The Nuremberg Trial

101

The Evening Star (December 29, 1945)

Editorial: Militarism exposed

From the Salina Journal

One reason no war has successfully ended all wars is that the political machinations behind the backs of the lesser people of great nations has remained the knowledge of a few. At Nuernberg today, and later in Japan, the chiefs of a nation responsible for instigating a war are being tried for their crimes against civilization.

It is as much the purpose of these trials to expose militarism as it is to punish the guilty. And this the testimony covering the scheming inside Germany and in international politics can do. The lesser people of the world stand to learn that racial hatreds, terrorism and other cruelties against them are merely the tools of scheming minds moved by a lust for power.

Any critical examination of these plottings by the victims – rather than the testimony of the victims – should be convincing proof that a few men seek to use the lives and suffering of the masses for their own glorification. Such knowledge can do more than anything else to cause militarism, as it has been practiced through the centuries, to lose favor and to be forever rejected.

102

The Evening Star (December 30, 1945)

Streicher’s wife arrested

NUERNBERG (AP) – A military government officer today announced the arrest of Mrs. Julius Streicher, whose husband is one of the Nazi leaders now on trial on war crimes charges. The nature of the charge was not revealed.

103

The Evening Star (December 31, 1945)

Hitler’s will creates furor among Nazis in Nuernberg jail

Prisoners are surprised by naming of Goering and Himmler as traitors
By Daniel De Luce, Associated Press foreign correspondent

NUERNBERG (AP) – Adolf Hitler’s political testament, calling Hermann Goering and Heinrich Himmler traitors, created a furor today among the 20 arch Nazis awaiting in the Nuernberg jail for their trials as war criminals to resume Wednesday.

Meanwhile, the full story of the escape of three messengers from Hitler’s Berlin chancellery with his last testaments was told today in Herford by a British intelligence officer, who said there now was no possible doubt that the Nazi Fuehrer died in his battered bunker.

Exhaustive questioning of all persons known to have witnessed Hitler’s last hours who are now in British hands disclosed the full sequence of events which British intelligence now accepts as the true version of Hitler’s death, the officer said.

No surprise to Goering

The sensational charges, written by the trapped Fuehrer in the Berlin chancellery bunker on the eve of his suicide with his mistress bride, Eva Braun, were learned by the prisoners during a busy morning filled with conferences with their lawyers.

To Goering, Hitler’s condemnation came as no surprise for the SS and SA had arrested him in Berchtesgaden on April 23 while he was expecting to become the new German Fuehrer. The ousted reichsmarshal had not suspected, however, the full extent to which Himmler, suicide head of the Gestapo, also had slipped from Hitler’s favor.

Seyss-Inquart unmoved

Virtually all the other prisoners were reported surprised at the language used in the will in actions against the two Nazis, who next to Hitler had wielded the most power:

“Apart altogether from their disloyalty to me, Goering and Himmler have brought irreparable shame on the country and the whole nation by secretly negotiating with the enemy without my knowledge and against my will and also by illegally attempting to seize control of the state.”

Arthur Seyss-Inquart, named in the will as Joachim von Ribbentrop’s successor as foreign minister, was understood not to have known before of such an appointment. He was reported to have received the tardy word of this dubious honor today with his usual phlegmatic calm.

Ribbentrop was said to have hid whatever disappointment he may have felt at learning the will ignored him completely. He has described himself as “the last foreign minister of defeated Germany.” Ernst Kaltenbrunner and Grand Adm. Erich Raeder still were unaware of the will. Kaltenbrunner is under treatment at the American Army hospital for cranial hemorrhage which may require another month of convalescence. Raeder, whose health has been poor, stayed in bed in his jail cell.

Victims of plotting

The better-informed prisoners seemed agreed that Goering had been the victim of plotting by Deputy Party Fuehrer Martin Bormann and Paul Joseph Goebbels, who had worked to destroy Hitler’s confidence in him. Bormann, reported today to having been arrested, is being tried in absentia; Goebbel’s body was found in the chancellery.

Himmler apparently had dealt more independently in peace negotiations with Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden than had been believed. The prisoners gave this as the likeliest reason for Himmler’s “disgrace.”

Grand Adm. Karl Doenitz appeared to be better informed than any of the prisoners over the content of the Hitler document. He has explained that he was notified of his appointment as Reich president and supreme commander, and, as such, started peace preliminaries on his own initiative.

Bequeaths legacy of hate

Hitler sought to picture himself as a martyr. He bequeathed the German people the Nazi creed of fierce loyalty to the state and hatred of the Jews.

His final admonition was: “Above all, I enjoin the government of the nation and the people to uphold the racial laws to the limit and resist mercilessly the poisoner of all nations, international Jewry.”

Texts of the political testament of Hitler’s personal will, an appendix to the testament by Goebbels and a document recording Hitler’s marriage to Miss Braun were released yesterday by Allied authorities.

Hitler’s will indicated he preferred suicide in a Reich Chancellery bunker to trial before an Allied court.

“I shall not fall into the hands of an enemy who requires a new spectacle presented by the Jews to divert their hysterical masses,” he said.

Urging Germans to keep alive the Nazi doctrine, Hitler said the “establishment of a National Socialist state represents the work of centuries to come and obliges each individual person always to serve the common interest before his own advantage.”

“This seed has been sown that will grow one day in the rebirth of the National Socialist movement,” the document added.

