“2. No one can find out more than he must know.
“3. When must the person in question know it at the very latest? No one may know anything before it is necessary that he know it.
“On Göring’s question, the Führer decided that:
a) The armed forces determine what shall be built;
b) In the shipbuilding program nothing is to be changed;
c) The armament programs are to be modeled on the years 1943 or 1944.”—Schmundt certified this text.
MR. ALDERMAN: Mr. President, the translation was closer than I had anticipated.
THE PRESIDENT: Yes.
MR. ALDERMAN: We think, as I have just said, that this document leaves nothing unproved in those allegations in the Indictment. It demonstrates that the Nazi conspirators were proceeding in accordance with a plan. It demonstrates the cold-blooded premeditation of the assault on Poland. It demonstrates that the questions concerning Danzig, which the Nazis had agitated with Poland as a political pretext, were not true questions, but were false issues, issues agitated to conceal their motive of aggressive expansion for food and “Lebensraum.”
In this presentation of condemning documents, concerning the initiation of war in September 1939, I must bring to the attention of the Tribunal a group of documents concerning an address by Hitler to his chief military commanders, at Obersalzberg on 22 August 1939, just one week prior to the launching of the attack on Poland.