MAJOR WALLIS: Having acquired full political control, the Nazi conspirators now proceeded to consolidate their power, and at this point I would like to impress upon the Tribunal once again that with the exception of a very few documents, the subject matter of my remarks is within the purview of judicial notice of the Court, a matter of history well known to these defendants and their counsel. Their first step in the consolidation of power was ruthlessly to purge their political opponents by confining them to concentration camps or by murder. Concentration camps made their first appearance in 1933 and were first used as means of putting political opponents out of circulation by confining them to a so-called “protective custody.” This system of concentration camps grew and expanded within Germany. At a subsequent stage in these proceedings full and complete evidence of the concentration camp system and the atrocities committed therein will be presented to the Court, both by documents and films.
Illustrative documentary evidence of the arrest, mistreatment, and murder by the Nazi conspirators of their political opponents is contained in the documentary evidence offered by the United States.
As an illustration, affidavit of Raymond H. Geist, former American Consul and First Secretary of the Embassy in Berlin from 1929 to 1938, states (which will be offered):
“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 1933, more particularly from March 6 to 13, 1933, accompanied by unusual mob violence. When the Nazi Party won the elections in March 1933, 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. All over Germany victims were numbered by the hundred thousand.”
On the 30th of June and 1 and 2 July 1934 the conspirators proceeded to destroy opposition within their own ranks by wholesale murder. In discussing this purge, the Defendant Frick stated, in an affidavit under oath, signed on the 19th day of November 1945, in the presence of his Defense Counsel, as follows. This is document number 2950-PS. It has not yet been introduced in evidence, Sir:
“Himmler, in June of 1934, was able to convince Hitler that Röhm wanted to start a Putsch. The Führer ordered Himmler to suppress the Putsch which was supposed to take place at the Tegernsee, where all of the SA leaders were coming together. For northern Germany, the Führer gave the order to suppress the Putsch to Göring.”
Frick goes on to say:
“Pursuant to this order, a great many people were arrested and something like a hundred, and possibly more, were even put to death, accused of high treason; all this was done without judicial process.” They were just killed on the spot. Many people were killed—I don’t know how many—who actually did not have anything to do with the Putsch. People who just weren’t liked very well as, for instance, Schleicher, the former Reich Chancellor, were killed. Schleicher’s wife was also killed. Also Gregor Strasser, who had been the Reich Organization Leader and second man in the Party after Hitler. Strasser, at the time he was murdered, was not active in political affairs any more; he had however separated himself from the Führer in November or December of 1932”.