Chapter XXII: Section 1: of this Frick decree reads as follows (1)

“For the unification of police duties in the Reich, a Chief of
German Police is appointed in the Reich Ministry of the
Interior, to whom is assigned the direction and conduct of all
police affairs. . . .”

And from Section 2 we learn that it was the Defendant Frick and Hitler, the signers of the decree, who appointed Himmler as Chief of the German Police.

Paragraph 2 of Section 2 of the decree states that Himmler was, and I quote, “subordinated individually and directly to the Reich and Prussian Minister of the Interior.” And of course that is Frick.

The official chart of the German Police system, Document 1852-PS, which has already been introduced into evidence as Exhibit Number USA-449, clearly shows the position of the Reich Minister of the Interior, Frick, as the supreme commander of the entire German Police system, including the notorious RSHA, of which the Defendant Kaltenbrunner became chief, under Frick, in January 1943.

The Defendant Frick used his authority over the newly centralized police system for the promotion of the Nazi conspiracy. The Tribunal may take judicial notice of Frick’s decree of September 20, 1936, published in the _Ministerial Gazette of the Reich_ (_Ministerialblatt des Reichs- und Preussischen Ministeriums des Innern_), 1936, Page 1343, Document 2245-PS.

In this decree Frick reserved for himself the authority to appoint inspectors of the security police, subordinated them to his district governors, the Oberpräsidenten, and ordered them to have a close co-operation with the Party and the Armed Forces.

Another example of the use of his activities in the police sphere is in his ordinance of March 18, 1938, concerning the Austrian Anschluss, in which Frick authorized the Reichsführer of the SS and Police, Himmler, to take security measures in Austria without regard to previous legal limitations. This decree is published in the _Reichsgesetzblatt_, 1938, Page 262, and appears in the document book as Document Number 1437-PS.

I shall not here repeat the evidence concerning the criminal activities of the German police, over which the Defendant Frick had supreme authority. I should simply like to refer the Tribunal to the presentations already made on the subject of concentration camps and the Gestapo, two of the police institutions under Frick’s jurisdiction. But I should like to show that not only Himmler’s subordinate machine but also Frick’s ministry itself was familiar with these institutions. Therefore, I now offer into evidence Document 1643-PS, as Exhibit Number USA-713.

This document is a synopsis of correspondence between the Reich Ministry of the Interior and its field offices, from November 1942 through August 1943, on the subject of the legal aspects of the confiscation of property by the SS for the enlargement of the concentration camp at Auschwitz. At the bottom of Page 1 and the top of Page 2 of the English translation there appears a synopsis of the minutes of a meeting held on December 17 and 18, 1942, concerning the confiscation of this property. These minutes indicate that a further discussion was to be held on the subject on 21 December 1942, between the representatives of the Reich Minister of the Interior and the Reichsführer SS. On Page 2 there appears also a summary of a teletype letter dated January 22, 1943 from Dr. Hoffmann, representing the Reich Minister of the Interior, to the District Governor in Katowice.

The summary begins as follows, and I quote:

“The territory of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp will be
changed into an independent estate”—which means an
administrative territory of itself.

The fact that the Defendant Frick demonstrated personal interest in a concentration camp became known through the testimony of Dr. Blaha, to which I should like to refer the Tribunal, in which he testified that Frick visited the Dachau Camp in 1943.

The next aspect of the participation of the Defendant Frick in the Nazi conspiracy concerns his promotion of racial persecution and racism, involving the wiping out of the Jews.

In addition to the many other responsibilities of Frick, this vast administrative empire covered the entire area of the enactment and administration of racial legislation.

I refer again to Document 3475-PS, _The Manual for German Administrative Officials_, previously introduced, and I refer to Pages 2 and 4, showing that Frick was administrative and legislative guardian and protector of the German race.

In order to avoid any repetition, I shall not quote the various acts drafted by Frick’s ministry against the Jews. The presentation concerning persecution of the Jews made by Major Walsh before the Christmas recess listed a number of decrees signed by Frick, including the infamous Nuremberg Laws and the laws depriving Jews of their property, their rights of citizenship and stigmatizing them with the Yellow Star.

But the activities of Frick’s ministry were not restricted to the commission of such crimes, camouflaged in the form of legislation. The police field offices, subordinate to Frick, participated in the organization of such terroristic activities as the pogrom of November 9, 1938.

I refer to a series of Heydrich’s orders and reports concerning the organization of these pogroms or, as they were termed by Heydrich, “spontaneous riots,” Documents 3051-PS and 3058-PS, which are already in evidence as Exhibit Numbers USA-240 and 508.

Three days after this pogrom of 9 November 1938 Frick, his undersecretary Stuckart, and his subordinates, Heydrich and Daluege, participated in a conference on the Jewish question under the chairmanship of the Defendant Göring. At this meeting were discussed the various measures which the individual governmental departments should initiate against the Jews. A stenographic record of this meeting, Document 1816-PS, is already in evidence as Exhibit Number USA-261. May I briefly refer to the bottom of Page 23 of the English translation, where we find Göring’s concluding remarks:

“Also the Ministry of the Interior and the Police will have to
think over what measures have to be taken.”

This remark shows that Göring regarded it as Frick’s duty to follow-up by administrative devices the pogrom, organized by Frick’s own subordinates.

In the foregoing presentation we have shown that the Defendant Frick, as a member of the conspiracy, devised the machinery of the State for Nazism. In the following presentation we will show that Frick actively supported the preparation of the Nazi State for war.