Throughout the testament Hitler built himself up as a martyr who wished to join in death the troops who had fallen on the battlefield. “I cannot forsake the city that is the capital of this state,” he said. “…I wish to share my fate with that of millions of others. … I die with a joyful heart in my knowledge of the immeasurable deeds and achievements of our soldiers at the front, of our women at home, the achievements of our peasants and workers and of a contribution unique in history, of our youth that bears my name.”

Told of suicide plans

In his personal will, also dated April 29, Hitler told of plans for suicide after marrying Miss Braun, his 35-year-old mistress.

“She will go to her death with me at her own wish as my wife,” the will said. “This will compensate us for what we have both lost through my work in the service of my people.”

“My wife and I choose to die in order to escape the shame of overthrow or capitulation,” the will added. “It is our wish for our bodies to be cremated immediately…”

Hitler left his personal possessions “insofar as they are worth” to the Nazi Party, and said that paintings he had collected should be placed in a gallery “in my home town of Linz on the Danube.”

Bormann was named executor. Bormann, Goebbels and Nicolaus von Below witnessed the will.

Issued first by British

The Hitler documents and the appendix by Goebbels were released by the American Third Army after British officials at Herford had made them public in the British zone.

The documents were recovered by American intelligence agents. The British also seized a messenger who carried a duplicate set of the documents, plus the Goebbels’ appendix.

Third Army officers at first refused to release the texts, saying they contained “political dynamite” and “weeks of investigation” would be required before the texts could be made public.

The Goebbels appendix, also dated April 29, said the propaganda minister had rejected Hitler’s command to leave Berlin and become chancellor of a new government.

“In the nightmare of treason which surrounds the Fuehrer in these most critical days of war, there must be some people to stay with him unconditionally until death,” the appendix said.

Berlin fell three days later, and Red Army soldiers identified the charred bodies of a man, woman and children as Goebbels and his family.

104

Bormann, missing deputy to Hitler, reported captured

LONDON (AP) – Reuters News Agency said in a dispatch from Nuernberg today that Czechoslovak newspapers had reported the arrest of Martin Bormann, Hitler’s deputy party Fuehrer. The report was not confirmed immediately.

The dispatch said the Czechoslovak newspapers reported that Bormann had been seized in the British zone of Germany. It added, however, that Allied security officers refused to confirm or deny the report.

105

nuremberg.tribunal

Day 25

106

The Evening Star (January 2, 1946)

Kaltenbrunner gave order for execution of 15 Yanks, court told

AP writer with group of OSS men captured in 1944 and killed

NUERNBERG (AP) – The International Military Tribunal heard testimony today that Ernst Kaltenbrunner, former head of the Gestapo and security police, personally ordered the execution of from 12 to 15 Americans, including war correspondent Joseph Morton of the Associated Press.

Mr. Morton and a group of members of the Office of Strategic Services were captured late in 1944 far behind German lines in Slovakia. They were put to death without a trial.

American prosecutors put into the records of the war crimes trial of Kaltenbrunner and 20 other ranking Nazis an affidavit by Adolph Zutter, adjutant at the Mauthausen murder camp, telling how the Americans were brought in from Slovakia. The trial resumed today after a 12-day holiday recess.

“I suppose the number of arrivals was about 12 to 15 men,” Zutter’s deposition said. “They wore a uniform which was American or Canadian, brown-green in color, and a shirt and cloth hat. Eight or 10 days after their arrival, an execution order came in by telegraph of teletype.

“Standarten Fuehrer Zeireis (then commandant of the camp) came to me in my office and told me: ‘Now Kaltenbrunner has given permission for the execution.’ The letter was secret and had the signature: Signed, Kaltenbrunner.”

The affidavit said an order was received later to destroy all files relating to the killing of the American party.

Mr. Morton, 34, was captured near Plomka in Slovakia December 26, 1944. He first was taken to Bratislava and then to Mauthausen, 15 miles east of Linz, Austria. He had accompanied a group of nine other Americans and four Britons on a flying trip into Slovakia to bring out stranded American fliers.

An earlier affidavit said Kaltenbrunner personally visited the Mauthausen camp and watched the Nazis gas their victims.

Hitler ordered slaughter

The court heard earlier that Hitler personally ordered the “slaughter to the last man” of all Allied parachute and commando troops captured after October 18, 1942.

The evidence today was the first that any of the ranking Nazis were actual eyewitnesses of the gruesome, wholesale slaughters. It was presented in an affidavit by Alois Hoellriegel, a former SS guard at Mauthausen, which said:

“On one occasion. I believe it was in the fall of 1942, Ernst Kaltenbrunner visited Mauthausen. I was on guard duty and saw him twice. He went down to the gas chamber with Ziereis, commandant of the camp, at the time when prisoners were being gassed. The sound accompanying the gassing operation was well known to me. I heard the gassing operation taking place while Kaltenbrunner was present.”

Kaltenbrunner was absent from the court as the case against him personally was started. He is recovering from a cranial hemorrhage. An effort by his attorney to obtain a delay was overruled. He is the only defendant absent from the trial now except for Martin Bormann, Hitler’s deputy, who is being tried in absentia.

A Reuters dispatch Monday quoted Czechoslovakian reports as saying Bormann had been arrested by the British in Germany, but there was no official confirmation of this. An Exchange Telegraph report from Copenhagen said the report apparently was a case of mistaken identity arising from the arrest at Neumuenster of a farmer who somewhat resembled Bormann.

The Fuehrer’s order – for the slaughter of Commandos and paratroopers – of which only 12 copies were made, was inspired by his fury over the Dieppe raid and similar operations, American prosecutors told the court.

“From now on,” the order asserted, “all enemies on so-called Commando missions in Europe or Africa challenged by German troops, even if they are to all appearances soldiers in uniform or demolition troops, whether armed or unarmed, in battle or in flight, are to be slaughtered to the last man.

“It does not make any difference whether they are landed from ships and airplanes for their actions or whether they are dropped by parachute. Even if these individuals, when found, should apparently be prepared to give themselves up, no pardon is to be granted them on principle.”

The order demanded that individual Commando soldiers or paratroopers be handed over immediately to Heinrich Himmler’s security guard. Apparently foreseeing objections among German soldiers to the brutal murder of all such prisoners, Hitler added: “I will hold responsible under military law, for failing to carry out this order, all commanders and officers who either have neglected the duty of instructing troops about this order or acting against the order where it was to be executed.”

Tries to justify action

In an effort to justify his action Hitler charged that captured orders showed that Commando units were directed both to shackle prisoners and also to “kill defenseless prisoners on the spot” when the prisoners would prove a hindrance.

The prosecution also read to the tribunal a vivid eyewitness account of how Nazi SS troops and security police massacred 5,000 Jews in one night in the Ukrainian town of Rowne.

The prosecution completed its case against the Gestapo security police and the SD, a branch of the SS which functioned as another sort of security police, during the morning session.

Col. Robert G. Storey, assistant American prosecutor, summed up the case against the secret Nazi police organizations by noting that Hermann Goering created the Gestapo in 1933 with the avowed purpose of eliminating any real or suspected enemies of Nazi conspirators.

Col. Storey declared that the Gestapo and its kindred organizations were responsible for hundreds of thousands of brutal murders.

Story of slaughter told

The story of the slaughter of helpless men, women and children in the Rowne ghetto – after an SS commander had given assurances that no pogrom was planned – was given in an affidavit by a German contractor, Herman Friedrich Graebe.

Graebe’s affidavit, read by Col. Storey, told how the SS men and security police surrounded the ghetto, switched on batteries of arc lights and drove the victims from their houses, many of them without clothes.

It went on to describe how the streets of the ghetto were filled with Jews, torn from their homes, with mothers and children crying frantically for each other.

“That did not prevent the SS from driving the people along the road at a running pace and hitting them until they reached a waiting freight train,” the affidavit said. “Car after car was filled and the screaming of women and children and the cracking of whips and rifle shots resounded unceasingly.

Houses blown open

“Several families had barricaded themselves in especially strong buildings, and those houses were blown open with hand grenades…

“All through the night these beaten, hounded and wounded people moved along the lighted streets. Women carried their dead children in their arms, children pulled and dragged their dead parents by their arms and legs down the road toward the train…

“I saw dozens of corpses of all ages and both sexes in the streets. … At the corner of one house lay a baby less than a year old with its skull crushed. Blood and brains were spattered over the house wall.

“The commander, SS Maj. Pritz, was walking up and down a row of 80 to 100 male Jews who were crouching on the ground. He had a heavy whip in his hand.”

107

Ribbentrop letter to Churchill tells of Hitler’s last prophecy

By Daniel De Luce, Associated Press foreign correspondent

NUERNBERG (AP) – Adolf Hitler was pictured today as going to his death with a defiant prophecy that his spirit would arise from the grave and that the world one day would see that he had been right.

The new version of the Fuehrer’s final hours was contained in a long secret letter written by Joachim von Ribbentrop, Nazi foreign minister, to Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden just before he was captured in Hamburg last summer. He said Hitler made the prediction in their final conversation in Berlin, and described his letter as Hitler’s “last political will.”

Von Ribbentrop’s handwritten letter was put on the secret list by army intelligence when he was captured, and this is the first dispatch to quote from it textually.

Hitler jittery

The letter declared the jittery Hitler entrusted to Von Ribbentrop the delivery of an appeal to British statesmen for real friendship between their empire and Germany as a “fundamental necessity if both nations will live in the long run.”

Hitler also was quoted as saying he “regretted” the war with the United States. Further, the Fuehrer could not help expressing his wonder at the power of the Soviet Union and called Premier Stalin’s creation of the Red Army a “grandiose deed,” Von Ribbentrop added.

Of the war with the United States the letter said: “Hitler regretted the war with America because we had no possible divergencies with this big nation. We had always regretted this war from the beginning and have done everything we could to prevent it even when our ships were being attacked.”

Fuehrer embittered

Of Hitler’s own political dreams Von Ribbentrop wrote that the Fuehrer showed “deep disappointment and embitterment” about their failure.

Von Ribbentrop’s version of Hitler’s “political will” made orally to him bore practically no resemblance to the hysterically worded document released publicly by British and American officers last Saturday. That document named a cabinet under Adm. Karl Doenitz to carry on the war, charged Reichsmarshal Goering and Heinrich Himmler with treason, and blamed Germany’s downfall on “international Jewry.”

The pale and aging Von Ribbentrop has told American interrogators at the Nuernberg jail that he fled Berlin April 24, 1945, on higher instructions. Three days later he informed Hitler that he wanted to come back and fight beside him, but was told to stay in the area of Nauen. However, the Red Army advance drove him into the British zone.

Letter rambles

Von Ribbentrop’s rambling and wheedling letter to Mr. Churchill and Mr. Eden was frankly phrased to pique their curiosity, if not their sympathy, and get him a trip to see them personally. It recalled the alleged statement by Hitler at western front headquarters in the summer of 1940 that he would grant England a peace “that must never in any way violate English prestige and esteem in the world.”

The letter began by noting radio reports that “former collaborators of the Fuehrer are at present soiling their own house, are trying to deprecate the Fuehrer, falsify his ideas about England, calumniate other former collaborators of his, etc., and compel me to do what I really wanted to do later on: Place myself at the disposal of the British commander in chief.

“I shall do it now. If I did not do so false impressions owing to unclear or biased statements or misunderstandings might arise.”

Von Ribbentrop was arrested before carrying out his alleged intention to surrender voluntarily.

Describes conversation

The letter said Von Ribbentrop had gone into the British territory “to inform you about my last political conversation with Adolf Hitler. This conversation during which, as so often lately, the Fuehrer’s deep disappointment and embitterment about the failure of a political conception was evident, culminated in a kind of last appeal and message to the leaders of the British Empire. This appeal represents at the same time the last political will of a man who as a great idealist has loved his people above all…

“I do not know if you will wish to hear the political testament of a deceased man, but I could imagine its contents might be adapted to heal the wounds which in the course of this bitter war have been inflicted. …II have been a close collaborator of the Fuehrer in foreign politics for many years. I have been a faithful follower of his up to the last minute…

“German foreign policy was in every phase directed by the Fuehrer himself,” the letter continued. “Its execution was my task. After my appointment to the head of the German Foreign Office I considered it my business to help the Fuehrer in attaining the justified German claims in Europe – as laid down by Hitler – and this by diplomatic means. … About the question of world conception (Weltauffassung) I have had serious divergencies of views and disputes with Hitler which I presume also was the cause that the Fuehrer never asked me to party meetings which he held regularly…

Policy carried out

“But if the Fuehrer had once decided on a matter his policy was always carried out according to the Fuehrer principle.

“When German and Russian relations were severed and war with Russia broke out, a development which I as originator of the German-Russian pact more than regretted, everything was subordinated to the anti-Communistic role. … The Fuehrer has looked upon this was as a war between the Weltaffassung, national and Communistic. … In our last conversation the Fuehrer in talking of the war suddenly turned to me and said: ‘You will see my spirit will arise from my grave and one will see that I have been right.’”

The letter continued: “About one point there always has been entire agreement between the Fuehrer and myself and that was that a strong and united Germany as a preliminary condition for a stable, flourishing Europe could only exist in the long run by close collaboration with Great Britain…

“He has spoken often in vehement terms about British politics, which he did not understand, but everyone who knew the Fuehrer was well aware that it was one of the most outstanding features of his character that – impulsive though he was – he never changed his fundamental convictions…

Wanted to avoid war

“Every step during these years was always taken with an eye on this final issue, that is to say, to bring Britain to terms. … That England declared war on Germany over the Polish question, a war which we both wanted to avoid by all means and which I tried and almost succeeded to prevent at the last moment, came lastly as a great shock to the Fuehrer.

“Now, shortly before the bitter end and before his death, Hitler has shown himself once more and in spite of his very poor state of health in his old ingenious way. He has with extraordinary clearness … in an almost prophetic way pointed out the decisive importance which in this century of the formation of the huge combined political areas (Grossraumgestaltung) must be attached to English-German relations.”

108

nuremberg.tribunal

Day 26

109

The Evening Star (January 3, 1946)

Former Himmler aide describes liquidation of Jews and Russians

NUERNBERG (AP) – A former aide of Gestapo Chief Heinrich Himmler told the International Military Tribunal today that special SS commandos were attached to the German Army on the eastern front with orders to kill every Jew and Soviet political commissar in occupied Russian regions.

Otto Ohlendorf, major general of police, testifying in the trial of 22 Nazi leaders, declared the high command of the German Army had full knowledge of the Commando order.

The 38-year-old witness, who had been in the SS since his teens, said his own Einsatzgrupp, operating with the German 11th Army in the Ukraine, alone had liquidated 90,000 persons in the first year of the war with Russia.

Himmler gave orders

Outlining the inner workings of the security police system under questioning by Col. John Harlan Amen, assistant American prosecutor, Ohlendorf testified that Himmler personally gave liquidation orders to leaders of the special Einsatzgrupps.

“He told us that the men had no responsibility for the acts and that the responsibility was his alone, as well as that of the Fuehrer,” the witness said.

Ohlendorf, who admitted giving orders himself for mass executions, testified that he conferred frequently with army commanders on the execution of Himmler’s orders.

He said the victims included men, women and children, and explained how they were wiped out en masse after being lined up on the pretext that they would be relocated.

Standing erect, Ohlendorf spoke through the microphone without hesitation, frequently turning his eyes toward the defendants sitting in the prisoners’ box on the opposite side of the room.

Steely looks for witness

Reichsmarshal Hermann Goering sucked in his lips and shook his head slightly. Col. Gen. Alfred Jodl and Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel gave the witness steely looks, but showed no emotion.

Ohlendorf hedged when pressed for a direct statement as to whether the army commanders condoned the plan to liquidate Jews and Soviet political commissars, but declared without qualification: “Since the liquidations took place in operations regions, the Einsatzgrupps would not have been able to function in the sense I described without army support.”

Ohlendorf also testified to the vital position which hulking Ernst Kaltenbrunner, former chief of the security police, held in the Nazi terror control over occupied Europe. Kaltenbrunner, one of the defendants, is recovering from a cranial hemorrhage and is being tried in absentia.

Giving details of the mass executions in Russia, Ohlendorf said leaders of some other groups reported that they had surpassed the 90,000 which his own group accounted for, but added that he believed their figures were “to a large extent exaggerated.”

“1 was present at the mass executions,” he declared calmly under questioning. “A local Einsatz commander would collect all the Jews in one area. They would be rounded up on the pretext that they were to be relocated.

