The Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Berlin, on 29 June 1942, objected to the draft of a reply to the French note, which we do not have here but which must have been a protest against this ordinance of 27 December 1941. The Tribunal knows that in the military operations which accompanied the liberation of our land many archives disappeared, and therefore we cannot make known to the Tribunal the protest to which the note of 29 June 1942, from the German Foreign Ministry refers.
Paragraph 2 summarizes the arguments of the French protest. The French evidently had written: If German territory were occupied by the French, we would certainly consider as a man without honor any German who denounced to the occupying power an infraction of their laws, and this point of view was taken up and adopted by the German Foreign Ministry. The note continues:
“As a result of consideration of this matter, the Foreign Office considers it questionable whether punishment should be inflicted on whomsoever fails to denounce a person possessing or known to possess arms. Such a prescription of penalty under this general form is, in the opinion of the Foreign Office, the more impracticable in that it would offer the French the possibility of calling attention to the fact that the German Army is demanding of them acts which would be considered Criminal if committed by German citizens.”
This German note, I repeat, comes from the Reich Ministry of Foreign Affairs and is signed “Strack.” There is no more severe condemnation of the German Army than that expressed by the Reich Ministry of Foreign Affairs itself. The reply of the German Army will be found by the Tribunal on Page 155, “Berlin. 8 December 1942. High Command of the Wehrmacht.” The High Command of the Wehrmacht concludes:
“. . . since it does not seem desirable to enter into discussion with the French Government on the questions of law evoked by them, we too consider it appropriate not to reply to the French note.”
This note begins, moreover, by asserting that any relaxing of the orders given would be considered as a sign of weakness in France and in Belgium.
These are not the signs of weakness that the German Army gave in our occupied countries of the West. The weakness manifested itself in terror; it brought terror to reign throughout our countries, and that in order to permit the development of the policy of extermination of the vanquished nations which, in the minds of all Nazi leaders, remained the principal purpose, if not the sole purpose, of this war.
This terrorist policy, of which the Tribunal has just seen examples in connection with the repression of attacks by our French Forces of the Interior on the enemy, developed without any military necessity for it in all the countries of the West. The devastations committed by the enemy are extremely numerous. We shall limit our presentation to the destruction of Rotterdam at a time when the city had already capitulated and when only the question of the form of capitulation had to be settled; and secondly, to a description of the inundations which the German Army caused, without any military necessity of any sort, in 1945 on the eve of its destruction when that Army already knew that it had lost the game.
We have chosen the example of Rotterdam because it is the first act of terrorism of the German Army in the West. We have taken the inundations because, without her dykes, without fresh water, Holland ceases to exist. The day her dykes are destroyed, Holland disappears. One sees here the fulfillment of the enemy’s aim of destruction, formulated long ago by Germany as already shown by the citation from Hitler with which I opened my speech, an aim which was pursued to the very last minute of Germany’s existence as is proved by those unnecessary inundations.
We submit to the Tribunal Document F-719 as Exhibit Number RF-409, which comprises Dutch reports on the bombing of Rotterdam and the capitulation of the Dutch Army. On Pages 38 and 39 of the second document book are copies of the translations of documents exchanged between the commander of the German troops before Rotterdam and the colonel who was in command of the Dutch troops defending the city.