May we begin this portion by showing that Frick was in sympathy with the flagrant violations by Germany of her treaties of non-aggression. This is clearly shown by the affidavit of Ambassador Messersmith, Document 2385-PS, previously introduced as Exhibit Number USA-68. I shall quote only one sentence from this affidavit, Page 4, line 10. It reads as follows:

“High-ranking Nazis with whom I had to maintain official
contact, particularly men such as Göring, Goebbels, Ley, Frick,
Frank, Darré, and others repeatedly scoffed at my position as to
the binding character of treaties and openly stated to me that
Germany would observe her international undertakings only so
long as it suited Germany’s interests to do so.”

In May 1935, by his appointment as Plenipotentiary General for the administration of the Reich, Frick became one of the big three in charge of preparing Germany for war. The other two members of the triumvirate were the Chief of the OKW and the Plenipotentiary General for War Economy, at that time the Defendant Schacht. Frick has admitted that he held the position of Plenipotentiary General since 21 May 1935, the date of the original secret Reich Defense Law. I refer to his statement of positions, Document 2978-PS, Exhibit Number USA-8.

His functions as Plenipotentiary General are outlined in the Reich Defense Law of 4 September 1938, which was classified top military secret and appears in our document book as 2194-PS, Exhibit Number USA-36. Under this law of 1938, Paragraph 3, tremendous power was concentrated in the hands of Frick as Plenipotentiary General for Administration. In addition to the offices under his supervision as Minister of the Interior, the law made the following offices subordinate to Frick for the purpose of carrying out the directives of the law: Reich Minister of Justice, Reich Minister of Education, Reich Minister for Religious Matters, and the Reich Minister for Planning.

Frick admitted the significant part he played in the preparations for war as a member of the triumvirate in a speech made on 7 March 1940 at the University of Freiburg. Excerpts appear in the document book as Document Number 2608-PS, which I offer in evidence as Exhibit Number USA-714. I think it would be helpful if the Tribunal would allow me to read two short paragraphs, beginning at the top of Page 1 of the English translation:

“The organization of the non-military national defense fits
organically into the entire structure of the National Socialist
Government and administration. This state of affairs is not
exceptional, but a necessary and planned part of the National
Socialist order. Thus, the conversion of our administration and
economy to wartime conditions has been accomplished very quickly
and without any friction—avoiding the otherwise very dangerous
change of the entire structure of the State.

“The planned preparation of the administration for the
possibility of a war has already been carried out during
peacetime. For this purpose the Führer appointed a
Plenipotentiary General for the Reich Administration and a
Plenipotentiary General for War Economy.”

Many of Frick’s contributions to the preparation of the German State for war are outlined in detail in the book _Dr. Wilhelm Frick and His Ministry_, which is already in evidence as Document 3119-PS. May I quote two short sentences from the top of Page 3 of the English translation:

“Besides, the leading co-operation of the Reich Minister of the
Interior in the important field of ‘military legislation,’ and
thus in the establishment of our Armed Forces, has to be
particularly emphasized. After all, the Reich Minister of the
Interior is the civilian minister of the defense of the country,
who in this capacity, together with the Reich War Minister, not
only signed the military law of 21 May 1935 but, in his capacity
as Supreme Chief of the General and Inner Administration as well
as of the Police, has also received from the Führer and Reich
Chancellor important powers in the fields of the recruitment
system and of military supervision.”

I have previously mentioned that as Minister of the Interior Frick was responsible for the administrative policy in occupied and annexed territories. It was his ministry which introduced the new German order throughout the vast territory of Europe occupied by the German Armed Forces, and the Defendant Frick exercised these powers. I request that the Tribunal take judicial notice of three decrees signed by Frick, introducing German law into Austria, the Sudetenland, and the Government General of Poland respectively:

Decree of 13 March 1938, _Reichsgesetzblatt_, 1938, Part I, Page 237, Article 8, Document 2307-PS; decree of 1 October 1938, _Reichsgesetzblatt_, 1938, Part I, Page 1331, Paragraph 8, Document 3073-PS; decree of 12 October 1939, _Reichsgesetzblatt_, 1939, Part I, Page 2077, Paragraph 8 (1), Document 3079-PS.

Frick’s ministry also arranged the selection and assignment of hundreds of occupation officials for the Soviet territory even before the invasion. This fact appears in a report by the Defendant Rosenberg of April 1941 on preparations for the administration of occupied territory in the East. May I refer to Page 2, Paragraph 2, of Document 1039-PS, which has previously been introduced as Exhibit Number USA-146.

One category of Frick’s contribution to the planning of, and preparation for, aggressive war deserves special notice. This is the systematic killing of persons regarded as useless to the German war machine, such as the insane, the crippled, and aged, and foreign laborers who were no longer able to work. These killings were carried out in nursing homes, hospitals, and asylums. The Tribunal will recall that the Defendant Frick, in his capacity as Reich Minister of the Interior, had jurisdiction over public health and all institutions. May I refer again briefly to the _Manual for German Administrative Officials_, Document 3475-PS, this time to Pages 3, 4, and 7 of the English partial translation. There the following are mentioned as Frick’s jurisdictional areas: “Health Administration,” “Social Hygiene,” “Racial Improvement and Eugenics,” “Reich Plenipotentiary for Sanatoria and Nursing Homes.”