“After registration, the Jews were collected at certain places, then transported to the place of execution, which was usually an anti-tank ditch or a natural gully.

‘‘The Jews were transported in trucks and executed immediately. The time during which the victims knew what was going to happen to them was kept as short as possible.”

Ohlendorf said the victims “were shot standing or kneeling” and that unit leaders had orders to administer the coup de grace in the event any of the victims still lived after being shot.

“They were executed in a military fashion,” he added.

He said, however, that in some of the massacres the leaders “simply killed their victims by shooting them in the back of the neck.”

“I was against that procedure,” he continued, “because it resulted in unnecessary emotional disturbances among the men who had to do the work… It was intolerable to me that the individual men should have to form their own decisions and take their own responsibility in the executions.”

In the spring of 1942, he said, the procedure was changed when Himmler ordered that “women and children should be killed only in gas vans.” These were disguised as ordinary trailers, he said, but were to designed that a gas engine could pump enough gas into them in 15 minutes to kill the occupants.

He declared that the victims died on their way to their burial place without knowing they were being executed. “They suffered no pain,” he commented.

All the personal property and other belongings of the victims, whether they were shot or executed in the gas vans, was collected and given to the Reich finance ministry or to the central command office of the Gestapo and security police, he said.

The latter office was headed by Reinhardt Heydrich until his assassination in Czechoslovakia in 1942. From that time until the collapse of the Nazi government, it was headed by Kaltenbrunner.

110

Czech police hunting man suspected of being Goering’s son

PRAGUE (AP) – Czechoslovak security authorities hunted today for a mystery man tenatively identified as a son of Hermann Goering who escaped from an east-bound prisoner of war transfort after it crossed the Polish frontier.

The police radio alerted all posts to search for the fugitive, who got away near Cieszyn (Teschen), 10 miles east of the Czechoslovak border.

Officers were told that he was believed to be the son of Goering, former German reichsmarshal who is now on trial at Nuernberg, that he was about 30 years old and that he greatly resembled Goering.

Goering, 52 years old and twice married, has two daughters. He is not known to have had a son.

A puzzled officer commented: “I didn’t know Goering had such a son, but I am certainly willing to try to find him.”

The Ministry of the Interior, in calling for the manhunt, suggested that the fugitive would try to flee back across Czechoslovakia.

The police alarm for this man was the latest of a series, of rumors which have had security officers at work, searching first for a youngster described as a son of Hitler and then for a son of Martin Bormann, Hitler’s missing aide.

Security authorities denied a rumor that they had arrested a boy of 11 named Friederich Schultz as a son of Hitler. They said they had no special interest in the boy and that he was the son of a Berlin furrier. The boy has been living with a Bohemian farmer since March 1940.

The existence of a son of Hitler was not even suspected until military authorities found the picture of a boy of 11 or 12 among Hitler’s personal documents recently.

No official basis for this report was found during an investigation at Nuernberg earlier this week. A kindred rumor that Martin Bormann had been arrested likewise was without support.

Czechoslovak police later heard a rumor that the pictured youth was Bormann’s son.

111

British officer denies report of Bormann arrest

PLOEN, Germany (AP) – A senior intelligence officer of the British Eighth Corps categorically denied yesterday that any person suspected of being Martin Bormann, Hitler’s missing deputy, was under arrest in the Eighth Corps district.

He said no person in custody in this corps area “is or has been suspected of being Bormann.”

Rumors had come from Denmark and Czechoslovakia that a man named Marius had been arrested in Neumuenster in Schleswig-Holstein and identified as Bormann.

112

Editorial: A warning for generations

With the finding and publication of his “political testament” and other personal documents, it seems beyond doubt now that Hitler – as reported some weeks ago by British intelligence officers and German witnesses – died in an atmosphere of nightmare and hysteria, full of self-pity and self-justification, a suicide with his Eva Braun, his body consumed by flames, a supreme egotist, a psychopathic preacher of hate and a colossal prevaricator to the very end.

He wrote his “testament” just hours before he destroyed himself, but nowhere in it is there any evidence that he felt the slightest twinge of conscience as he prepared to cross the threshold into a world which even he, despite his apparent lack of spirituality and Christian belief, might have dreaded at the last moment as a place where conceivably he would be obliged to face a terrible judgment. In his final hours, as the savage and essentially pagan world of Nazidom came crashing down, the only thing Hitler feared, seemingly, was the prospective “shame” of being taken captive and tried as a criminal.

The trial at Nuernberg is proving beyond doubt that this man and his regime wanted war and conspired to bring it about and that they pursued a deliberate, cold-blooded policy of extermination, particularly against the Jews. Yet on the eve of his death, facing the unknown, facing what even to his mind must have seemed to be at least the possibility of supernatural justice, Hitler, who had made the lie an instrument of policy during the whole of his adult life, had the temerity to keep on lying. Despite all the evidence now before mankind, he wrote in his “testament” that he had always been a man of peace and that “international Jewry and its helpers,” not he, were responsible for the agony let loose upon the world in 1939. The only thing he did, he said, was to “love” his people and lead them in history’s “most glorious and heroic” struggle for existence.

Then, as if in defiance of any possible judgment awaiting him beyond cremation, he boasted of how he had seen to it that the Jews would be exterminated during the war, “even though by more humane means than war” – the horror camps, the gas chambers, the merciless beatings, the systematic starvation, and all the other refinements of the Nazi policy of mass slaughter. Finally, after condemning the “traitors” Goering and Himmler, he called upon his followers now and in the future to emphasize how he had died – in other words, to use him as an example and a legend – in order to keep alive and increase in Germany hatred against the Jews and everyone else who brought about his downfall.

