COL. AMEN: Will you tell the Tribunal the ones which you do recognize?
HÖLLRIEGEL: I recognize of course Reichsführer SS Himmler first of all, next to him the commandant of Mauthausen Concentration Camp Ziereis and way to the right I recognize Kaltenbrunner.
COL. AMEN: That is all, may it please the Tribunal.
THE PRESIDENT: The witness can go and we will adjourn for 10 minutes.
[A recess was taken.]
COL. STOREY: If the Tribunal please, the next and final subject of the criminal organizations is the General Staff and High Command, to be presented by Colonel Taylor.
COLONEL TELFORD TAYLOR (Associate Trial Counsel for the United States): Your Lordship and members of the Tribunal, the Indictment seeks a declaration of criminality, under Articles 9 to 11 of the Charter, against six groups or organizations; and the last one listed in the Indictment is a group described as the General Staff and High Command of the German Armed Forces.
At first sight these six groups and organizations seem to differ rather widely one from another, both in their composition and in their functions. But all of them are related, and we believe that they are logically indicted together before the Tribunal because they are the primary agencies and the chief tools by means of which the Nazi conspirators sought to achieve their aims. All six of them were either established by, controlled by, or became allied with the Nazis; and they were essential to the success of the Nazis. They were at once the principal and indispensable instruments: The Party, the Government, the Police, and the Armed Forces. It is my task to present the case in chief against the General Staff and High Command group.
Now, in one respect this group is to be sharply distinguished from the other groups and organizations against which we have sought this declaration. For example, the Leadership Corps of the Nazi Party—of the NSDAP—is the Leadership Corps of the Party itself, the Party which was the embodiment of Nazism and which was the instrument primarily through which Hitlerism rode to full power and tyranny in Germany. The SA and the SS were branches—to be sure, large branches—of the Nazi Party. The German Police did, indeed, have certain roots and antecedents which antedated Hitlerism; but it became 99 per cent a creature of the Nazi Party and the SS. The Reich Cabinet was in essence merely a committee or series of committees of Reich Ministers; and when the Nazis came to power, quite naturally these ministerial positions were filled for the most part by Nazis. All these groups and organizations, accordingly, either owe their origin and development to Nazism or automatically became Nazified when Hitler came to power.
Now, that is not true of the group with which we are now concerned. I need not remind the Tribunal that German armed might and the German military tradition antedate Hitlerism by many decades. One need not be a graybeard to have very vivid personal recollections of the war of 1914 to 1918, of the Kaiser, and of the “scrap of paper.” For these reasons I want to sketch very briefly, before going into the evidence, the nature of our case against this group, which is unique in the particulars I have mentioned.