My Lord, I won’t go through the list. I would merely call the Tribunal’s attention to the fact that either Admiral Dönitz or his deputy, Konteradmiral Voss, was present at each of these meetings; and that amongst those who were also constantly there were the Defendants Speer, Keitel, Jodl, Ribbentrop, and Göring, and also Himmler or his lieutenants, Fegelein or Kaltenbrunner.
My Lord, the inference which I ask the Tribunal to draw from the document is that from the time that he succeeded Raeder, this defendant was one of the rulers of the Reich and was undoubtedly aware of all decisions, major decisions of policy.
My Lord, I pass to the next document, C-178. That has already been put in as Exhibit Number USA-544. It is an internal memorandum of the naval war staff, written by the division dealing with international law to another division, and the subject is the order with regard to the shooting of Commandos, of the 18th of October 1942, with which the Tribunal are, I think, familiar.
The point of the document is that some doubt appeared to have arisen in some quarters with regard to the understanding of the order, and in the last sentence of the memorandum it is suggested:
“As far as the Navy is concerned, it remains to be seen whether or not this case should be used to make sure, after a conference with the Commander-in-Chief of the Navy, that all departments concerned have an entirely clear conception regarding the treatment of members of Commando units.”
My Lord, whether that conference took place or not I do not know. The document is dated some 11 days after this defendant had taken over from the Defendant Raeder.
But the next document in the book, D-649, which I put in as Exhibit GB-208, is an instance of the Navy in July of that year—July 1943—handing over to the SD for shooting Norwegian and British naval personnel whom the Navy decided came under the terms of the order. My Lord, it is an affidavit by a British barrister-at-law who served as judge advocate at the trial of the members of the SD who executed the order.
Paragraph 1 sets out that the deponent was judge advocate at the trial of 10 members of the SD by a military court held at the law courts, Oslo, Norway, which sat on Thursday, 29 November 1945, and concluded its sitting on Tuesday, 4 December 1945.
My Lord, the next paragraph sets out who convened the court and the names of the prosecuting and defending counsel, and the third paragraph states:
“The accused were charged with committing a war crime, in that they at Ulven, Norway, in or about the month of July 1943, in violation of the laws and usages of war, were concerned in the killing of. . .”