“1. Attacks on U.S. merchant vessels sailing in British or U.S. convoys, or independently are authorized in the original operational area which corresponds in its dimensions to the U.S. blockade zone and which does not include the sea-route U.S. to Iceland.”
As the members of the Tribunal will have seen from these orders, at one date the ships of a particular neutral under certain conditions could be sunk while those of another could not. It would be easy to put before the Tribunal a mass of orders and instances to show that the attitude to be adopted toward ships of particular neutrals changed at various times. The point is that the defendant conducted the U-boat war against neutrals with complete cynicism and opportunism. It all depended on the political relationship of Germany toward a particular country at a particular time whether her ships were sunk or not.
My Lord, I turn to the next document in the document book, D-642, which I put in as Exhibit GB-196. My Lord, this is a series of orders; the first, I should say, of a series of orders leading up to the issue of an order which enjoined the U-boat commanders not merely to abstain from rescuing crews, which is the purpose of this order, not merely to give them no assistance but deliberately to annihilate them.
My Lord, in the course of my proof of this matter, I shall call two witnesses. The first witness will give the Court an account of a speech made by the defendant at the time that he issued the order describing the policy, or his policy toward the recovery of Allied troops: that it must be stopped at all costs.
The second witness is the officer who actually briefed crews on the order.
My Lord, this document is an extract from the standing orders of the U-boat command, an extract from Standing Order Number 154, and it is signed by the defendant:
“Paragraph e) Do not pick up men or take them with you. Do not worry about the merchant ship’s boats. Weather conditions and distance from land play no part. Have a care only for your own ship and strive only to attain your next success as soon as possible. We must be harsh in this war. The enemy began the war in order to destroy us, so nothing else matters.”
THE PRESIDENT: What is the date of that?
COL. PHILLIMORE: My Lord, that order, the copy we have, is not dated, but a later order, Number 173, which was issued concurrently with an operational order, is dated the 2d of May 1940. The Tribunal may take it, it is earlier than the 2d of May 1940. My Lord, that is a secret order.
THE PRESIDENT: Earlier than May 1940?