As proof that Frick’s jurisdiction covered the death cases in these institutions, I now offer in evidence Document 621-PS, Exhibit Number USA-715. This is a letter of 2 October 1940 from the Chief of the Reich Chancellery, Dr. Lammers, to the Reich Minister of Justice, informing the latter that material concerning the death of inmates of nursing homes had been transmitted to the Reich Minister of the Interior for further action. In fact, the Defendant Frick not only had jurisdiction of these establishments, but he was one of the originators of a secret law organizing the murdering.

I now offer Document 1556-PS, Exhibit Number USA-716. This is an official report, dated December 1941, of the Czechoslovak War Crimes Commission entitled, “Detailed Statement on the Murdering of Ill and Aged People in Germany.” I should like to quote very brief excerpts from this report. Paragraphs 1, 2, and 3 read as follows:

“1) The murdering can be traced back to a secret law which was
released some time in the summer of 1940.

“2) Besides the Chief Physician of the Reich, Dr. L. Conti, the
Reichsführer SS Himmler, the Reich Minister of the Interior Dr.
Frick, as well as other men, the following participated in the
introduction of this secret law:. . .”—Other names listed.

“3) As I have already stated, there were—after careful
calculation—at least 200,000, mainly mentally deficient,
imbeciles, besides neurological cases and medically unfit
people—these were not only incurable cases—and at least 75,000
aged people.”

The most striking example of the continued killings in these institutions, which were under Frick’s jurisdiction and operated under the order of which Frick was a co-author, is the famous Hadamar case.

Your Honor, may I ask you whether I may have 10 more minutes to end this presentation, because the Chief Prosecutors agreed, as I understood, to start tomorrow morning the case of the French, and I have just 10 more minutes.

THE PRESIDENT: Yes, very well.

DR. KEMPNER: Thank you, Your Lordship.

I refer to the Hadamar case. I now offer in evidence Document Number 615-PS, Exhibit Number USA-717.

THE TRIBUNAL (Mr. Biddle): What is this last report that you spoke about? Whose is it?

DR. KEMPNER: The Czechoslovak War Crimes Commission report. After I have shown the general scheme, of which Frick was a co-author, I would like to show that Frick’s ministry was acquainted with the things that were going on under his organizational authorship; and therefore I am quoting now a letter to the fact that he was acquainted with these killings and that these killings had even become public knowledge. For this reason I offer in evidence Document 615-PS, Exhibit number USA-717. This document is a letter from the Bishop of Limburg of 13 August 1941 to the Reich Minister of Justice. Copies were sent to the Reich Minister of the Interior—this means Frick—and to the Reich Minister for Church Affairs. I quote:

“About 8 kilometers from Limburg, in the little town of Hadamar,
on a hill overlooking the town, there is an institution which
had formerly served various purposes and of late had been used
as a nursing home; this institution was renovated and furnished
as a place in which, by consensus of opinion, the
above-mentioned euthanasia has been systematically practiced for
months, approximately since February 1941. The fact has become
known beyond the administrative district of Wiesbaden, because
death certificates from a Registry Hadamar-Moenchberg are sent
to the home communities. . . .”

And I quote further:

“Several times a week buses arrive in Hadamar with a
considerable number of such victims. School children of the
vicinity know this vehicle and say, ‘There comes the murder-box
again.’ After the arrival of the vehicle, the citizens of
Hadamar watch the smoke rise out of the chimney and are tortured
with the ever-present thought of the miserable victims,
especially when repulsive odors annoy them, depending on the
direction of the wind.

“The effect of the principles at work here, are: Children call
each other names and say, ‘You’re crazy; you’ll be sent to the
baking oven in Hadamar.’ Those who do not want to marry or find
no opportunity say, ‘Marry, never! Bring children into the world
so they can be put into the bottling machine!’ You hear old
folks say, ‘Don’t send me to a state hospital! After the
feeble-minded have been finished off, the next useless eaters
whose turn will come are the old people.’

“. . . The population cannot grasp that systematic actions are
carried out which, in accordance with Paragraph 211 of the
German criminal code, are punishable with, death! . . .

“Officials of the Secret State Police, it is said, are trying to
suppress discussion of the Hadamar occurrences by means of
severe threats. In the interest of public peace this may be well
intended. But the knowledge and the conviction and the
indignation of the population cannot be changed by it; the
conviction will be increased with the bitter realization that
discussion is prohibited with threats but that the actions
themselves are not prosecuted under penal law.”

I quote the last paragraph of the letter, the postscript:

“I am submitting copies of this letter to the Reich Minister for
Church Affairs.” Initialed by above.

Nevertheless, the killings carried out in these institutions under the secret law created by Defendants Frick, Himmler, and others continued year after year.

THE PRESIDENT: Was any answer made to that letter?

DR. KEMPNER: No answer has been found. I have other letters which I am not able to quote here today which have the remark, “Please don’t answer.”

THE PRESIDENT: “Please don’t answer”?

DR. KEMPNER: That it should be unanswered.

Nevertheless, the killings carried out in these institutions under the secret law created by Defendants Frick, Himmler, and others continued year after year. I offer in evidence Document 3592-PS, Exhibit Number USA-718, which is a certified copy of the charge, specifications, findings, and sentence of the U.S. Military Commission at Wiesbaden, against the individuals who operated the Hadamar Sanatorium, where many Russians and Poles were murdered. In this particular proceeding seven defendants were charged with the murder in 1944 of 400 persons of Polish and Russian nationality, and three of the defendants were sentenced to be hanged; the other four were sentenced to confinement at hard labor.

