“If acts of violence are committed by the inhabitants of the country against members of the occupation forces, if offices and installations of the Armed Forces are damaged or destroyed, or if any other attacks are directed against the security of German units and service establishments, and if, under the circumstances, the population of the place of the crime or of the immediate neighborhood can be considered as jointly responsible for those acts of sabotage, measures of prevention and expiation may be ordered by which the civil population is to be deterred in future from committing, encouraging, or tolerating acts of that kind. The population is to be treated as jointly responsible for individual acts of sabotage, if by its attitude in general towards the German Armed Forces, it has favored hostile or unfriendly acts of individuals, or if by its passive resistance against the investigation of previous acts of sabotage, it has encouraged hostile elements to similar acts, or otherwise created a favorable atmosphere for opposition to the German occupation. All measures must be taken in a way that it is possible to carry out. Threats that cannot be realized give the impression of weakness.”
I submit these two documents as Exhibit Number RF-268 and 269 (Documents Number F-508 and F-510).
Until now we have not found any trace in these German texts of an affirmation which might lead one to think that the taking of hostages and their execution constitute a right for the occupying power; but here is a German text which explicitly formulates this idea. It is quoted in your book of documents as Document Number F-507 (Exhibit Number RF-270), dated Brussels, 18 April 1944. It is issued by the Chief Judge to the military Commander-in-Chief in Belgium and the North of France; and it is addressed to the German Armistice Commission in Wiesbaden. It reads in the margin: “Most Secret. Subject: Execution of 8 terrorists in Lille on 22 December 1943. Reference: Your letter of 16 March 1944 Lille document.” You will read in the middle of Paragraph 2 of the text:
“. . . Moreover, I maintain my point of view that the legal foundations for the measures taken by the Oberfeldkommandantur of Lille, by virtue of the letter of my police group of the 2d of March 1944, are, regardless of the opinion of the Armistice Commission, sufficiently justified and further explanations are superfluous. The Armistice Commission is in a position to declare to the French, if it wishes to go into the question in detail at all, that the executions have been carried out in conformity with the general principles of the law concerning hostages.”
It is, therefore, quite obviously a state doctrine which is involved. Innocent people become forfeit. They answer with their lives for the attitude of their fellow-citizens towards the German Army. If an offense is committed of which they are completely ignorant, they are the object of a collective penalty possibly entailing death. This is the official German thesis imposed by the German High Command, in spite of the protests of the German Armistice Commission in Wiesbaden. I say: A thesis imposed by the German High Command, and I will produce the evidence. Keitel, on the 16th of September 1941, signed a general order which has already been read and filed by my American colleagues under Document Number 389-PS (Exhibit Number RF-271) and which I shall begin to explain. This order concerns all the occupied territories of the East and the West, as established by the list of addresses which includes all the military commanders of the countries then occupied by Germany: France, Belgium, Norway, Holland, Denmark, eastern territories, Ukraine, Serbia, Salonika, southern Greece, Crete. This order was in effect for the duration of the war. We have a text of 1944 which refers to it. This order of Keitel, Chief of the OKW, is dictated by a violent spirit of anti-Communist repression. It aims at all kinds of repression of the civilian population.
This order, which concerns even the commanders whose troops are stationed in the West, points out to them that in all cases in which attacks are made against the German Army:
“It is necessary to establish that we are dealing with a mass movement uniformly directed by Moscow to which may also be imputed the seemingly unimportant sporadic incidents which have occurred in regions which have hitherto remained quiet.”
Consequently Keitel orders, among other things, that 50 to 100 Communists are to be put to death for each German soldier killed. This is a political conception which we constantly meet in all manifestations of German terrorism. As far as Hitlerite propaganda is concerned, all resistance to Germany is of Communist inspiration, if not in essence Communist. The Germans thereby hoped to eliminate from among the resistance the nationalists whom they thought hostile to Communism. But the Nazis also pursued another aim: They still hoped above all to divide France and the other conquered countries of the West into two hostile factions and to put one of these factions at their service under the pretext of anti-Communism.
THE PRESIDENT: Would that be a convenient time to break off for 10 minutes?