Frick goes on to say:
“The SS was used by Himmler for the execution of these orders to suppress the Putsch.”
During this period the conspirators created, by a series of decrees of the Reich Cabinet, a number of new political crimes. Any act or statement contrary to the Nazi Party was deemed to be treason and punished accordingly. The formations of the Party, the SA, SS, as well as the SD and the Gestapo, were the vicious tools used in the extermination of all opposition, real or potential. As the Defendant Göring said on July 24th, 1933—I refer to Document Number 2494-PS, which will be introduced in evidence:
“Whoever in the future raises a hand against a representative of the National Socialist movement or of the State, must know that he will lose his life in a very short while. Furthermore, it will be entirely sufficient, if he is proven to have intended the act, or, if the act results not in a death, but only in an injury.”
The Defendant Frank stated, in a magazine of the Academy for German Law, 1936, which will be introduced as Document Number 2533-PS, as follows:
“By the world we are blamed again and again because of the concentration camps. We are asked, ‘Why do you arrest without a warrant of arrest?’ I say, ‘Put yourself into the position of our nation.’ Don’t forget that the very great and still untouched world of Bolshevism cannot forget that we have made final victory for them impossible in Europe, right here on German soil.”
And Raymond Geist, whose affidavit I previously referred to, being Document Number 1759-PS, states:
“The German people were well-acquainted with what was happening in concentration camps, and it was well known that the fate of anyone too actively opposed to any part of the Nazi program was liable to be one of great suffering. Indeed, before the Hitler regime was many months old, almost every family in Germany had received first-hand accounts of the brutalities inflicted in the concentration camps from someone, either in the family circle or in the circle of friends who had served a sentence, and consequently the fear of such camps was a very effective brake on any possible opposition.”
And as the Defendant Göring said in 1934,—and I refer to Document Number 2344-PS, which will be offered in evidence:
“Against the enemies of the State, we must proceed ruthlessly . . . therefore the concentration camps have been created, where we have first confined thousands of Communist and Socialist Democrat functionaries.”