All this, it must be remembered – the repeated lie, the unmitigated hate, the total lack of repentance – was written by a man on the verge of leaving this world to meet his Maker. Could it have been possible that Hitler, having employed untruth for so long, came actually to believe that it was truer than truth itself? Or is it all to be explained – the hating as well as the lying – simply by saying that he had a sick and twisted genius which made him incapable of distinguishing right from wrong?

Whatever the answer, whatever it was that made him darkly perverse even in the last moments of his life, he seems certainly to have come close to personifying Nietzsche’s harrowing ideal – the creature beyond good and evil, the negation of the humane and Christian man. Let his name stand for generations in that somber light – as a warning of what can happen when such spirits are appeased until it is too late to stop them from running wild in the world.

113

Nazi rebuff of Vatican on atrocity protests disclosed at trial

NUERNBERG (AP) – The highhanded manner in which the Nazi government rebuffed Vatican attempts to halt atrocities against the Catholic Church in Poland was pictured today in documents made available by American officials here.

The documents – official communications between the Vatican and the Nazi Foreign Office – showed the Holy See got a rude brushoff when it tried to bring these atrocities to the attention of Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop.

The Foreign Office flatly refused to deliver the Vatican’s letter to Von Ribbentrop.

When the Vatican protested to the foreign minister against this “unfriendly act,” he made an insulting reply. Obviously angered by the Vatican’s refusal to recognize German sovereignty in territories won by force, Von Ribbentrop said: “Letters dealing with impossible situations are a waste of time, and since (by implication) Rome contested German sovereignty in occupied lands, it could hardly expect the Reich to acknowledge papal authority regarding religious matters in the same territories.”

The protest, delivered by Msgr. Cesare Orsenigo, then apostolic nuncio in Berlin, charged that the German government was making it impossible for the Holy See to carry out its “divine mandate” to protect Catholics in occupied countries.

Copies of this correspondence, carried on in 1943 and made available recently by the Vatican, are now on the hands of Allied prosecutors and will be used in the trial of 22 top-flight Nazis, including Von Ribbentrop, before the International Military Tribunal.

The documents will be presented to the tribunal by Col. Leonard Wheeler Jr., who will handle the American prosecution’s case on church persecution.

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nuremberg.tribunal

Day 27

115

Enakopravnost (January 4, 1946)

Kako se nacijski prvaki pripravljajo, da bi se v Nuernbergu oprali vojnih zločinov

NUERNBERG (O.N.A.) – Branitelji nacističnih mogotcev so naznanili, kakšno stališče bodo zavzemali obtoženci, ko bodo odgovarjali na obtožbo. Iz teh objav je posneti, da bo na primer Julius Streicher, najstrašnejši preganjalec Zidov, poskušal prepričati sodnike, da je bil v bistvu njih prijatelj in protektor. Priznati je treba, da to njegovo stališče razodeva mnogo optimizma – kar je malo v skladu s preplašenostjo, katero kaže ta nekdaj tako mogočni in osorni ter naduti obtoženec.

Streicher bi baje želel dokazati, da ni nikdar storil nič drugega kot pisal v svojem zloglasnem časopisu “Der Stuermer”, in da se osebno ni nikdar vdeležil nobenega preganjanja Zidov.

Trdil bo tudi, da je osebno interveniral v prilog mnogih žrtev v koncentracijskih taboriščih, ter da jih je osvobodil najmanj po 20 do 30 vsako leto. Privedel bo tudi priče, ki bodo potrdile, da ni imel na svojih posestvih nikdar nobenih kaznjencev, da delajo zanj.

Arthur Seyss-Inquart, ki je bil poglavitna osebnost pri or ganizaciji napada na Avstrijo, in pozneje nacistični gaulajtas na Nizozemskem, namerava privesti nekih 20 prič. Trdil bo, da je sprejel svojo pozicijo v Avstriji, ker je zvedel, da je Hitler sklenil, da bo zasedel Avstrijo, češ, da mu je bilo le na tem, da ustvari nekoliko boljše in znosnejše razmere za avstrijsko prebivalstvo.

Walter Funck, ki se je moralično popolnoma sesedel in je le še senca človeka in moža, namerava baje igrati “ubogo revo”, ki ni vedela ničesar niti pomenila ničesar. Trdil bo, da je bil popolnoma brez vsakega vpliva napram Goeringu ali Speeru, ter mislil, da bo našel priče, ki bodo pripravljene priseči, da je bil vedno proti vojni in tudi proti ropanju in-plenjenju zasedenih dežel.

Wilhelm Frick, ki je bil nekoč takozvani protektor Češke to je, firerjev namestnik, pa se bo pritoževal, da policija v njegovem območju ni bila v njegovih rokah, ter da so odgovorni za strahovlado v tej deželi edinole Streicher, Kaltenbrunner in nekateri drugi.

116

The Evening Star (January 4, 1946)

General staff viewed war for corridor as duty, Blomberg says

Germany’s pre-war aims are described at trial in affidavit by marshal

NUERNBERG (AP) – Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg, former German war minister, informed the International Military Tribunal in an affidavit today that the whole group of German general staff officers considered a war to wipe out the Polish Corridor was “a sacred duty.”

The marshal, who was deposed in 1938 as minister of war because the Fuehrer disapproved of his marriage, said the Polish Corridor issue was the primary reason for secret rearmament which began about 10 years before Hitler assumed power.

Blomberg is a prisoner of the American Army of Occupation.

