I pass to the second report, Document D-641(b). It is part of the same document and is put in as Exhibit GB-191. It is a report covering the next 6 months from September 1, 1940. . .
THE PRESIDENT: Are you not reading Page 3?
COL. PHILLIMORE: If Your Lordship pleases, I have read a great deal of the report and there are passages that I had not considered important.
THE PRESIDENT: I haven’t myself read it, but I think. . .
COL. PHILLIMORE: If I might read the first two paragraphs on Page 3:
“By the middle of October submarines were sinking merchant vessels without any regard to the safety of the crews. Yet 4 months later the Germans were still officially claiming that they were acting in accordance with their prize ordinance. Their own semi-official commentators, however, had made the position clear. As regards neutrals, Berlin officials had early in February stated that any neutral ship that is either voluntarily or under compulsion bound for an enemy port—including contraband control harbors—thereby loses its neutrality and must be considered hostile. At the end of February the cat was let out of the bag by a statement that a neutral ship which obtained a navicert from a British consul in order to avoid putting into a British contraband control base was liable to be sunk by German submarines, even if it was bound from one neutral port to another. As regards Allied ships, in the middle of November 1939 a Berlin warning was issued against the arming of British vessels. By that date a score of British merchantmen had been illegally attacked by gunfire or torpedo from submarines, and after the date some 15 more unarmed Allied vessels were torpedoed without warning. It is clear therefore that not only was the arming fully justified as a defensive measure but also that neither before nor after this German threat did the German submarines discriminate between armed and unarmed vessels.”
The last paragraph is merely a summing-up; it does not add.
Turning to D-641(b), which is a similar report covering the next 6 months, if I might read the first five paragraphs of Page 1:
“On the 30th January 1941 Hitler proclaimed: ‘Every ship, with or without convoy, which appears before our torpedo tubes is going to be torpedoed. On the face of it, this announcement appears to be uncompromising; and the only qualification provided by the context is that the threats immediately preceding it are specifically addressed to the peoples of the American Continent. German commentators, however, subsequently tried to water it down by contending that Hitler was referring only to ships which attempted to enter the area within which the German ‘total blockade’ is alleged to be in force.