Now I come to the last page of my presentation, the final case of Frick’s responsibility, which arises under his position as Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia for the period from August 20, 1943, until the end of the war. I think it is not necessary to say anything about the functions of the Protector of Bohemia and Moravia; these broad powers are known to the Court.

THE PRESIDENT: Before you pass from 3592-PS, is it clear that that trial relates to the killing of Polish and Russian nationals in nursing homes or institutions of that sort?

DR. KEMPNER: It is absolutely clear in this document, the sentence of the Military Commission of Hadamar for Wiesbaden.

THE PRESIDENT: Will you show me where that is?

DR. KEMPNER: Document Number 3592-PS. I quote:

“Specification: In that Alfons Klein, Adolf Wahlmann, Heinrich
Ruoff, Karl Willig, Adolf Merkle, Irmgard Huber, and Philipp
Blum, acting jointly and in pursuance of a common intent and
acting for and on behalf of the then German Reich, did, from or
about July 1, 1944, until about April 1, 1945, at Hadamar,
Germany, wilfully, deliberately, and wrongfully aid, abet, and
participate in the killing of human beings of Polish and Russian
nationality; their exact names and number being unknown, but
aggregating in excess of 400, and who were then and there
confined by the German Reich as an exercise of belligerent
control.”

THE PRESIDENT: It doesn’t show that it came within the jurisdiction of the Ministry of the Interior.

DR. KEMPNER: Some time ago I referred to the manual of the German administrative officials. This manual points out very clearly that nursing homes, sanitaria, and similar establishments are under the supervision of the Ministry of the Interior.

THE PRESIDENT: I follow that, but this document does not refer to nursing homes. That is what I was asking you.

DR. KEMPNER: Yes, it says only Hadamar. It is, in fact, the Hadamar Nursing Home. This portion wasn’t given by the Judge Advocate General, but I am willing to give later a more extended document that Hadamar is a common name for the so-called Hadamar killing mill, which is a nursing home.

Now I come to the last paragraph of my presentation.

THE PRESIDENT: Wait a moment, Dr. Kempner. Counsel for the Defense wishes to speak. There is a gentleman standing by your side.

DR. PANNENBECKER: From Document 3592-PS, which was just read, I cannot find that the Defendant Frick is connected with the document in any way.

THE PRESIDENT: Surely it is not necessary for you to get up and repeat what I have just said.

DR. PANNENBECKER: I would like to add something else.

THE PRESIDENT: I beg your pardon.

DR. PANNENBECKER: I would like to add that the Defendant Frick since August 1943 was not Minister of the Interior, and for that reason this document cannot be used against him.

THE PRESIDENT: And it does not give the date of the death of these people. At any rate, until Dr. Kempner produces something to show that this was a nursing home and in a time during which the Defendant Frick was Minister of the Interior, the Tribunal will not treat it as being evidence which implicates Frick.

DR. KEMPNER: I quoted this killing in Hadamar for two reasons: First, because the Ministry of the Interior has become acquainted, as I said before, with the letter of the Bishop of Limburg, in 1941, when Frick was Minister of the Interior and knew about these facts; and I quoted the military decision for this reason, that these killings were still going on in 1944 and 1945 under a law of which the Defendant Frick was the co-author.

The final phase of Frick’s responsibility arises under his position as Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia for the period from 20 August 1943 until the end of the war. I have not to prove his function but I shall mention one example, and I offer in evidence Document Number 3589-PS, Exhibit Number USA-720, which is a supplement to an official Czechoslovak report on German crimes against Czechoslovakia. I would like to quote only the following brief passage from this report:

“During the tenure of office of Defendant Wilhelm Frick as Reich
Protector of Bohemia and Moravia from August 1943 until the
liberation of Czechoslovakia in 1945 many thousands of
Czechoslovak Jews were transported from the Terezin ghetto in
Czechoslovakia to the concentration camp at Oswieczim
(Auschwitz) in Poland and were there killed in the gas
chambers.”

Brought from the territory over which Frick was Protector to the gas chamber.

Thus, we submit, it has been shown that the Defendant Frick was a key conspirator from 1923 until the Allied armies crushed the resistance of the Nazi Armed Forces. Frick’s guilt rests on his own record and on the record of his co-defendants, for whom he is co-responsible under our Charter.

I would like to express my appreciation for the assistance rendered in connection with the preparation of this case by my colleagues Mr. Karl Lachmann, Lieutenant Frederick Felton, and Captain Seymour Krieger.

[_The Tribunal adjourned until 17 January 1946 at 1000 hours._]

THIRTY-SIXTH DAY
Thursday, 17 January 1946

_Morning Session_

THE PRESIDENT: I call upon the Counsel for France.

M. FRANCOIS DE MENTHON (Chief Prosecutor for the French Republic): The conscience of the peoples, who only yesterday were enslaved and tortured both in soul and body, calls upon you to judge and to condemn the most monstrous attempt at domination and barbarism of all times, both in the persons of some of those who bear the chief responsibility and in the collective groups and organizations which were the essential instruments of their crimes.

France, invaded twice in 30 years in the course of wars, both of which were launched by German imperialism, bore almost alone in May and June 1940 the weight of armaments accumulated by Nazi Germany over a period of years in a spirit of aggression. Although temporarily crushed by superiority in numbers, material, and preparation, my country never gave up the battle for freedom and was at no time absent from the field. The engagements undertaken and the will for national independence would have sufficed to keep France behind General De Gaulle in the camp of the democratic nations. If, however, our fight for freedom slowly took the shape of a popular uprising, at the call of the men of the Resistance, belonging to all social classes, to all creeds and to all political parties, it was because, while our soil and our souls were crushed by the Nazi invader, our people refused not only to submit to wretchedness and slavery, but even more they refused to accept the Hitlerian dogmas which were in absolute contradiction to their traditions, their aspirations, and their human calling.

