See how it looked in 1946

Nuremberg Convicts Gestapo, SS, SD, Brands Aggression ‘Supreme Crime’

General Staff Wins 'Not Guilty as Unit'

By J. Emlyn Williams | Staff Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

NUREMBERG, Germany, Sept. 30

Initiation of war is “the supreme crime,” and while the German General Staff and High Command are declared not criminal as units, the conduct of German generals has been a disgrace to the “honorable profession.”

Thus opened the 100,000 word judgment of the International Military Tribunal here as it reached the concluding stage of the 10-month trial of 22 Nazi leaders, charged with conspiring to commit this crime.

Though it exonerated the High Command, it convicted the leadership corps of the SS (Elite Guard), the SD (Spy Department) and the Gestapo (Secret Police). Hitler’s old “Brown Shirts,” the SA, once with a membership of 4,000,000, later comparatively unimportant, were excluded from culpability. At the same time Lord Justice Lawrence, who read the decision, emphasized that acquittal of any organization as a group did not mean that individual members of acquitted group could escape punishment for any crime they had committed.

Evidence ‘Overwhelming’

Verdicts and sentences on the individual defendants will be delivered after Lord Justice Lawrence has completed the reading of the judgment, a task which is expected to take nearly two days. The trial is expected to end on Oct. 2.

While no names were mentioned at the opening stages of the judgment, the tribunal described the evidence adduced by the prosecution on implication in aggressive war, war crimes, and crimes against humanity as “quite overwhelming.”

To arrive at this verdict, the judges have studied 16,000 pages of official protocol, 5,300 documents presented by the prosecution and defense, and sworn statements of 240 witnesses, who appeared before the Court. In addition to these, there have been nearly 300,000 sworn testimonies.

Four Days for Appeal

Defendants will be given four days in which to appeal the sentence before the Allied Control Council. The appeal will be only on the sentence itself, not on the question of innocence or guilt.

According to Article 26 of the Charter, the Tribunal’s judgment is final on the issue of guilt. The Control Council can only at any time “reduce or otherwise alter the sentence,” but it “may not increase the severity of it.”

Prisoners sentenced to capital punishment will be executed on the 15th day after pronouncement of the sentence. The executions will be carried out “without publicity.”

An initial point to be settled by the International Military Tribunal here was whether the 22 defendants could be legally punished, since it might be argued as a violation of the fundamental principle of all law, international and domestic, that there can be no punishment without a previous existing law.

It had been submitted in the trial that to punish these prisoners, therefore, would be abhorrent to the law of all civilized nations.

The Tribunal answers to this that “to assert that it is unjust to punish those who in defiance of treaties and assurance have attacked neighboring states without warning is obviously untrue. In such circumstances, the attacker must know that he is doing wrong, and so far from it being unjust to punish him, it would be unjust if his wrong were allowed to go unpunished.”

Kellogg Pact Cited

Some, if not all, of the defendants, the Tribunal maintains, must have known they were acting in defiance of international law when “in complete deliberation they carried out their designs of invasion and aggression.”

On this view alone, therefore, the above-mentioned maxim has no application to present facts. And this view, in the Tribunal’s opinion is reinforced by the state of international law in 1939 as far as aggressive war is concerned – to wit, the preamble to the Kellog-Brand Pact of Aug. 27, 1928.

The tribunal rejected flatly the plea of some of the defendants that their acts had been committed under orders from Hitler.

“Hitler could not make aggressive war by himself; he had to have the co-operation of German military leaders, diplomats, and business,” the judgment said.

“The evidence established the existence of many separate plans to wage aggressive war. Continued planning with aggressive war as the objective had been established beyond all doubt.”

The organizations found guilty represent perhaps a million persons down to the Nazi block leader who terrorized his neighbors, the SS troops now behind barbed wire, and the guards who performed hideous tasks at Hitler’s slave camps.

According to evidence read by Justice Lawrence, 2,500,000 persons were exterminated at the Auschwitz (Oswiecim) Concentration Camp between May 1, 1940, and Dec. 1, 1943, an additional 500,000 having perished there from disease and starvation.

Further evidence indicated that a total of 6,000,000 Jews had been killed, 4,000,000 of them in concentration camps and 2,000,000 killed by special “Einsatz” units.

Those members who knew what their organizations were doing, the court contended, were convicted automatically. Those who quit such organizations before the invasion of Poland also were acquitted.

The tribunal ruled that Germany in 1940 was planning war against the United States “at a later date” and did everything possible the next year to persuade Japan to attack the United States and Great Britain.

Individuals Responsible

During the course of the trial, defense counsel also had sought unsuccessfully to plead that since international law – in its present state of development – was concerned only “with the actions of foreign states and provides no punishment for individuals” and that as the acts for which the prisoners were held guilty were acts of a state, those performing them could not be held personally responsible.

Such plans were rejected by the Tribunal, since the fact that “international law imposes duties and liabilities upon individuals as well as upon states has long been recognized.”

“Crimes against international law are committed by men, not by abstract entities, and only by punishing individuals who commit such crimes can the provisions of international law be enforced,” the Tribunal stated.