. They were accused of imprisoning numerous political and religious personages, including Pastor Martin Niemoller.
“American prisoners, officers and men, were murdered in Normandy during the summer of 1944 and in the Ardennes in December 1944,” the indictment said. “American prisoners were starved, beaten and otherwise mistreated in numerous stalags (prisoner of war camps) in Germany and in the occupied countries, particularly in 1943, 1944 and 1945.”
The indictment referred to such concentrated camps as Buchenwald, Belsen, Dachau and Auschwitz and referred to such methods as:
“Bad treatment, pseudo-scientific experiments (sterilization of women at Auschwitz and at Ravensbruck, study of the evolution of cancer of the womb at Auschwitz, of typhus at Buchenwald, anatomical research at Natzweiller, heart injections at Buchenwald, bone grafting and muscular excisions at Ravensbruck, etc.), gas chambers, gas wagons and crematory ovens.”
Bones for fertilizer
The methods and crimes of the Nazis were held to be not only in violation of international conventions but also of internal penal laws and the “general principles of criminal law as derived from the criminal law of all civilized nations.” The indictment accused the Germans of trying to cover up their crimes by exhuming corpses and crushing bones for use as fertilizer.
After Italy surrendered to the Allies, the Germans turned on their former Axis partners – murdering at least 7,500 men, women and children during the period from March 1944 to April 1945.
In Poland, the Germans used the “most refined methods of cruelty,” the indictment charged, including “disemboweling and freezing of human beings in tubs of water and mass shooting to the accompaniment of the music of an orchestra.”
Germany was blamed for the Katyn massacre of Polish officers in Russia and with treacherously engineering a break between the Soviet Union and the Polish government-in-exile. Germany swore that Russia had killed the officers and Poland’s request for an investigation caused Russia to break relations with the exile government.
125,000 slain at Smolensk
Citizens of the Soviet Union were perhaps the greatest victims of German savagery. More than 135,000 citizens were murdered near Smolensk; 172,000 civilians were shot and tortured in the Leningrad region; more than 50,000 were killed and tortured in the Stalingrad area.
“After the Germans were expelled from Stalingrad, more than a thousand mutilated bodies of local inhabitants were found with marks of torture,” it said. “One hundred and thirty-nine women had their arms painfully bent backward and held by wires. From some their breasts had been cut off and their ears, fingers and toes had been amputated. The bodies bore the marks of burns. On the bodies of the men the five-pointed star was burned with an iron or cut with a knife. Some were disemboweled.”
It was revealed that Hitler had sent a secret order decreeing that “the Fuehrer has decided to erase from the face of the earth St. Petersburg (Leningrad).” The order said the existence of this city, will have no further interest after “Soviet Russia is destroyed.”
Destroyed museums
The Germans looted and destroyed historical and artistic works throughout Europe. In Russia alone, 427 museums were destroyed. The grave of the Russian poet Pushkin was desecrated, the estate and museum of Lev Tolstoy was destroyed and the museum of the painter Repin was looted and devastated. Some 10,000 works of art were stolen from Estonia.
The indictment listed similar Nazi atrocities in France, Holland, Norway, Greece, Czechoslovakia and Belgium. It told of the utter destruction of entire towns – including the now historical village of Lidice.
It condemned the mass deportation of political and racial refugees, attesting that some 1,400,000 persons were deported from France and four million from the Soviet Union. It spoke of the use and mistreatment of slave laborers and the killing of hostages. It quoted Streicher as saying: “The sun will not shine on earth until the last Jew is dead.”
Retraces road to war
The Nazis justified their aggression and terrorism on the grounds that “persons of so-called ‘German blood’” were a “master race” and were, accordingly, entitled to subjugate, dominate or exterminate other “races” and “peoples.” Germany came to believe that “war was a noble and necessary activity of Germans,” the indictment said.
There was a careful retracing of the German road back to militarism. The indictment told of Germany leaving the League of Nations and the international disarmament conference in 1933; Goering’s announcement in 1935 that Germany was building an air force and the enactment of a law for universal military service in the same year.
In 1936, Germany reoccupied and fortified the Rhineland. Then came the annexation of Austria and the infamous “appeasement” pact at Munich on September 29, 1938, which sold out Czechoslovakia.
Tells of war’s start
The indictment told of Germany’s launching of World War II with the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, and her subsequent invasions on Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Yugoslavia and Greece.
Then came the attack on Russia after an agreement of non-aggression had been signed. Germany sought and obtained a 10-year military alliance which created the Axis of Germany, Italy and Japan.
“The Nazi conspirators conceived that Japanese aggression could weaken and handicap those nations with whom they were at war and those with whom they contemplated war,” the indictment said.
“Accordingly, the Nazi conspirators exhorted Japan to seek a ‘new order of things.’ Taking advantage of wars then being waged by Nazi conspirators, Japan commenced an attack on December 7, 1941, against the United States of America, Great Britain, France and the Netherlands.”
Lists broken treaties
The indictment listed the treaties and agreements which the Nazis violated in their career of aggression. They included the Hague Treaty signed in 1899 for peaceful settlements; the Hague Convention regarding the opening of hostilities and the methods of warfare; the Versailles Treaty; the Treaty of Locarno, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, the Munich agreement and individual treaties and pacts with other nations.
The indictment was drawn after mountains of evidence had been sifted and thousands of witnesses heard. The final release of the indictment was delayed for several days while it was translated from the original English version into the other languages.