“Today we are proud of having formulated our legal principles from the very beginning in such a way that they need not be changed in the case of war. For the maxim—that which serves the Nation is right, and that which harms it is wrong, which stood at the beginning of our legal work and which established this idea of the community of the people as the only standard of the law—this maxim shines out also in the social order of these times.”
If this sentiment has a familiar ring to it, it is because it is a restatement of a Party commandment tailored and furnished by the Party lawyer to fit the Party’s concept of law. I allude, of course, to the Party commandment, commented upon at Page 1608 (Volume IV, Page 38) of the official English transcript of these proceedings in the treatment of the Leadership Corps, which commandment stated and I quote, “Right is that which serves the Movement and thus Germany.”
It follows, I think, that the Prosecution conceives the Defendant Frank to be jointly responsible for all those cruel and discriminatory enabling acts and decrees through which the Nazis crushed minorities in Germany and consolidated their control over the German State and prepared it for its early entry upon aggression. It matters not, in our view, that the signature of this lawyer does not appear at the foot of every decree. Enough has been shown, in our submission, to indicate culpability in this regard. There is sufficient, we believe, now in this Record—and I refer to decrees cited by Major Walsh in his treatment of the persecution of the Jews and by Colonel Storey in his treatment of the Reich Cabinet—to demonstrate that type of enactment and the consequences thereof, for which we hold the Defendant Frank liable. In following this theory, may it please the Tribunal, we are only arriving at conclusions already arrived at for us by the Defendant Frank himself.
I now pass to that second and well-known phase of the Defendant Frank’s official life, wherein he for 5 years, as chief Party and Government agent, was bent upon the elimination of a whole people. He was appointed Governor General of the occupied Polish territory by a decree signed by his then Führer on 12 October 1939. The decree defined the scope of Frank’s executive power and is contained in our Document 2537-PS, at Page 66 in the document book. I shall ask the Tribunal to take judicial notice of this, since it appears in Reichsgesetzblatt, 1939, Part I, Page 2077.
It merely states that Dr. Frank is appointed as Governor General of the occupied Polish territory; that Dr. Seyss-Inquart is appointed as Deputy Governor General, and that “the Governor General shall be directly responsible to me”—meaning Hitler, he having signed the decree.
While some of the outside world was prone in earlier days to wonder at the apparent efficiency of Nazi administration, we now know that it was often riddled with the petty jealousies of small men in positions of some authority and with jurisdictional fractiousness. No such difficulty existed with the Defendant Frank, however, for though he was not without the threat of divided authority, he insisted upon, and was granted, the favor of supreme command within the territorial confines of the Government General. Only two references from his diary, one in 1940 and one in 1942, are necessary to show the all-inclusiveness of his direction and authority.
At a meeting of department heads of the Government General on 8 March 1940 in the Bergakademie, the Defendant Frank clarified his status as Governor General; and these remarks appear in the diary and in our Document 2233(m)-PS, at Page 42 in the document book, the original of which I offer into evidence as Exhibit Number USA-173.
In the German text, the extracts appear in the meetings of department heads, Volume 2 for 1939-1940, at Pages 5, 6, 7, and 8. Frank says:
“One thing is certain. The authority of the Governor General as the representative of the will of the Führer and the will of the Reich in this territory is certainly strong, and I have always emphasized that I would not tolerate misuse of this authority. I have made this known anew at every office in Berlin, especially after Herr Field Marshal Göring on 12. 2. 1940, from Karin Hall, had forbidden all administrative offices of the Reich, including the Police and even the Wehrmacht, to interfere in administrative matters of the Government General. . . .”
He goes on to say: