Through the police formations that before you are accused as
criminal organizations, 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 organizations were utilized to
hunt down every form of Opposition and to penalize every
nonconformity. These organizations 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 Guertner
to Hitler which is revealing. A Gestapo official had been
prosecuted for crimes committed in the camp at Hohnstein,
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 have occurred at least since Summer 1933. The
prisoners not only were beaten with whips without
cause, similarly as in the Concentration Camp Bredow
near Stettin till 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 tormenters
became blase and careless. We have a report of discovery
that in Ploetzens one night, 186 persons were executed while
there were orders for only 180. 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
June 27, 1942, SS General Gluecks ordered commandants of all
concentration camps to reduce this honorarium to three
cigarettes. In 1943, the Reichsleader of the SS and Chief of
German Police ordered the corporal punishments on Russian
women to be applied by Polish women and vice versa, but the
price was not frozen. “As reward, a few cigarettes” was
authorized. Under the Nazis, human life had been
progressively
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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 August 11, 1942, an order
went from Himmler to the commanders 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 SD 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 (66-PS).
Deportations and secret arrests were labeled, with a Nazi
wit which seems a little ghoulish,
Nacht und Nebel (Night and Fog) (90, 83-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 committed 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 8 days after the
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
those 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
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were not the work of underlying degenerates but of master
minds high in the Nazi conspiracy. In May 20,1942, General
Field Marshal Milch authorized SS General Wolff to go ahead
at Dachau Camp with so-called “cold experiments”; and four
female gypsies were supplied 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 28 degrees
centigrade (82.4 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
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 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 civilized hand
against Nazi Germany.
Germany became one vast torture chamber. Cries of its
victims were heard round the world and brought shudders to
civilized 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 tan
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
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Hitler on July 20, 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
ones. 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 practiced the fuehrerprinzip, which
centralized 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 singlemindedness 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 neighbors 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
defense and every defendant, and every intelligent German,
well understood them to be for aggressive purposes.
