COMMANDER DONOVAN: This morning we presented photographic evidence of the history of National Socialism from 1921 to September 1939. We saw the dignity of the individual in Germany destroyed by men dedicated to perverted nationalism, men who set forth certain objectives and then preached to a regimented people the accomplishment of those objectives by any necessary means, including aggressive war.
In September 1939 the Nazis launched the first of a series of catastrophic wars, terminated only by the military collapse of Germany. It is this final chapter in the history of National Socialism that the Prosecution now presents.
May I again remind the Tribunal that all film presented and all German narration heard is in the original form as filmed by the Nazis.
[The showing of the film, part 4, then continued.]
COMMANDER DONOVAN: The Prosecution has concluded its presentation of the photographic summation entitled The Nazi Plan. We shall deliver for the permanent records of the Tribunal, as soon as possible, the original films projected today.
COL. STOREY: If the Tribunal please, just a brief announcement about the presentation that shall follow. The rest of the week will be consumed in the presentation of War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity, starting with exploitation of forced labor, concentration camps, persecution of the Jews, and Germanization and spoliation in occupied countries. We should like to call the Tribunal’s attention to the fact that many of these crimes will be crimes attributed to the criminal organizations which will follow. The program following will be the criminal organizations, beginning with the Leadership Corps of the Nazi Party, the Reich Cabinet, the SA, the SS, and finally, the SD and Gestapo.
Mr. Dodd will now present “Exploitation of Forced Labor.”
MR. THOMAS J. DODD (Executive Trial Counsel for the United States): May it please the Tribunal, we propose to submit during the next several days, as Colonel Storey has said a moment ago, evidence concerning the conspirators’ criminal deportation and enslavement of foreign labor, their illegal use of prisoners of war, their infamous concentration camps, and their relentless persecution of the Jews. We shall present evidence regarding the general aspects of these programs, and our French and Soviet colleagues will present evidence of the specific application of these programs in the West and the East respectively.
These crimes were committed both before and after Nazi Germany had launched her series of aggressions. They were committed within Germany and in foreign countries as well. Although separated in time and space, these crimes had, of course, an inter-relationship which resulted from their having a common source in Nazi ideology; for we shall show that within Germany the conspirators had made hatred and destruction of the Jews an official philosophy and a public duty, that they had preached the concept of the master race with its corollary of slavery for others, that they had denied and destroyed the dignity and the rights of the individual human being. They had organized force, brutality, and terror into instruments of political power and had made them commonplaces of daily existence. We propose to prove that they had placed the concentration camp and a vast apparatus of force behind their racial and political myths, their laws, and their policies. As every German Cabinet minister or high official knew, behind the laws and decrees in the Reichsgesetzblatt was not the agreement of the people or their representatives but the terror of the concentration camps and the police state. The conspirators had preached that war was a noble activity and that force was the appropriate means of resolving international differences; and having mobilized all aspects of German life for war, they plunged Germany and the world into war.
We say this system of hatred, savagery, and denial of individual rights, which the conspirators erected into a philosophy of government within Germany or into what we may call the Nazi constitution, followed the Nazi armies as they swept over Europe. For the Jews of the occupied countries suffered the same fate as the Jews of Germany, and foreign laborers became the serfs of the “master race,” and they were deported and enslaved by the million. Many of the deported and enslaved laborers joined the victims of the concentration camps, where they were literally worked to death in the course of the Nazi program of extermination through work. We propose to show that this Nazi combination of the assembly line, the torture chamber, and the executioner’s rack in a single institution has a horrible repugnance to the twentieth century mind.