France, which was systematically plundered and ruined; France, so many of whose sons were tortured and murdered in the jails of the Gestapo or in concentration camps; France, which was subjected to the still more horrible grip of demoralization and return to barbarism diabolically imposed by Nazi Germany, asks you, above all in the name of the heroic martyrs of the Resistance, who are among the greatest heroes of our national legend, that justice be done.

France, so often in history the spokesman and the champion of human liberty, of human values, of human progress, through my voice today also becomes the interpreter of the martyred peoples of western Europe, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, peoples more than all others devoted to peace, peoples who are among the noblest of humanity by their aspirations and their worship of the values of civilization, peoples who have shared our sufferings and have refused, like us, to give up liberty and to sacrifice their souls before the assault of Nazi barbarism. France here becomes their interpreter to demand that real justice be done.

The craving for justice of the tortured peoples is the basic foundation of France’s appearance before Your High Tribunal. It is not the only one, nor perhaps the most important one. More than toward the past, our eyes are turned toward the future.

We believe that there can be no lasting peace and no certain progress for humanity, which still today is torn asunder, suffering, and anguished, except through the co-operation of all peoples and through the progressive establishment of a real international society.

Technical procedures and diplomatic arrangements will not suffice. There can be no well balanced and enduring nation without a common consent in the essential rules of social living, without a general standard of behavior before the claims of conscience, without the adherence of all citizens to identical concepts of good and of evil. There is no domestic law which, in defining and punishing criminal violations, is not founded on criteria of a moral order which is accepted by all—in a word, without a common morality. There can be no society of nations tomorrow without an international morality, without a certain community of spiritual civilization, without an identical hierarchy of values; international law will be called upon to recognize and guarantee the punishment of the gravest violations of the universally accepted moral laws. This morality and this international criminal law, indispensable for the final establishment of peaceful co-operation and of progress on lasting foundations, are inconceivable to us today after the experience of past centuries and more especially of these last years, after the incredible and awesome sacrifices and the sufferings of men of all races and of all nationalities, except as built on the respect of the human person, of every human person whosoever he may be, as well as on the limitation of the sovereignty of states.

But in order that we may have the hope of founding progressively an international society, through the free co-operation of all peoples, founded on this morality and on this international law, it is necessary that, after having premeditated, prepared, and launched a war of aggression which has caused the death of millions of men and the ruin of a great number of nations, after having thereupon piled up the most odious crimes in the course of the war years, Nazi Germany shall be declared guilty and her rulers and those chiefly responsible punished as such. Without this sentence and without this punishment the people would no longer have any faith in justice. When you have declared that crime is always a crime, whether committed by one national entity against another or by one individual against another, you will thereby have affirmed that there is only one standard of morality, which applies to international relations as well as to individual relations, and that on this morality are built prescriptions of law recognized by the international community; you will then have truly begun to establish an international justice.

This work of justice is equally indispensable for the future of the German people. These people have been for many years intoxicated by Nazism; certain of their eternal and deep seated aspirations, under this regime, have found a monstrous expression; their entire responsibility is involved, not only by their general acceptance but by the effective participation of a great number of them in the crimes committed. Their re-education is indispensable. This represents a difficult enterprise and one of long duration. The efforts which the free peoples will have to make in order to reintegrate Germany into an international community cannot succeed in the end if this re-education is not carried out effectively. The initial condemnation of Nazi Germany by your High Tribunal will be a first lesson for these people and will constitute the best starting point for the work of the revision of values and of re-education which must be its great concern during the coming years.

This is why France sees fit to ask the Tribunal to qualify juridically as crimes, both the war of aggression itself and those acts in violation of the morality and of the laws of all civilized countries which have been committed by Germany in the conduct of the war, to condemn those who are chiefly responsible, and to declare criminal the members of the various groups and organizations which were the principal perpetrators of the crimes of Nazi Germany.

Your High Tribunal, established by the four nations signatory to the agreement of 8 August 1945, acting in the interests of all the United Nations, is qualified to mete out to Nazi Germany the justice of the free peoples, the justice of liberated humanity.

The establishment by our four governments of a Tribunal competent to judge the crimes committed by those principally responsible in Nazi Germany is based solidly on the principles and usage of international law. As an eminent British jurist has recently reminded us: The practice and the doctrine of international law have always given to belligerent states the right to punish enemy war criminals who fall into their power. It is an immutable rule of international law which no author has ever contested. It is not a new doctrine. It was born with the birth of international law. Francisco de Vittoria and Grotius laid its foundations. The German authors of the 17th and 18th century developed the doctrine.

Thus Johann Jacob Moser, a positivist writer of the 18th century said:

“Enemy soldiers who act in violation of international law,
should they fall into the hands of their adversaries, are not to
be treated as prisoners of war. They can suffer the same fate as
thieves or murderers.”

The prosecutions which the United States, Great Britain, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and France are today carrying out against the men and the organizations appearing before Your High Tribunal under the Indictment read in Berlin on 18 October 1945, therefore have an unimpeachable juridical foundation: The right, universally recognized by international doctrine, of bringing war criminals before a punitive jurisdiction.

This right is strengthened by legal considerations that are perhaps even more irrefutable.

