“b) No one is to obtain more information than he needs for the fulfillment of the task set him.
“c) No one is to receive information earlier than is necessary for the duties assigned to him.
“d) No one is to pass on to subordinates more secret orders or at an earlier date than is indispensable for the attainment of the purpose.”
Document Number 1, that is, the expert opinion on the Führer state and Führer order, in connection with this Führer Order Number 1, is to serve as proof for the fact that there can be no question of conspiracy in the sense of the Indictment. Therefore, I request the Tribunal to admit those two documents as relevant. Documents Number 10 and Number 11, and also to a certain degree, Number 16, are submitted as proof that the principles which the Defendant Keitel, as a soldier and a German, considered to be important, namely, rearmament up to a point of securing a respectable position for Germany among the council of nations, were not only postulated by the German people, but also appreciated and approved by important persons abroad. This subject is to be proved by submission of articles by a British, a French, and an American author, military men, all of whom hold a high reputation for their writings on military matters. Among these is the article “Total War,” by Major General Fuller, my Document 15, as well as the book by the British Major General Temperley, The Whispering Gallery of Europe. Mr. Fuller, for instance, writes in his article, that:
“It is nonsense to state that he”—Hitler—“wanted war. War could not bring him the rebirth of his nation. What he needed was an honorable, secure peace.”
The point to be proved here is that any aggressive intentions would of themselves be incompatible with the pronouncements of Hitler and the leading Nazis, if one believes in their sincerity. The defendant believed in the sincerity of these pronouncements and to this end he referred to the opinion of important persons abroad.
I think those are the documents to which the Prosecution raised certain objections.
THE PRESIDENT: You have not mentioned 19 to 21, which documents are said to reveal a certain state of opinion in Austria.
DR. NELTE: Yes. Those documents—Number 19, “The Cultural and Political Importance of the Anschluss,” and Document 20, “The Way Toward the Anschluss,” and the third, “The Anschluss in the International Press,” dated 1931—are to prove the defendant could assume, and was justified in so doing, that the overwhelming majority of Austrian people welcomed the Anschluss with Germany. These are articles and memoranda of the Austro-German Peoples Union, the chairman of which was the Social Democrat Reichstag President Loebe.
THE PRESIDENT: That concludes the documents, does it not?