His affidavit was submitted as American prosecutors started the development of one of the most controversial and probably most difficult tasks in the entire trial of the 22 ranking Nazis – the effort to convict the general staff and high command as a criminal organization which willingly lent its services in a Nazi plot to wage aggressive wars.

Statement is frank

Blomberg’s affidavit – a remarkably frank statement of the general staff’s pre-war aims – said: “From 1919 and particularly from 1924, three critical territorial questions occupied attention in Germany. These were the questions of the Polish Corridor, the Ruhr and Memel.

“I myself, as well as the whole group of German staff officers, believed that these three questions outstanding, among which was the question of policy about the corridor, would have to be settled someday, if necessary, by force of arms. About 90 percent of the German people were of the same mind as the officers on the Polish question.

“War to wipe out the desecration involved in the creation of the Polish Corridor and to lessen the threat to separated East Prussia, surrounded by Poland and Lithuania, was regarded as a sacred duty though a sad necessity. This was one of the chief reasons behind the partially secret rearmament which began about 10 years before Hitler came to power and was accentuated under Nazi rule.

Hitler not opposed

“Before 1938-9 German generals were not opposed to Hitler. There was no reason to oppose Hitler since he produced results which they desired. After this time some generals began to condemn his methods and lost confidence in the power of his judgment. However, they failed as a group to take any definite stand against him, although a few of them tried to do so and as a result had to pay with their lives or their positions.

“Shortly after my removal from the post of commander in chief of the armed forces in January 1928, Hitler asked me to recommend a successor. I suggested (Hermann) Goering, who was the ranking officer, but Hitler objected because of his lack of patience and diligence.

“I was replaced as commander in chief by no officer, but Hitler personally took over my function as commander. Keitel (Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, one of the defendants who was known throughout the war as chief of the German high command) was recommended by me as chief of bureau. As far as I know, he was never named commander of the armed forces, but was always ‘a chief of staff’ under Hitler and in effect conducted the administrative functions of the ministry of war.

Keitel not opposed to Hitler

“At my time Keitel was not opposed to Hitler and therefore was qualified to bring about good understanding between Hitler and the armed forces, a thing which I myself desired and had furthered as Reichswehrminister and Reichskriegminister.

“To do the opposite would have led to civil war, for at that time the mass of the German people supported Hitler. Many are no longer willing to admit this. But it is true.

“Keitel did not oppose any of Hitler’s measures. He became a willing tool in Hitler’s hands for every one of his decisions.

“He did not measure up to what might have been expected of him.”

Col. Telford Taylor of Chevy Chase, Md., American deputy prosecutor who formerly was counsel for the Federal Communications Commission, reminded the judges of the United States, Russia, Great Britain and France that the prosecution saw nothing criminal in the preparation of war plans against actual conflicts, but “we will show the defendants agreed with Nazi objectives. … Without this agreement on objectives there might never have been war.”

Col. Taylor explained that five of the defendants were members of the Nazi command group. Of them, four – Keitel, Col. Gen. Alfred Jodl, Grand Adm. Erich Raeder and Grand Adm. Karl Doenitz – are on trial particularly because of their acts as military men, but the fifth, Reichsmarshal Hermann Goering, he declared, was “primarily a Nazi politician.”

Two linked to horrors

Blomberg’s testimony came after two defendants were linked directly with horrors of Nazi concentration camps.

A dramatic moment in the session came when Alois Hoellriegel, former guard at the Mauthausen death camp, rose from his seat and pointed a finger directly at Baldur von Schirach when asked to identify the defendant who visited Mauthausen in 1942.

The one-time strutting head of the Hitler youth movement, who before the trial contended he was unaware of concentration camp horrors, moved uneasily as all eyes in the courtroom turned on him. Then he leaned forward and whispered to Goering.

Another witness – Walter Schellenberg, former SS brigade leader and chief of the Nazi security police foreign intelligence service – testified earlier that Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Gestapo chief, personally gave orders for the mass evacuation of thousands of weakened concentration camp inmates in the path of the advancing Allied armies.

This was in direct contradiction of Heinrich Himmler’s orders, Schellenberg testified, and was contrary to the word which had been sent to Gen. Eisenhower that starving inmates would be left behind to be rescued by the Allies.

Schellenberg also testified that Kaltenbrunner at a conference in the spring of 1944 proposed that the Nazis cover up the slaughter of 504 American and British prisoners of war by giving a false explanation to the International Red Cross.

He said Kaltenbrunner suggested that the Red Cross be told that some of the prisoners had been killed by bombings.

Immediately after the two witnesses completed their testimony, the prosecution turned to the presentation of its case against the Nazi high command and general staff – the last among the six German official groups which were indicted as criminal organizations.

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Hess may have saved life of Bruening, Nazi files show

Ex-chancellor was menaced by SA man, Haushofer warned
By Daniel De Luce, Associated Press foreign correspondent

NUERNBERG (AP) – Rudolf Hess heeded a plea for mercy for Heinrich Bruening and possibly saved the ex-chancellor of Germany from death at the hands of an SA assassin, captured Nazi correspondents disclosed today.

The chapter in Hess’ past more than 12 years ago was told in two confidential letters seized by Allied intelligence, which the Deputy Fuehrer’s long-time crony, Dr. Albrecht Haushofer, son of the more famous Karl Haushofer, instigated with this message to Hess August 24, 1933:

“A very delicate matter. It is known to yourself that at some places in your organization there are people unable to subordinate their personal initiative for the benefit of the common good.