The principle of the territorial application of penal laws gives to every state the right to punish crimes committed on its territory. The application of the territorial principle covers the violations of international law in territory subject to military occupation; these violations are the chief source of war crimes. But the crimes committed by the defendants were not directed against any given state, in any given occupied territory. The National Socialist conspirators, against whom we ask that justice be done, directed the policy of the Third Reich. All the states which were occupied and temporarily enslaved by their armed forces have been equally victims both of the illicit war which they launched and of the methods used by them in the conduct of this war.

There is therefore no single state which could legitimately claim the privilege of trying these criminals. Only an International Tribunal, emanating from the combined United Nations, which were yesterday at war with Germany, can rightly claim this privilege. This is why the declaration on enemy atrocities made at the end of the Moscow Conference in October 1943 had provided that the leaders of Nazi Germany would, after the joint victory of the Allies, be brought before an international jurisdiction. There is, therefore, nothing new from a juridical point of view in the principle of justice which you are called upon to render. Far from being merely an affirmation of power on the part of the victors, your competence is founded on the recognition by international law of the territorial jurisdiction of sovereign states.

The transfer by these states of their juridical power to an international court constitutes a notable progress in the setting up of an inter-state punitive procedure. It does not constitute any innovation in the legal foundation of the justice which you are called upon to render.

The penal qualification of the facts may seem more open to juridical objections. This horrible accumulation and maze of Crimes against Humanity both include and go beyond the two more precise juridical notions of Crimes against Peace and War Crimes. But I think—and I will revert later separately to Crimes against Peace and War Crimes—that this body of Crimes against Humanity constitutes, in the last analysis, nothing less than the perpetration for political ends and in a systematic manner, of common law crimes such as theft, looting, ill treatment, enslavement, murders, and assassinations, crimes that are provided for and punishable under the penal laws of all civilized states.

No general objection of a juridical nature, therefore, appears to hamper your task of justice.

Moreover, the Nazis accused would have no ground to argue on alleged lack of written texts to justify the penal qualification that you will apply to their crimes.

Has not the juridical doctrine of National Socialism admitted that in domestic criminal law even the judge can and must supplement the law? The written law no longer constituted the Magna Charta of the delinquent. The judge could punish when, in the absence of a provision for punishment, the National Socialist sense of justice was gravely offended.

How could a judge under the Nazi regime supplement the law?

In his search for a semi-legal solution he acted in the manner of a legislator. Proceeding from the firm basis of the National Socialist program, he sought the rule which he would have proclaimed had he been a legislator. The Defendant Frank, in his speech at the Juristentag in 1936, declared:

“Say to yourself at each decision you have to make: How would
the Führer decide in my place? For every decision which you have
to make, ask yourself: Is this decision in accordance with the
National Socialist conscience of the German people? Thus you
will have a firm basis of conscience which will also bear for
all time, in your own sphere of decisions, the authority of the
Third Reich, based on the popular National Socialist unity and
on the recognition of the will of the Führer Adolf Hitler.”

To those who tomorrow will render justice in the name of human conscience, the Defendant Frank and his accomplices would be ill advised to protest against a lack of written texts with appropriate sanctions, especially since, in addition to various international conventions, these texts, though they be not codified in an inter-state penal code, exist in the penal code of every civilized country.

Mr. Justice Jackson has given you the details of the various phases and aspects of the National Socialist plot, its planning and its development, from the first days of the conspiracy of Hitler and his companions to rise to power, until the unleashing of innumerable crimes in a Europe almost entirely at their mercy.

Sir Hartley Shawcross then enumerated the various breaches of treaties, of agreements, of promises which were the prelude to the many wars of aggression of which Germany was guilty.

I propose today to prove to you that all this organized and vast criminality springs from what I may be allowed to call a crime against the spirit, I mean a doctrine which, denying all spiritual, rational, or moral values by which the nations have tried, for thousands of years, to improve human conditions, aims to plunge humanity back into barbarism, no longer the natural and spontaneous barbarism of primitive nations, but into a diabolical barbarism, conscious of itself and utilizing for its ends all material means put at the disposal of mankind by contemporary science. This sin against the spirit is the original sin of National Socialism from which all crimes spring.

This monstrous doctrine is that of racialism: The German race, composed in theory of Aryans, would be a fundamental and natural concept. Germans as individuals do not exist and cannot justify their existence, except insofar as they belong to the race or Volkstum, to the popular mass which represents and amalgamates all Germans. Race is the matrix of the German people; proceeding therefrom this people lives and develops as an organism. The German may consider himself only as a healthy and vigorous member of this body, fulfilling within the collectivity a definite technical function; his activity and his usefulness are the exact gauge and justification of his liberty. This national body must be “moulded” to prepare it for a permanent struggle.

The ideas and the bodily symbols of racialism form an integral part of its political system. This is what is called authoritative or dictatorial biology.

The expression “blood” which appears so often in the writings of the Nazi theorists denotes this stream of real life, of red sap which flows through the circulatory system of every race and of all genuine culture as it flows through the human body. To be Aryan is to feel this current passing through oneself, this current which galvanizes and vivifies the whole nation. Blood is this region of spontaneous and unconscious life which reveals to each individual the tendencies of the race. The intellectual life must never, in extolling itself, separate us from this elemental basis of the sacred community. Let the individual go into himself and he will receive by direct revelation “the commandments of the blood.” Dreams, rites, and myths can lead to this revelation. In other words the modern German can and must bear in himself the call of the old Germany and find again its purity and its youthful primitiveness.

