4. PURGE OF POLITICAL OPPONENTS AND TERRORIZATION
A. The Nazi conspirators ruthlessly purged their political opponents. Soon after the Nazi conspirators had acquired political control, the defendant Goering, 3 March 1933, stated:
“Fellow Germans, my measures will not be crippled by any judicial thinking. My measures will not be crippled by any bureaucracy. Here, I don’t have to give justice, my mission is only to destroy and exterminate, nothing more! This struggle, fellow Germans, will be a struggle against chaos and such a struggle, I shall not conduct with the power of any police. A bourgeoise state might have done that. Certainly, I shall use the power of the State and the police to the utmost, my dear Communists! So you won’t draw any false conclusions; but the struggle to the death, in which my fist will grasp your necks, I shall lead with those down there—those are the Brown Shirts.” (1856-PS)
In 1934 Heinrich Himmler, the Deputy Leader of the Prussian Secret State Police, stated:
“We are confronted with a very pressing duty—both the open and secret enemies of the Fuehrer and of the National Socialist movement and of our National Revolution must be discovered, combatted and exterminated. In this duty we are agreed to spare neither our own blood nor the blood of anyone else when it is required by our country.” (2543-PS)
Raymond H. Geist, former American Counsel and First Secretary of the Embassy in Berlin, Germany 1929-1939, has stated:
“Immediately in 1933, the concentration camps were established and put under charge of the Gestapo. Only ‘political’ prisoners were held in concentration camps * * *.
“The first wave of terroristic acts began in March 6-13, 1933, accompanied by unusual mob violence. When the Nazi Party won the elections in March 1933—on the morning of the 6th—the accumulated passion blew off in wholesale attacks on the Communists, Jews, and others suspected of being either. Mobs of SA men roamed the streets, beating up, looting, and even killing persons * * *.
“For Germans taken into custody by the Gestapo * * * there was a regular pattern of brutality and terror. Victims numbered in the hundreds of thousands all over Germany.” (1759-PS)
The Sturmabteilung (SA) had plans for the murder of former Prime Minister Bruening, but his life was spared through the negotiations and activities of the defendant Hess and Dr. Haushofer, President of the Geopolitic Institute of Munich, because they feared his death might result in serious repercussions abroad. (1669-PS)