Afternoon Session
MARSHAL: If Your Honor please, the Defendants Kaltenbrunner and Streicher will continue to be absent during this afternoon’s session.
THE PRESIDENT: Mr. Dubost, the Tribunal had some difficulty this morning in following the documents that you were citing; and also, the Tribunal understands the interpreters had some difficulty because the document books, except the one that is before me, have no indications of the “PS” or other numbers; and the documents themselves are not numbered in order. Therefore it is extremely difficult for members of the Tribunal to find documents, and it is also extremely difficult for the interpreters to find any document which may be before them.
So, this afternoon, it will be appreciated if you will be so kind as to indicate what the document is, and then give both the interpreters and the Tribunal enough time in which they may find the document, and then indicate exactly which part of the document you are going to read, that is to say, whether it is the beginning of the document, or the first paragraph, or the second, and so on. But you must bear with us if we find some difficulty in following you in the documents.
M. DUBOST: Very well, Your Honor.
I had finished this morning presenting the general rules which prevailed during the five years of occupation in the matter of the execution of numerous hostages in the occupied countries of the West. I brought you the evidence, by reading a series of official German documents, that the highest authorities of the Army, of the Party, and of the Nazi Government had deliberately chosen to practice a terroristic policy through the seizure of hostages.
Before passing to the examination of a few particular cases, it seems to me to be necessary to say exactly wherein this policy consisted, in the light of the texts which I have quoted.
According to the circumstances, people belonging by choice or ethnically to the vanquished nations were apprehended and held as a guarantee for the maintenance of order in a given sector; or after a given incident of which the enemy army had been the victim. They were apprehended and held with a view to obtaining the execution by the vanquished population of acts determined by the occupying authority, such as denunciation, payment of collective fines, the handing over of perpetrators of assaults committed against the German Army, and the handing over of political adversaries; and these persons thus arrested were often massacred subsequently by way of reprisal.
An idea emerges from methods of this kind, namely, that the hostage, who is a human being, becomes a special security subjected to seizure as determined by the enemy. How contrary this is to the rule of individual liberty and human dignity. All the members of the German Government are jointly responsible for this iniquitous concept and for its application in our vanquished countries. No member of the German Government can throw this responsibility on to subordinates by claiming that they merely executed clearly stated orders with an excess of zeal.
I have shown you that upon many occasions, on the contrary, the persons who carried out the orders reported to the chiefs the moral consequences resulting from the application of the terroristic policy of hostages. And we know that in no case were contrary orders given. We know that the original orders were always maintained.