The body and soul unity (Leib Seele Einheit) of the individual must not be disputed. One reads in the _Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte_ of September 1938 that the body belongs to the State and the soul to the Church and to God. It is no longer so. The whole of the individual, body and soul, belongs to the Germanic nation and to the Germanic State. National Socialism affirms, indeed, that the moral conscience is the result of ortho-genetic evolution, the consequence of the most simple physiological functions which characterize the individuality of the body. Therefore, the moral conscience is also subject to heredity and consequently subject to the postulate and to the demands of the race.

True, this pseudo-religion does not repudiate the means of reason and of technical activity, but subordinates them rigorously, brings them infallibly to the racial myth.

The individual has no value in himself and is important only as an element of the race. This affirmation is logical if one admits that not only physical and psychological characteristics, but also opinions and tendencies are bound, not to the individual but to the nation. Anyone whose opinions differ from the official doctrine is asocial or unhealthy. He is unhealthy because in the Nazi doctrine the nation is equivalent to the race. Now, the characteristics of the race are fixed. An exception in the formation from the spiritual or moral point of view constitutes a malformation in the same way as does a clubfoot or a harelip.

That is the totalitarian doctrine which reduces the individual to nonexistence save by the race and for the race, without freedom of action or any definite aim; totalitarian doctrine which excludes every other concept, every other aspiration or requirement save those connected with the race, totalitarian doctrine which eliminates from the individual every other thought save that of the interest of the race.

National Socialism ends in the absorption of the personality of the citizen into that of the state and in the denial of any intrinsic value of the human person.

We are brought back, as can be seen, to the most primitive ideas of the savage tribe. All the values of civilization accumulated in the course of centuries are rejected, all traditional ideas of morality, justice, and law give way to the primacy of race, its instincts, its needs and interests. The individual, his liberty, his rights and aspirations, no longer have any real existence of their own.

In this conception of race it is easy to realize the gulf that separates members of the German community from other men. The diversity of the races becomes irreducible, and irreducible, too, the hierarchy which sets apart the superior and the inferior races. The Hitler regime has created a veritable chasm between the German nation, the sole keeper of the racial treasure, and other nations.

Between the Germanic community and the degenerate population of an inferior variety of men there is no longer any common measure. Human brotherhood is rejected, even more than all the other traditional moral values.

How can one explain how Germany, fertilized through the centuries by classic antiquity and Christianity, by the ideals of liberty, equality, and social justice, by the common heritage of western humanism to which she had brought such noble and precious contributions, could have come to this astonishing return to primitive barbarism?

In order to understand it and to try to eradicate forever from the Germany of tomorrow the evil by which our entire civilization came so near to perishing, it must be recalled that National Socialism has deep and remote origins.

The mysticism of racial community was born of the spiritual and moral crises which Germany underwent in the 19th century and which abruptly broke out again in its economic and social structure through a particularly rapid industrialization. National Socialism is in reality one of the peaks of the moral and spiritual crisis of modern humanity, convulsed by industrialization and technical progress. Germany experienced this metamorphosis of economic and social life not only with an extraordinary brutality but at a time when she did not yet possess the political equilibrium and the cultural unity which the other countries of western Europe had achieved.

While the inner and spiritual life was weakening, a cruel uncertainty dominated human minds, an uncertainty admirably defined by the term “Ratlosigkeit,” which cannot be translated into French but which corresponds to our popular expression, “One no longer knows in what saint to believe.” This is the spiritual cruelty of the 19th century which so many Germans have described with a tragic evocative power. A gaping void opens before the human soul, disoriented by the search for new values.

The natural sciences and the sciences of the mind give birth to absolute relativism; to a deep scepticism regarding the lasting quality of values on which Western humanism has been nurtured for centuries. A vulgar Darwinism prevails, bewilders, and befuddles the brain. The Germans cease to see in human groups and races anything but isolated nuclei in perpetual struggle with one another.

It is in the name of decadence that the German spirit condemns humanism. It sees in the value of humanism and in the elements that derive from it only “maladies,” which it attributes to an excess of intellectualism and abstraction of everything that restrains men’s passions by subjecting them to common norms. From this point on, classic antiquity is no longer considered in its aspects of ordered reason or of radiant beauty. In it one sees only civilizations violently enamored of struggles and rivalries, linked especially to Germany through their so-called Germanic origin.

Sacerdotal Judaism and Christianity in all its forms are condemned as religions of honor and brotherhood, calculated to kill the virtues of brutal force in man.

A cry is raised against the democratic idealism of the modern era, and then against all the internationals.

Over a people in this state of spiritual crisis and of negations of traditional values the culminating philosophy of Nietzsche was to exercise a dominant influence. In taking the will to power as a point of departure, Nietzsche preached, certainly not inhumanity but superhumanity. If there is no final cause in the universe, man, whose body is matter which is at once feeling and thinking, may mould the world to his desire, choosing as his guide a militant biology. If the supreme end of humanity is a feeling of victorious fullness which is both material and spiritual, all that remains is to insure the selection of physical specimens, who become the new aristocracy of masters.

For Nietzsche the industrial evolution necessarily entails the rule of the masses, the automatism and the shaping of the working multitudes. The state endures only by virtue of an elite of vigorous personalities who, by the methods so admirably defined by Machiavelli, which alone are in accord with the laws of life, will lead men by force and by ruse simultaneously, for men are and remain wicked and perverse.

We see the modern barbarian arise. Superior by his intelligence and his wilful energy, freed of all conventional ethics, he can enforce upon the masses obedience and loyalty by making them believe in the dignity and beauty of labor and by providing them with that mediocre well-being with which they are so easily content. An identical force will, therefore, be manifest in the leaders, by the harmony between their elementary passions and the lucidity of their organizing reason, and in the masses, whose dark or violent instincts will be balanced by a reasoned activity imposed with implacable discipline.

Without doubt, the late philosophy of Nietzsche cannot be identified with the brutal simplicity of National Socialism. Nevertheless, National Socialism was wont to glorify Nietzsche as one of its ancestors. And justly so, for he was the first to formulate in a coherent manner criticism of the traditional values of humanism; and also, because his conception of the government of the masses by masters knowing no restraint is a preview of the Nazi regime. Besides, Nietzsche believed in the sovereign race and attributed primacy to Germany, whom he considered endowed with a youthful soul and unquenchable resources.

The myth of racial community which had arisen from the depths of the German soul, unbalanced by the moral and spiritual crises endured by modern humanity, allied itself with the traditional theses of Pan-Germanism.

Already Fichte’s speeches to the German nation exalting Germanism clearly reveal one of the main ideas of Pan-Germanism, namely, that Germany visualizes and organizes the world as it should be visualized and organized.

The apology for war is equally ancient. It dates back to Fichte and Hegel, who had affirmed that war, through its classifying of peoples, alone establishes justice among nations. For Hegel, in _Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechtes_, Page 433, states: “The moral health of nations is maintained thanks to war, just as the passing breeze saves the sea from stagnation.”

The living space theory appears right at the beginning of the 19th century. It is a well-known geographical and historical demonstration which such people as Ratzel, Arthur Dix, and Lamprecht will take up later on, comparing conflicts between peoples to a savage fight between conceptions and realizations of space and declaring that all history is moving towards German hegemony.

State totalitarianism also has ancient roots in Germany. The absorption of individuals by the State was hoped for by Hegel, who wrote:

“Individuals disappear in the presence of the universal
substance”—that is the people or state idea—“and this
substance itself shapes the individuals in accordance with its
own ends.”

Therefore, National Socialism appears in present-day Germany neither as a spontaneous formation which might be due to the consequence of the defeat in 1918, nor as a mere invention of a group of men determined upon seizing power. National Socialism is the ultimate result of a long evolution of doctrines; the exploitation by a group of men of one of the most profound and most tragic aspects of the German soul. But the crime committed by Hitler and his companions will be precisely that of unleashing and exploiting to its extreme limit the latent force of barbarity, which existed before him in the German people.

The dictatorial regime instituted by Hitler and his companions carries with it for all Germans the “soldier-life,” that is to say, a kind and a system of life entirely different from that of the bourgeois West and the proletarian East. It amounted to a permanent and complete mobilization of individual and collective energies. This integral militarization presupposed complete uniformity of thoughts and actions. It is a militarization which conforms to the Prussian tradition of discipline.

Propaganda instils into the masses faith, drive, and a thirst for the greatness of the community. Those consenting masses find an artificial derivative for their moral anguish and their material cares in theories of race and in a mystical exaltation held in common. Souls which yesterday were wounded and rent asunder once more find themselves united in a common mould.

The Nazi educational system moulds new generations which show no trace of traditional moral teachings, those being replaced by the cult of race and of strength.

The race myth tends to become a real national religion. Many writers dream of substituting for the duality of religious confessions a world-wide dogma of German conception, which would amount to being the religion of the German race as a race.

In the middle of the 20th century Germany goes back, of her own free will, beyond Christianity and civilization to the primitive barbarity of ancient Germany. She makes a deliberate break with all universal conceptions of modern nations. The National Socialist doctrine, which raised inhumanity to the level of a principle, constitutes, in fact, a doctrine of disintegration of modern society.

This doctrine necessarily brought Germany to a war of aggression and to the systematic use of criminality in the waging of war.

The absolute primacy of the German race, the negation of any international law whatsoever, the cult of strength, the exacerbation of community mysticism made Germany consider recourse to war, in the interests of the German race, logical and justified.

This race would have the incontestable right to grow at the expense of nations considered decadent. Germany is about to resume even in the middle of the 20th century the great invasions of the barbarians. Moreover, most naturally and logically, she will wage her war in barbarous fashion, not only because National Socialist ethics are indifferent to the choice of means, but also because war must be total in its means and in its ends.

Whether we consider a Crime against Peace or War Crimes, we are therefore not faced by an accidental or an occasional criminality which events could explain without justifying it. We are, in fact, faced by systematic criminality, which derives directly and of necessity from a monstrous doctrine put into practice with deliberate intent by the masters of Nazi Germany.

From the National Socialist doctrine there arises directly the immediately pursued perpetration of Crimes against Peace. As early as February 1920, in the first program of the National Socialist Party, Adolf Hitler had already outlined the future basis of German foreign policy. But it was in 1924 in his Landsberg prison, while writing _Mein Kampf_, that he gave a fuller development to his views.

According to _Mein Kampf_ the foreign policy of the Reich must have as its first objective to give back to Germany her “independence and her effective sovereignty” which is clearly an allusion to the articles of the Treaty of Versailles, referring to disarmament and the demilitarization of the Rhineland. It would then endeavor to reconquer the territories lost in 1919, and 15 years before the outbreak of the second World War the question of Alsace and Lorraine is clearly raised. It would also have to seek to extend German territories in Europe, the frontiers of 1914 being “insufficient” and it would be indispensable to extend them by including “all Germans” in the Reich, beginning with the Germans of Austria.