I omit the balance of the paragraph and continue with the next paragraph:
“The 15th of March 1939 brought a similar utilization of the SS when it served to establish order in the collapsed Czechoslovakia. This action ended with the founding of the Protectorate Bohemia-Moravia.
“Only a week later, on the 22d of March 1939, Memel also returned to the Reich upon basis of an agreement with Lithuania. Again it was the SS, here above all the East Prussian SS, which played a prominent part in the liberation of this district.”
In the final act in setting off the war—the attack on Poland in September 1939—the SS acted as a sort of stage manager. The Tribunal will recall the oral testimony of Erwin Lahousen with relation to the simulated attack on the radio station at Gleiwitz, by Germans dressed in Polish uniform—what Lahousen referred to as one of the most mysterious actions which took place in the Abwehr. Describing his task of getting the Polish uniforms and equipment together, he said at Page 620 of the transcript (Volume II, Page 450):
“These articles of equipment had to be prepared, and one day some man from the SS or the SD—the name is on the official diary of the War Department—fetched them.”
The war erupted and the Waffen-SS again took its place in the van of the attacking forces.
During the war great use was made of the peculiar qualities possessed by the SS, qualities not only of its combat forces but of its other components as well. I turn now to a consideration of some of the tasks in which the SS was engaged during the war—tasks which embraced the commission of War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity described in the Indictment.
The Tribunal has already received in evidence our Document 447-PS as Exhibit Number USA-135. It is a directive issued by the Defendant Keitel, on the 13th of March 1941, covering some of the preparations made 3 months in advance for the attack on Russia. Paragraph 2b of that directive, which was read into the record, provided that in the area of operations the Reichsführer SS was entrusted with special tasks for the preparation of the political administration, tasks which would result from the struggle about to commence between two opposing political systems.
One of the steps taken by the Reichsführer SS to carry out those “special tasks” was the formation and use of so-called “anti-partisan” units. They were discussed by Himmler in his Posen speech, our Document 1919-PS, at Page 3 of the translation, Paragraph 5, Page 57 of the original, last paragraph. I read those two paragraphs in which he discusses the anti-partisan units: