“You did indeed point out there that Article 43 of the Hague Convention gave the occupying power the authority to legislate, but the power to which you refer in the said article is subject to two qualifications: There can be legislation only to establish and secure public order and life as far as it is possible. On the other hand, the ordinances decreed must. . .”
THE PRESIDENT: Isn’t it enough to show that General Doyen protested? It is not necessary to read all the argument which was put forward on the one side or the other.
M. HERZOG: I shall then stop this quotation, Mr. President.
The German ordinances which I have just read to the Tribunal thus contained formal violations of the general principles of international criminal legislation; they were decreed in contradiction to Article 52 of the Annex to the fourth convention of The Hague and also in contradiction to Article 43, on which they were supposed to be based. They were, therefore, illegal and they were criminal, since they provided death sentences which no international law or domestic law justifies.
The system of the requisition of service furnishes the first example of the criminal character of the methods pursued by the defendants in the execution of their plan of recruitment of foreign labor.
The National Socialist authorities then had recourse to a second procedure to give an appearance of legality to the recruiting of foreign workers. They called upon workers who were so-called volunteers. From 1940 on, the occupation authorities opened recruiting offices in all the large cities of the occupied territories. These offices were placed under the control of a special service instituted for this purpose within the general staff of the commanders-in-chief of occupation zones.
The Tribunal knows that these services from 1940 to 1942 functioned under the control of the generals. From 1942 on, and more precisely, from the day when the Defendant Sauckel became the Plenipotentiary for Allocation of Labor, they received their orders directly from the latter. General Von Falkenhausen, Commander-in-Chief in Belgium and in the north of France, declared in the testimony which I have just read to the Tribunal that from the summer of 1942 he had become the simple intermediary charged with transmitting the instructions given by Sauckel to the Arbeitseinsatz.
Thus, the policy of the German employment offices set up in the occupied areas was carried out from 1942 under the sole responsibility of the Defendant Sauckel and his direct chief, the Delegate for the Four Year Plan, the Defendant Göring. I ask the Tribunal to take note of this.
The task of the employment offices was to organize the recruiting of workers for the factories and workshops set up in Europe by the Todt Organization and by the Wehrmacht, Kriegsmarine, Luftwaffe, and other German organizations. It was also their task to procure for the German munition factories the amount of foreign labor needed. Workers recruited in this way signed a labor contract; thus they had, theoretically, the status of free workers and were apparently volunteers.