I shall come back to this point when, having finished my presentation of the facts, I shall have to qualify the crime, in accordance with the legal tradition of my country.
Allow me to give you some indications as to how, with your kind permission, I intend to make my presentation.
The facts I am to prove here are the results of many testimonies. We could have called innumerable witnesses to this stand. Their statements have been collected by the French Office for Inquiry into War Crimes. It seemed to us that it would simplify and shorten the procedure if we were to give you extracts only from the testimony that we have received in writing.
With your authorization, therefore, I shall limit myself to reading excerpts from the written testimonies collected in France by official organizations qualified to investigate War Crimes. However, if in the course of this presentation it appears necessary to call certain witnesses, we shall proceed to do so but with constant care not to slow down the sessions in any way and to bring them with all speed to the only possible conclusion, the one our peoples expect.
The whole question of atrocities is dominated by the German terrorist policy. Under this aspect it is not without precedent in the Germanic practice of war. We all remember the execution of hostages at Dinant during the war of 1914, the execution of hostages in the citadel of Laon, or the hostages of Senlis. But Nazism perfected this terrorist policy; for Nazism, terror is a means of subjugation. We all remember the propaganda picture about the war in Poland, shown in Oslo in particular on the eve of the invasion of Norway. For Nazism, terror is a means of subjugating all enslaved people in order to submit them to the aims of its policy.
The first signs of this terrorist policy during the occupation are fresh in the memory of all Frenchmen. Only a few months after the signing of the armistice they saw red posters edged with black appear on the walls of Paris, as well as in the smallest villages of France, proclaiming the first execution of hostages. We know mothers who were informed of the execution of their sons in this way. These executions were carried out by the occupiers after anti-German incidents. These incidents were the answer of the French people to the official policy of collaboration. Resistance to this policy stiffened, became organized, and with it the repressive measures increased in intensity until 1944—the climax of German terrorism in France and in the countries of the West. At that time the Army and the SS Police no longer spoke of the execution of hostages; they organized real reprisal expeditions during which whole villages were set on fire, and thousands of civilians killed, or arrested and deported. But before reaching this stage, the Germans attempted to justify their criminal exactions in the eyes of a susceptible public opinion. They promulgated, as we shall prove, a real code of hostages, and pretended they were merely complying with law every time they proceeded to carry out reprisal executions.
The taking of hostages, as you know, is prohibited by Article 50 of the Hague Convention. I shall read this text to you. It is to be found in the Fourth Convention, Article 50:
“No collective penalty, pecuniary or other, can be decreed against populations for individual acts for which they cannot be held jointly responsible.” (Document Number RF-265).
And yet, supreme perfidy! The German General Staff, the German Government, will endeavor to turn this regulation into a dead letter and to set up as law the systematic violation of the Hague Convention.
I shall describe to you how the General Staff formed its pseudo-law on hostages, a pseudo-law which in France found its final expression in what Stülpnagel and the German administration called the “hostages code.” I shall show you, in passing, which of these defendants are the most guilty of this crime.