Nuremberg Trials
Opening Address for the United States
Robert Jackson
This document was retrieved from the archives of Nizkor. Source: Nazi Conspiracy & Aggression, Volume I, Chapter VII, Office of the United States Chief Counsel for Prosecution of Axis Criminality, United States Government Printing Office, Washington, 1946.
TERRORISM AND PREPARATION FOR 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 tolerable by modern
civilization. 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
labor, 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 cognizance, 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
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atrocity practice to discipline the membership of the criminal
organization to follow the pattern later in occupied countries.
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 5/20/1942, 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.
A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust
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College of Education, University of South Florida © 2005.