“I am informed that a personage very highly esteemed abroad but completely retired at home. Hh. Bg. must fear for his personal safety. The source of this fear I was told is SA Standartenfuehrer Shoeneberg. I need not point out to you the repercussions abroad which any personal accident would provoke. Could you take care of the internal curbing?”

Bruening at the time was more than a year out of office. The Nazis had outlawed his Catholic Center Party along with other opposition parties. Hounded by Hitler’s fanatical followers, Bruening changed his Berlin residence several times. He left Germany finally in June 1934 on insistence of friends just before the Nazi blood purge. A year later, he visited the United States where he is now teaching at Harvard University.

Within four days Hess dispatched a reassuring reply to Haushofer on elegant personal stationery as deputy of the Fuehrer of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.

Friendship confirmed

Captured German documents have shown the confidential friendship between Hess and Haushofer endured until Hess’ plane flight to Scotland in May 1941. For at least eight months preceding that forlorn mission, Hess had been acting on Haushofer’s advice concerning the proper way to get peace negotiations started with Britain. Haushofer was executed by the Gestapo in Berlin after the 1944 bomb plot against Hitler.

Members of the Haushofer family have confirmed to American interrogators that the “Hh. Bg.” of Albrecht’s note was in fact Bruening.

118

The Pittsburgh Press (January 4, 1946)

German Army prepared war 10 years before Hitler rose

Ex-commander discloses general staff plot in affidavit to War Crimes Tribunal

NUERNBERG (UP) – The German General Staff was preparing secretly for war and rearming for 10 years before Adolf Hitler came to power, Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg, one-time German commander-in-chief, stated today.

His frank affidavit was submitted to the War Crimes Tribunal.

Blomberg’s affidavit was presented in the prosecution’s submission of evidence against the German High Command and the German General Staff, in which the prosecution charged that it conspired to wage aggressive warfare.

Blomberg, who was removed as commander-in-chief by Hitler in 1938, declared that “about 90 percent of the German people” supported the German General Staff in its view that at least three outstanding issues – the Polish Corridor, Memel and the Ruhr – would have to be settled “someday, if necessary, by force of arms.”

Blomberg said that the prospective war was regarded as “a sacred duty.”

He said that up to 1938 and 1939, German generals were not opposed to Hitler.

“They had no reason to oppose Hitler,” he said, “since he produced the results they desired. After this time some generals began to condemn his methods and lost confidence in the power of his judgment. However, they failed as a group to take any definite stand against him although a few of them tried to do so and as a result had to pay for this with their lives or their positions.”

Forced into suicide

Blomberg said he had never heard of Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, who succeeded him as chief of staff, opposing any of Hitler’s measures.

The Blomberg affidavit was presented after a Mauthausen concentration camp guard told the court that he saw eight prisoners hurl themselves over a 125-foot quarry cliff while SS men lashed them.

The SS guards called this “playing paratrooper,” he said.

The witness was Alois Hoellriegel, a 36-year-old Austrian barber. He said he watched from a guard tower in 1941 while two SS men herded the prisoners toward the cliff.

“They beat the prisoners and I saw that they intended to throw them over the cliff,” he said. “Because of the beatings the prisoners threw themselves off the cliff in desperation.”

Visited camp

Hoellriegel testified that Ernst Kaltenbrunner and Baldur von Schirach, two of the defendants, had visited Mauthausen and were familiar with conditions there.

Maj. Gen. Walter Schellenberg, former head of the Storm Troop foreign intelligence service, testified that he saw Heinrich and the German Army quartermaster general sign an agreement establishing the task forces charged with the mass executions to preserve order. He said the order specified that the groups were under Kaltenbrunner’s command.

119

The Evening Star (January 5, 1946)

Editorial: Von Blomberg’s affidavit

Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg’s affidavit to the International Military Tribunal at Nuernberg does more than lend significant support to the prosecution’s effort to establish the war guilt of the German general staff. It serves also, however, unwittingly, to forewarn the world that Germany is likely to try aggression again unless the victors make sure this time that it is kept powerless to do so.

The Von Blomberg affidavit makes crystal clear that the German Army, after its defeat in 1918, never had any intention of living up to the terms of peace. Instead, from 1919 on, starting almost as soon as the First World War came to an end, its staff officers plotted to win back the territory that had been lost, notably the Polish corridor. To this end, according to Von Blomberg, secret rearmament began in Germany about 10 years before Hitler came to power.

Von Blomberg is in an excellent position to testify. From 1919 until 1938, when Hitler removed him as minister of war, he was one of the key figures in the German Army. Before 1938-9, he says, his fellow officers were not opposed to the Fuehrer “since he produced results which they desired.” After that, they “began to condemn his methods” but they failed as a group to take “a definite stand against him.” As for Poland, they obviously did not mind his aggression there, because they – Von Blomberg included – always regarded it as “a sacred duty though a sad necessity” to wage war “to wipe out the desecration in volved in the creation of the Polish corridor.” And in this “about 90 percent of the German people were of the same mind.”

Wholly apart from its current bearing on the Nuernberg trial, this testimony plainly has an important meaning in relation to the long future. Germany lost relatively little in the last peace, but it promptly began to plan another war to win back the losses. This time it has lost enormously more, so that its impulse to try aggression once more – in another twenty or thirty years – must be proportionately far greater. Von Blomberg’s affidavit makes sobering reading. Unintentionally implied in it is the warning that the Allied world, for its own safety, must never again let its guard down against the German power potential.

120

The Pittsburgh Press (January 6, 1946)

War trial in recess

NUERNBERG (Jan. 5) – Public sessions of the war crimes trial were in recess today. The tribunal called a closed session to consider procedure.