THE PRESIDENT: You can summarize the rest, can’t you?
COL. PHILLIMORE: If Your Lordship pleases.
My Lord, Paragraph 9 described the interrogation by officials of the SD, and that these officials took the same views as the naval intelligence officers, that the crew were entitled to be treated as prisoners of war; that despite this they were taken out and shot by an execution squad composed of members of the SD. Then there is a description of the disposal of the bodies.
My Lord, the last paragraph is perhaps important in connection with the case against the Defendant Keitel.
THE PRESIDENT: Yes, read it.
COL. PHILLIMORE: “11. It appeared from the evidence that in March or April, 1945, an order from the Führer headquarters, signed by Keitel, was transmitted to the German authorities in Norway. The substance of the order was that members of the crew of Commando raids who fell into German captivity were from that date to be treated as ordinary prisoners of war. This order referred specifically to the Führer Order referred to above.”
The member of the Tribunal will of course have noted the date; it was time to put their affairs in order.
My Lord, the next document, C-158, I put in as Exhibit GB-209. It consists of two extracts from minutes of conferences on the 19th and 20th of February 1945, conferences between the Defendant Dönitz and Hitler. If I might read the first and last sentence from the first paragraph of the first extract:
“The Führer is considering whether or not Germany should renounce the Geneva Convention.”
That is of course the 1929 prisoners-of-war convention. And the last sentence: